Gerald Warner: It's time to stop kicking around Tricky Dicky

Published on Saturday 24 January 2009 18:46

FROST/NIXON: the title says it all. One was a former president of the United States, the other a busted-flush TV celebrity struggling to relaunch his career; but such is media narcissism, the talking head takes precedence. The film drama chronicling interviews between David Frost and the disgraced Richard Nixon opens in cinemas here this weekend.

So far, after a six-week run in America and release in four other countries, it has recouped only one-third of its $30m production costs. Frost/Nixon is based on the play by Peter Morgan, who recently wrote of "the horrors and betrayals that Nixon visited upon his electorate", from which we can adduce his play is not a hagiography. Since he also referred to "the travesty and illegality of the 2000 American presidential election and the recount in Florida", we can also assess his commitment to historical accuracy vis--vis partisan mythology.

The 2000 presidential election was neither a travesty nor illegal. In its aftermath, one liberal east coast newspaper assigned a large budget to conducting an independent audit of the Florida ballot papers, only to desist when it faced an outcome that would have awarded George W Bush a larger majority than the one officially recorded. A man who aspires to write fact-based drama about a US president should be cognisant of such matters.

The travesty Morgan elected to dramatise and Ron Howard to film is the four 90-minute TV interviews conducted by Frost with Nixon in 1977. Nixon had accepted a fee of $600,000 plus 20% of profits to give the interview. That committed him to coming up with something new, if only for his own financial gain.

So far from being broken by Frost, during an interlude in filming it was Nixon's minder Jack Brennan who exasperatedly said: "He knows he has to go further. He's got more to volunteer." Nixon duly obliged, with an apology: "I let down my country." He did not "confess" as the film portrays him doing by admitting to involvement in a cover-up. He did precisely the opposite, insisting: "You're wanting me to say that I participated in a illegal cover-up. No!"

This rewriting of history goes beyond legitimate dramatic licence. A filmed interview with a former US president on so notorious a topic as Watergate is as much an historical document as the Gettysburg Address. It should not be distorted for sensational purposes. If writers want more scope for imaginative development, then the legitimate option is to write allegorically, by inventing a fictitious president.

Nor should such travesties be allowed to distort the public view of historical events and personalities. Authentic history will record there was much more to Nixon than Watergate. Of course it was a sleazy episode, he acted illegally and paid the price. Yet Bill Clinton disgraced the presidential office more abysmally and survived, because he had the liberal media on his side – the same media that have now reached their apogee by imposing an ultra-liberal president upon an unthinking nation.

Nixon would have been few people's choice of dinner companion; but his achievements were real. As a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee he exposed Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. That earned him the undying hatred of liberal fellow travellers, whose propaganda even today raves of "McCarthyism" and "Reds under the bed".

Although the Venona project, from 1947 onward, only succeeded in decrypting 2,200 out of hundreds of thousands of Soviet espionage messages, those few decodes identified 349 agents, including Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Harry Dexter White, the number two at the Treasury Department, a section head and 20 agents in the Office of Strategic Services and a personal aide to Franklin D Roosevelt. Reds under the bed? The mattresses were heaving.

Nixon ensured the passing of the 1957 Civil Rights Bill and proposed a new relationship with China even before he became president. Under his presidency the number of children in blacks-only schools fell from 70% to 18%. His "ping-pong diplomacy" and ground-breaking visit to China in 1972 in turn forced the Soviet Union to embrace dtente. That year the supposedly unpopular, blue-jowled Nixon won a second term, carrying 49 of the 50 states.

Even after his disgrace, he quickly won rehabilitation. On his return from his influential visit to the Soviet Union in 1986, Gallup ranked him one of the 10 most admired men in the world. He may not have been an attractive personality and, as a conservative, he is eternally demonised by the media; but he got things done. The clever money is not on anybody being able to say that about the latest incumbent of the Oval Office in 35 years' time.