Why I'm not going to see "Frost/Nixon"

T.A. Barnhart

To use an old, tired cliché: Been there, done that.

I remember Watergate, Nixon's resignation, the pardon. Good times. I was just barely beginning to pay attention to the world, but I was aware of a number of things. And I was a Democrat. So not only was I aware of what was going on in Washington, DC, regarding Watergate, I understood the President had done wrong.

Being a Democrat: that was my mom's doing. She didn't actively recruit me — I don't recall that she ever volunteered with the party — but I do know she was a Democrat. During the 1972 campaign, she took me to the Billings, Montana, airport to see Democratic nominee George McGovern. We waited two hours in a stifling concourse with thousands of other excited supporters (and many who were just curious to see a "someone" — this was Billings, after all, and until Obama made his visits last year, not a place known for attracting big names). I got to shake the Senator's hand, get an autograph and a bit of teasing about the pen; in the midst of a campaign when he knew he was going to lose big, he was still able to be friendly to a young non-voter.

I don't even want to think what Nixon would have done to me.

It's now Common Wisdom that Dubya is the Worst President Ever. Hard to argue, given all he's done, but don't ever forget this: He was been aided and abetted at every step by Congressional Republicans happy to rubber-stamp the Rove-Cheney plan to eradicate Democrats and liberals, and by Congressional Democrats so terrified of being accused of being Democratic or liberal that they should have switched parties years before just to make their surrender official. Almost as bad, the mainstream media did done nothing — worse than nothing — to shed light on the dark pit that is the Bush White House. So when we say Bush is the worst president ever, let's not forget his worstestness was enabled by a coalition of the willing.

Nixon's horrendous record was, for the most part, a solo act. Strangely, for how terrible he ultimately proved to be, he was a good president in many regards. Nixon and the Congress accomplished important goals, such as passing and implementing the Clean Air, Clean Water and Environmental Policy Acts. When Nixon "opened up" China and Russia, he was able to overwhelm any opposition with his own proven touch-on-commies history. The press, as they were known then (newspapers were still viable concerns in those days, and both print and broadcast media hired many people known as "journalists" who did research and then reported the results), had not yet gone to war with Nixon, but they were his buddies in the way the 2000 media lapdogs sold their souls, not to mention their professionalism, for a nickname and friendly pat on the head.

But when it came to his efforts to eliminate the rule of law in his vain attempt to eradicate political enemies, Nixon worked without aid from Congress or the media, just a staff of like-minded criminals. Of course, he was also a paranoid, drunken nutjob (not that I like believing anything Henry Kissinger says, but we have other sources as well). He trusted no one, and certainly not the Congress or the press; his enemies list contained many from both groups. He did not need their capitulations to function on the dark side; he was far more intelligent and independent than Dubya. He was his own Cheney, his own Rove.

And he nearly destroyed the Constitution.

Bush has made a mockery of our laws and the Constitution on which they are based, but the good news is that Barack Obama will be able to undo much of that damage by simply holding fast to his oath of office. The Executive Orders Bush has used to undermine democratic governance will be replaced by new ones from Obama that re-establish and enforce the rule of law. It will take time, but at 12:00 Eastern time, January 20th, the United States will return to a constitutional form of government.

Which we almost lost under Nixon.

Nixon's White House tapes, which documented so clearly how extensive were the crimes of Nixon and his henchmen, were the fulcrum, the turning point of history. Had Nixon chosen not to obey the Supreme Court's ruling and turn the tapes over to Congress, the nation would have faced a constitutional crisis of a magnitude never before, or as yet, experienced. Would Congress have dared sent armed deputies to enforce the Court's orders? What if Nixon had had the Secret Service bar entrance to the White House? What if he had taken the tapes to basement and burned them?

What if Congress had been forced to place the President under arrest?

Of course Nixon, being intelligent as well as insane, knew his cause was lost. He was, without doubt, a patriot, albeit one of vicious and maniacal bent, but he did love his country enough to understand that he had to stand down and surrender — the tapes and his office. But as he made his decision to resign in the face of certain impeachment and conviction, Nixon also took this into consideration: Once out of office, he would be able to work on rewriting history.

Enter David Frost.

I have no idea how accurate Ron Howard's depiction of the events are. Given his past "docu-dramas," it's probably a mixed bag. But here is what I know as a citizen: Nixon played Frost like a cheap fiddle. Even a dumb kid from Billings, Montana, could tell who was the chump and who played the tune. This was before the Internets and interwebs, which is a dark and lost world beyond the ken of so many today. Back then, we relied on the papers and on Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley and Billings' own Chet Huntley. Those were our trusted sources of information, and, regarding Watergate, we actually were able to trust them. We were able to trust Congress as well, with Republicans and Democrats working together to find out "what the President knew, and when he knew it." It was, for those who loathed all that Nixon had done — above all, his dragging-out of the Vietnam War to use as an election prop in 1972, but also including the "Southern strategy" and so many other divisive acts of anti-American "leadership" — a heady time. The President, long suspected of being a criminal, was proven by his own records to have been the most vile person to ever occupy the White House.

So when, only a few years later, he sat down for a series of "conversations" with David Frost, few had hopes that the disgraced but apparently unabashed ex-President would actually come clean on his crimes. He had full liberty to do so, of course, having been pardoned by the cowardly Gerald Ford; but, as we know so well now from the many reminiscences from Nixon partners-in-crimes (including the war criminal Kissinger), there was no way Nixon would ever be open, honest or forth-right. The Frost interviews were not about setting the record straight: they were about rewriting the record entirely. They were Nixon's grand opportunity to airbrush history and begin the only task that would matter for his post-presidential life: leaving a legacy that did not make him the worst president ever.

How could he have imagined the way in which Bush so handily stole that title (moving Reagan into third place from his previous runner-up position)? Well, he probably did. No one has ever argued that Nixon wasn't an intelligent and perceptive man. His mistakes were not the result of being a dolt: he failed because his hubris and mental instability led him to behave in ways that countered what, as a healthy and rational man, he would have known would lead to his downfall. But as he schemed on how to rework his history, he had to know that the trail he blazed in constitutional abuse would be followed by others who would do even greater harm. All he had to do was rejigger the public's memory in his own lifetime just enough that, over the course of a few decades and a few more presidents, his own failures would dim.

He surely giggled himself to sleep many times during Carter's tough times. I have no doubt he celebrated the Iraq/Contragate hearings, seeing his crimes in Cambodia and elsewhere taken to the next level — and with impunity. By the time Ronald Reagan and his criminal cohort began using the Constitution for a floor mat, the press had been golly-geed into submission and the Congress had mistaken the enthusiasm of a small minority of voters for a mandate. (Given the 50% turnout in 1980 and the fact that possibly half the votes for Reagan were votes against Carter, the math gives us around 12-14% of the voters who actually wanted Reagan for positive reasons — not exactly a mandate, but you'd never know that by the way the press and Congress rolled over.) Nixon could see, in his own lifetime, the vindication of his post-presidential strategy.

I watched the original Frost/Nixon interviews, but, like millions of others (perhaps most of those who watched), I was under no illusion that Nixon would confess to his crimes. David Frost was a strange choice for these interviews, but he was the guy Nixon thought he could best job. (He was also the guy who gave Nixon a ton of money.) Ultimately, the initial fascination at watching the disgraced ex-president sit and talk about great matters of history faded into a dreariness as his refusal to do anything but work over history for his own benefit removed the substance from the interviews. I was certainly politically naive and uninformed back then — by the time of the interviews, I was in the Air Force and living in England — but even I could see that for every admission that he had let down his friends and family, there were a dozen self-serving rationalizations and excuses. In the end, the time spent watching the interviews simply took me back to where I began: Nixon was a dishonest man and the world was better with him gone from the White House.

So I have no desire whatsoever to sit through it all again. Had our country learned any real lessons from that period, I might have a bit of heart for the cinematic experience, but the sad truth is that once Nixon was pardoned — the final act of contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law — the fire went out of Congress' and the media's attempt to get to the bottom of the whole affair. The economic problems that began under Ford and worsened under Carter — malaise — not to mention the taking of the hostages in Iran simply wore down the nation's will to be vigilant and courageous on behalf of law and the Constitution. Ford's inexcusable pardon of Nixon not only undermined the effort by Congress to mete out some measure of justice but, in time, gave permission to Washington to return to business-as-usual, setting the stage for the crimes of Reagan and Bush. The take-over of Congress by neocons and the devolution of the media into corporate toadies were set in motion by the failure of Gerald Ford to let the constitutional process play out and the refusal of the press to remember why they achieved, for a short time, true greatness.

In sixteen days, a president will be sworn in who believes in the Constitution as it is written and the laws of the land as they are passed by Congress. I would love to see a "truth" commission or similar body installed, but I doubt the political support exists to allow Obama to pursue that; after all, the only matter of real concern to most Americans now, and, therefore, to most members of Congress, is the economy. Getting to the bottom of the crimes of the Bush Crime Syndicate is a hugely important task in order to ensure the future sanctity of the rule of law, but, as ever, money rules. The need to rebuild the economy, and the nation, will likely make any effort into the full scope of Bush's crimes simply not feasible.

People don't want the truth when their jobs, homes and prosperity are at stake. They just want the money. I can dig it. It's wrong and it's bad for the future of the nation, but I believe the majority of Americans simply want Bush to go away and Obama to make the future better. Rehash the past? Most people just don't want it.

I know there are many areas of the past of which I've had my fill. I will learn nothing of merit from "Frost/Nixon": it's Hollywood turning history into Oscar-worthy fiction. I know what I need to about those times, and I know the future means far more to me. If we're not going to spend a couple of years exposing the Bush crimes to the light of day (and some Bush cronies to the darkness of prison cells), then let's get on with the business of repairing our democracy. "Frost/Nixon" has nothing for me in that regard. For me, it's box office poison.

I'll tell you what you can sell me a ticket for, however: "Mr Obama Goes to Washington."

By T.A. Barnhart Jan. 04, 2009