Nixon: Shafted. Can You Dig It?

It was March 31, 1973, two months after Richard Nixon’s second inauguration, after the biggest reelection victory in history. The American Film Institute’s very first Lifetime Achievement Award live broadcast, honoring greatest of all time American director, John Ford, took place at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, the very place where Nixon famously said “Gentlemen, you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore”. That was only ten years before. Now, what a difference. Nixon, at the dais, was basking in glory. The guests of honor were former POWs in full dress uniform, filling the best tables, applauding as John Ford gave a speech about the power of movies, the responsibilities of Hollywood, and the honor of having had the co-workers that he’d had over a half century. Then the president presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

At the climax of his speech, John Ford said that when he heard the POWs were coming home, “I said a prayer, a simple prayer, not an original one but one that is one spoken in millions of American homes today. God bless Richard Nixon.” And what amounts to the supreme ruling council of Hollywood rose to its feet in a standing ovation, acknowledging the seemingly final triumph of their longtime cultural opponent. Can you imagine? It really happened.

Voters already knew the outline of what happened at the Watergate and re-elected Nixon anyway. He had taken some damage. Nixon already had to fire John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, as well as a lesser couple of officials. But he also got the POWs home at last, a time of national celebration. On March 31, 1973, there was nothing, nothing to suggest that he’d be gone in a year and a half.

Some comments by @OccupantCDN and others on the Screwtape propaganda post suggested that the Watergate era on screen might be worth a look. Silent Coup (1991) by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin is the book that I’d guess comes closest to Occupant’s point of view. I buy that an actual deep state feared and resented Nixon; I don’t buy that the CIA did it or made him do it.

All the President’s Men appeared just in time to influence the 1976 elections. It is still regarded as the definitive mainstream story of Watergate. The drama is structured like a who-done-it, but right from the start it’s more like a he-done-it. A very well crafted film, it still looks modern 48 years after it opened. It just doesn’t look as truthful, now that we know who Deep Throat was. Not a world-weary disillusioned patriot protecting the Constitution; just a hack FBI man, angry that he didn’t get J. Edgar Hoover’s job. The whole aura of threat and paranoia was made up. Woodward was never in any danger.

If you want to see at least halfway intelligent modern anti-Nixon propaganda, take a gander at The White House Plumbers. Made with little of the resources or prestige of All the President’s Men, this HBO mini-series is satirical (one critic called it “Coen brothers lite”) but unusually accurate in locations and historical detail. People who should know say that the portrayal of Gordon Liddy is dead-on, capturing some of the good side of someone who was tough to like. The series, for all its sardonic humor, has respect for Nixon’s achievements and a real sense of regret, even tragedy at seeing it set itself up for destruction.

The congressional Watergate hearings of the summer of ’73 were entertaining. Without them, we would never have discovered the Nixon tapes. But the public didn’t turn against Nixon until later, when the economy tanked, removing his Teflon. Nixon erred by allowing the process to turn into a striptease. He could have disclosed everything early. It would have hurt a little, but he would certainly have survived. Once things got to the point where the tapes were revealed, he could still have burned the tapes and gotten away with it. He was convinced he could ride it out.

Impeachment is a political, not a legal matter, so if Nixon had retained his enormous post-’72 election popularity in the country, he would have been criticized by Congress and that would have been that. But he lost that popularity. Nixon did what the public craved so much in 1968: he got us out of Vietnam. His policies about Russia and China were popular. The oil crisis of October 1973 was one of the few times in that era where the outside world slapped us upside the head, and it lingered. The postwar stock market finally crashed. As we’ve seen ever since, the public will forgive a lot if the economy is booming, but it turns sour pretty quick when the economy does.

As a pop culture snapshot of that earlier era of TV, ABC’s Dick Cavett was the middle-to-highbrow liberal alternative to NBC’s overwhelming king of late night, Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show. He was briefly, in effect, the Jon Stewart of his era. It was no surprise when Cavett was an early herald of bad news for Nixon.

But it rightly bothered the White House a great deal when they started to lose Johnny Carson. He was basically a moderate Democrat, who didn’t like to hit audiences over the head with it. For the first year of Watergate, he did no more than make justified fun of White House foul-ups that all but begged for late night laughs. But Carson was canny enough to hold off until he sensed that his audience was turning against Nixon.

When Nixon fired Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor, on October 20 (the famous ‘Saturday night massacre’) for the first time he seriously miscalculated his degree of public support. A real, if hard to define tipping point had been crossed. We’d re-elected him, but a year later we were no longer willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Looking back, one White House staffer said wistfully that the glowing evening of AFI’s John Ford tribute on March 31 was “the last happy time”. She didn’t have to spell that out. By the end of the year, one of the country’s best-selling bumper stickers was “Nixon is a Cox Sacker.”

For the next two decades, there were lots of Watergate re-creations. It was retold as a satire with nuns (Nasty Habits), and as solemn national drama (Blind Ambition). John Ehrlichman’s version, Washington: Behind Closed Doors, occupied a whole week of ABC’s 1977 season premieres. The Nixon imitation could be skillful (Beau Bridges in Kissinger and Nixon, Frank Langella in Nixon/Frost, or Lane Smith in 1989’s The Final Days.) Or it could be low and dumb comedy (Dick (1994), and Martha (2019). Even diehard Nixon fans have a sneaking appreciation for his “portrayal” in Futurama.

Although some of these were more balanced than others, the verdict is almost entirely negative, not matching up with the memories of American voters. If you’ve read @navyjag’s great post about Nixon’s firm, just handling of a racially explosive case of military justice, you know that plenty of people knew a different side of Nixon.

When it comes to skillful, open use of directorial technique to advance a persuasive case, once again as so often we’ll turn to Oliver Stone. His 1996 Nixon was a portrait of a flawed but brilliant man, brought down by his refusal to be a puppet for the warfare state. The movie, itself flawed but brilliant in parts, shocked film reviewers who expected that famed lefty Stone would set a new level of excoriating Nixon. Yet Stone treated his subject with sympathy and respect, as did New York Times writer Tom Wicker (“One of Us”) and later, Conrad Black (“A Man in Full”)

I don’t want to leave the subject of our martyred 37^th president without a happier note: the one time I ever got to see the man in person. It was a big luncheon outdoors at the Nixon Library in Orange County, California. July 15, 1992.

As I drove down to Yorba Linda, an FM station played Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s dirge-like “Ohio”, about the Kent State shootings in 1970. “Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming, we’re finally on our own/This summer I hear the drumming. Four dead in Ohio…” Those days, once so vivid, were now in the distant past. By now, even leftist writers like Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times were saying we all might owe our lives to Richard Nixon breaking the back of the Cold War. Things had changed.

The president was always a sports fan, and this summer event was baseball-themed. One of the featured guests, former Dodger Maury Willis, was one of the top base-stealing champs of the 1950s. At the microphone, his slightly uninhibited story about his Cadillac convertible and bringing a pair of his girlfriends to Blair House to meet the Vice President had the crowd in stiches. Nixon, as guest of honor, wasn’t supposed to speak yet, but he couldn’t help himself. He leaned into his microphone, grinning, eyebrows waggling, consciously and obviously “doing a Nixon impression” and declared,

“The lesson is: If you want to win, steal!”

The crowd all but fell apart laughing. Take that, Dan Aykroyd!