|
TV Show Reviews
Review of "Nixon
on Nixon: In His Own Words"
9/1/18 by Anonymous
airs on HBO
NOTE: This is a documentary from 2014, but it's still
showing on HBO and is very relevant to what's going on in
the world today.
Richard Nixon’s crimes against the United States are
nearly 50 years old now, and the number of people who
remember experiencing Watergate in real time dwindles by the
day. Indeed, for those who have no living memory of the
scandal, the best-known facts (break-in, cover-up,
resignation) must seem a bit quaint by contemporary
standards, and the country’s reaction to those events during
the 1970s may strike the rising generation as the same sort
of inexplicable moral purge that ushered in prohibition
earlier in the same century.
Fortunately, every time we are tempted to dismiss the
furor over Watergate as the naive overreaction of a more
sheltered era, Nixon himself returns to remind us that all
of this was about so much more than a “third rate burglary.”
In HBO’s 2014 documentary, “Nixon on Nixon,” the man himself
rails, threatens, blusters, and otherwise bares his twisted,
bigoted soul for the benefit of anyone who may have
forgotten—or never really understood—what was at stake in
the summer of 1974. Nixon’s own White House recordings
(augmented here with old news footage) remain the strongest
proof that our country once narrowly elected, and then
re-elected overwhelmingly, a genuine monster, and after
listening to him, raw and uncensored, for over an hour,
nobody need wonder any further why his political banishment
was treated by his countrymen as a successful exorcism.
Nixon, the documentary incessantly reminds us, was a
complicated man. The recordings, however, do little to bear
this out. Intelligent, yes. Paranoid, most definitely. But
otherwise, he’s little more than an amoral jumble of
ambitions and grievances who seeks constant reassurance of
his greatness and lashes out at his perceived enemies far
out of proportion to their transgressions. We all know
people like this in our own lives, and it would never occur
to us to refer to them as “complicated.”
What is a bit disconcerting, even to those of us who
actually remember Nixon, is the man’s utter lack of comfort
in his own skin. It is difficult to imagine someone so
socially awkward even sniffing the presidency in the 21st
Century. His gestures are discordant, he smiles at all the
wrong times, and his body language is so defensive that you
sometimes want to back away from your own television screen.
It’s not just that you don’t believe him; it’s that he
clearly doesn’t even believe himself. You may, in fact, find
yourself pitying the guy, almost rooting for him as the
underdog he always considered himself to be. Just before you
get there, however, the documentary provides yet another
recording where Nixon dishes out some Himmler-grade
anti-Semitism or plots the destruction of yet another
innocent political opponent and you remember again why the
man was so awkward: he had just enough self-awareness to
loathe himself, and in that he was not wrong.
As an antidote to pop culture’s tendency to smear
Vaseline all over history’s lens, the HBO documentary is a
triumph. As a persuasive vehicle for explaining Watergate to
Millennials, on the other hand, it falls short. The plot
twists that defined the scandal (the flipping of the
Watergate burglars, the Saturday Night Massacre, the Smoking
Gun tape) are given short shrift by the filmmakers, leaving
the impression the scandal was simply an inexorable slog
from break-in to resignation, and that Nixon’s goose was
cooked the moment that Ben Bradlee paired Woodward with
Bernstein. As those who were there will well remember,
however, there were multiple moments not just when it seemed
that Nixon might get away with it, but when it wasn’t
necessarily clear that he was guilty of anything more than
lax management of the stooges he employed. And even given
the limited time available, no Nixon documentary seems
complete without some mention of John Sirica or Margaret
Mitchell or Peter Rodino (even Sam Ervin gets stiffed with a
cameo role).
The documentary, which predates our current political
circumstances, nevertheless invites us to compare Nixon’s
scandals to those that currently consume the latest occupant
of the Oval Office, another man seemingly overwhelmed by
insecurity, prejudice, and rage (though nobody would ever
describe him as “complicated”). But the comparison is a weak
one. In Nixon’s case, Congress, the courts, and the news
media followed the trail of evidence for nearly two years to
determine, in the lasting words of Senate Watergate
Committee Vice-Chairman Howard Baker, “What did the
President know and when did he know it?” Until the very end,
nobody really knew the full extent of Nixon’s guilt.
In the case of Donald Trump, there is little need for a
latter-day Woodward and Bernstein, nor would we be aided
much by a trove of secret recordings, whether authorized by
Trump himself or smuggled out by, say, Omarosa Manginault.
Trump’s deeds and misdeeds are well known and hardly hidden.
There is no mystery and even less drama. The issue is not
what we don’t know, but rather how we feel about that which
is plainly before our eyes. There is a reason that Watergate
remains so fascinating 44 years after Nixon’s resignation;
nobody will need to write a book like “All the President’s
Men” about the Trump Administration.
Returning to the 1970s for a moment, it is sad to note
that the younger viewer will probably not be shocked by the
racism and bigotry that come so naturally to Richard Nixon
and his aides. The language itself might now be taboo, but
the sentiment has once again been loosed across the land and
it is not hard to imagine similar conversations taking place
in the West Wing as we speak.
A bit more jolting, perhaps, is Nixon’s unapologetic
misogyny. That, unfortunately, is a reflection of its time,
most notable in the fact that the only women who appear on
these Nixon tapes are his wife and daughters. But anyone who
wants to lay the sexism of the 1970s solely at Nixon’s feet
should listen carefully to the laughter that erupts in the
press room when someone raises the possibility of nominating
a woman to the Supreme Court. Remember that the next time
someone bemoans the damage inflicted by “political
correctness.”
Viewed today, “Nixon on Nixon” is a reminder, perhaps, of
the aphorism that history repeats itself as farce, but it is
also a healthy corrective lesson for those who long for the
days when we were supposedly ruled by men of substance who
practiced bipartisanship first and put country over party.
The man whose voice we hear on those tapes is considered by
some to be one of the greatest statesmen of the 20th
Century. He is also as mean and vicious a specimen ever to
crawl out of the bowels of our politics. And there’s nothing
quaint about that.
MORE INFORMATION:
On Aug. 9, 1974, Richard Milhous Nixon became the
first American president to resign from office. From
1971 to 1973, he had secretly recorded his private
conversations, purportedly “for the purpose of
historical record,” but in the wake of the Watergate
scandal the revelation of the tapes led to his
downfall.
Fearing that the blunt and candid remarks on the
tapes would sully the presidency forever, Nixon
sought to prevent their public release for the rest
of his life after leaving office. However, after his
death in 1994, the government began releasing the
3,700 hours of recordings. The final tapes were made
public on Aug. 20, 2013.
In 1982, John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s former chief
domestic advisor, voiced concern about the Nixon
tapes, noting, “The problem is that historians are
going to grab an hour of tape…and if you listen to a
snippet of tape, you’re going to form an impression
of this man that’s going to be wrong. Sometime,
hopefully, there will be a committee of historians
who will listen to all the tapes and go into all the
archives and then come out and say Richard Nixon was
the strangest collection, the strangest paradoxical
combination of any man I ever heard of. And they’ll
be right.”
Only Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, Deputy
Assistant Alexander Butterfield and Special
Assistant Stephen Bull knew of the recordings. Those
who did not know included John Ehrlichman, National
Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, Deputy National
Security Advisor Alexander Haig, Attorney General
John Mitchell and Secretary of State William Rogers,
among others. “It was voice activated — everything
was taped – which was probably stupid,” Nixon
conceded in 1983.
The declassified tapes revealed the President’s
opinions on a vast number of topics, including the
Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers leak, his Supreme
Court appointments, and other matters of state.
Nixon derided anti-war protesters in private
conversations with Henry Kissinger, saying, “It
really burns me up. We have no pride do we anymore,
Henry?” He had equally harsh words for young Vietnam
vet John Kerry, calling him “quite a phony.” Years
later, Nixon insisted that despite the anti-war
sentiment in Congress and the media, “That was not
the voice of America. The voice of America was the
silent majority.”
Nixon’s angry reaction to the New York Times’
publication of thousands of secret Pentagon
documents detailing America’s involvement in Vietnam
revealed his growing hatred of the press. “This is
treasonable action on the part of the bastards that
put it out,” he exclaimed to Henry Kissinger. Daniel
Ellsberg of the Rand Corporation, who released the
papers to the Times, became a target of his
anti-Semitic outbursts. “The Jews are, are born
spies,” he said, and asked Chief of Staff Haldeman
to “look at any sensitive areas around where Jews
are involved.”
With two vacancies open on the Supreme Court and
pressure mounting to nominate a woman, Nixon told
the press his list of candidates included Mildred
Lillie and Sylvia Bacon. But behind closed doors, he
told John Mitchell, “I would like to sorta get them
off the woman kick if we can.” Years later, Nixon
called the appointment of the Supreme Court justices
“the most important achievement” domestically of his
presidency. Internationally, Nixon described his
historic trip to China in 1972 as a “watershed
moment,” and cited his trip to Moscow to negotiate
an arms control agreement, as another major foreign
policy achievement.
“The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy.
The press is the enemy,” Nixon can be heard telling
Henry Kissinger. “You must keep up the attack on the
media. You’ve got to keep destroying their
credibility,” he told Special Counsel Charles
Colson. Whether calling them “sons of bitches” or
“bastards,” Nixon’s distaste of reporters was only
thinly veiled in interviews, and entirely open
behind closed doors.
After the Watergate break-in, Nixon discussed
with Bob Haldeman bailing out the five men arrested
saying, “Well, they took a hell of a risk. And they
have to be paid.” Later, he told speechwriter Pat
Buchanan, “The Watergate thing – well, that’s going
to pass. That’ll be over. They’ll indict a few
people, and then the goddam thing’s over.”
Despite Nixon’s reelection landslide victory and
the achievement of what he called, “peace with
honor” in Vietnam, Watergate did not pass. At the
Senate Watergate hearing on July 16, 1973, former
Deputy Assistant Alexander Butterfield revealed the
secret electronic listening devices in the office of
the president. Facing certain impeachment, Nixon
subsequently resigned.
NIXON BY NIXON: IN HIS OWN WORDS draws on
the work of Ken Hughes and his team at the
Presidential Recordings Program at the University of
Virginia’s Miller Center, as well as the work of Dr.
Luke Nichter.
In addition to the Emmy®-winning “Teddy: In His
Own Words,” Kunhardt McGee Productions’ previous HBO
credits include the Emmy®-nominated “Gloria: In Her
Own Words,” the Emmy®-nominated “In Memoriam: New
York City, 9/11/01,” “Bobby Kennedy: In His Own
Words” and the Emmy®-winning “JFK: In His Own
Words.”
NIXON BY NIXON: IN HIS OWN WORDS is
produced and directed by Peter Kunhardt; edited by
Phillip Schopper. For Kunhardt McGee Productions:
executive producers, Peter Kunhardt and Dyllan
McGee; co-producers, George Kunhardt and Teddy
Kunhardt. For HBO: supervising producer, Jacqueline
Glover; executive producer, Sheila Nevins.
The opinions in these articles are those of the writer and do not
necessarily reflect the opinions of The TV MegaSite or its other volunteers.
Proofread and Edited by
Brenda
We need more episode guide recap writers, article
writers, MS FrontPage and Web Expression users, graphics designers, and more, so
please email us
if you can help out! More volunteers always
needed! Thanks!
Back to the Main Reviews Page
Page updated 9/6/18
Back to the Main Primetime TV Page
    
|
