CORRIGENDUM:  In my earlier post, a correction is needed.  Vidal wrote, in the article mentioned, that Nixon was “the only great [U.S.] president of the last half of the 20th century.”

This hate-filled, hate-mongering commentary by Barra about the man, Richard Nixon, who Gore Vidal called “the only great [U.S.] president of the 20th century” (in his essay, ‘Not The Best Man’s Best Man,’ in 1983), is best understood in the context of Bryce Harlow’s account of his conversation with John Osborne.  Harlow asked Osborne, a onetime Communist sympathizer, admitted Nixon-hater, and dean of the Washington Press Corps during the Nixon Presidency, why he hated Nixon as he did.

Harlow was a great admirer of Nixon and a friend of longstanding of John Osborne.  A partial excerpt of Harlow’s description of his conversation with Osborne follows:

Harlow asked Osborne “‘Let me ask you a question.  Just why do you hate my guy [Richard Nixon] so much?’ [Osborne] said, ‘Well I don’t really know, but ...’ conceding in effect that he loathed Nixon.  Then after a moment’s silence, he said,  ‘Bryce, I wish you hadn’t done that.  That was a dirty trick.  I am ashamed of my attitude toward Nixon.  I don’t have a right to that as a reporter, but I don’t like him and I can’t help it.  I have no real basis to dislike him and I can’t help it.  He has done nothing to me.’ ... ‘Do you know what we call him in the press corps—the cardboard man ... He conceals himself somewhere behind a cardboard image of himself.  He never comes out ... I’ve talked to him in all kinds of ways.  But I’ve never seen nor met the real man ... Now, Bryce, you can’t trust a man, you can’t like a man whom you don’t meet, who hides himself from you .. I said, ‘John, now I understand.  You have finally revealed yourself and your comrades.  The real reason you don’t like Richard Nixon is that he is smarter than you are ... You sit here, John, and you use me like putty because you are smarter than I am ... you get all you want ... But Nixon, oh no, he gives you just what he wants to give you, and no more.  And you get all bent out of shape because you can’t control it.  He controls it.’ Well, there was a pause, and he looked at me, and he said, ‘You know, you may have something there.  I had never thought of that, and it’s quite possible.’”

For any who are interested, Osborne’s stylish writing about Nixon was collected in several books, covering various time periods, all entitled ‘The Nixon Watch.’  Osborne’s candor in his responses to Harlow (like the admissions of Nixon’s most ambitious biographer, Stephen Ambrose, a self-confessed onetime Nixon-hater when he began his Nixon trilogy, who came to like and admire Nixon by the time he wrote his Epilogue to the 3rd volume) do Osborne great credit because they underscore the reason why Nixon-haters such as Barra hate Nixon.  Nixon was smarter than those who hated him and he managed, through his intelligence (his measured I.Q. was prodigious) to accomplish great and historic goals for the world and for his country.  These accomplishments are perhaps best described in Ray Price’s ‘With Nixon,’ but are also well-described in Jonathan Aitken’s ‘Nixon. A Life,’ Black’s ‘The Invincible Quest,’ and Longford’s ‘Nixon.  A Study In Extremes Of fortune.’

The tragic and pathetic truth about pseudohistorians like Barra is that, by accentuating what they view as negative personality traits, they let an understanding of the history of their times pass them by.  Wagner, Einstein, and Churchill, to name just three others who wrought great historic changes in music and physics, and statesmanship, respectively, all had as many, probably more so-called ‘personality flaws’ than Nixon, but that in no way detracts from their achievements.  The great accomplishment of Langella is that he has done for Nixon, in the film Frost/Nixon, what George Scott did for Patton—the greatest U.S. field commander of the 20th century—in the film Patton.

Nixon wrote a book,“No More Vietnams.” Evidently, the Bushs, Cheney, Rumsfield, Rice, and Powell never read the book. Major Powell could not find anything wrong with the massacre of Vietnamese citizens at Mi Lai by the American Army. What do you expect from cold heart killers.

Richard Nixon was to a large extent the product of his political environment.
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“If one hangs out with gangsters, one must dress like gangsters.”

—Attributed to either Richard Millstone Nixon, or Spiro Agnew, or both.

Nixon was to the largest, consequential extent the consequence of his decision to be a criminal.  I will not tolerate being charged with his decisions, criminality, and crimes, simply because I happened to be alive during his lifetime.  The “environment” did not make his decisions for him.

Rich Little was also prescient: he released “Nixon: A Watergate Fantasy,” which had Nixon go to prison, only days before the “October Massacre”* finally convinced a majority that Nixon was a criminal and should be impeached, tried, convicted, and imprisoned.
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*Those who lived through that era, and were paying attention, recall that as probably the most frightening event of the era, post-JFK assassination.
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One of the most accurately revealing of Nixon, in Rich’s satire, was the exchange between Nixon and his “Hippy freak” cellmate.

“He was an immensely complicated man,” Reston told me last year in an interview for American Heritage, “and those very complications made him fascinating.”
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Meaningless, except perhaps as pretext, or excuse, because virtually every human being is “immensely complicated”.
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Peter Morgan (whose previous film scripts include “The Queen” and “The Last King of Scotland”) is merely the latest writer of imagination to dare a probe of Nixon’s psyche—Gore Vidal (“An Evening With Richard Nixon”), Philip Roth (“Our Gang”) and Norman Mailer (“Miami and the Siege of Chicago”) have all taken their turns at deciphering the 37th president.

Mailer, not entirely unsympathetic, probably came the closest to pinpointing Nixon’s Rosebud. At the 1968 Republican Convention, Mailer thought Nixon’s modesty to be “a product of a man who, at worst, had grown from a bad actor to a surpassingly good actor, or from an unpleasant self-made man—outrageously rewarded with luck—to a man who had risen and fallen and been able to rise again, and so conceivably had learned something about patience and the compassion of others.”
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“Miami” is hardly the only Mailer writing about Nixon; he covered Nixon from early, through to the grave, and after.
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What Mailer, Vidal, Roth and others have never entirely explained was their fascination with a man they derided as shallow and unrelentingly prosaic. Yet, despite the derision of so many intellectuals—or perhaps, in some perverse way, because of it—Nixon has cast a long, dark shadow on American pop culture. . . .
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Duh!?  He was “the first president to R-E-S-I-G-N”!  Like, that is BOUND to make news, and be excuse for any number of intellectuals, most of them pseudo- (Vidal), to write about him _ad nauseum_.
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Movies, for instance. With the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln, Nixon has been portrayed by more great actors than any other president. . . .
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There is more money in movies than in books.  And more in the combination.  Nixon was a retread, and he continues to be retread fodder for others’ bank accounts.  So everyone ripe for exploitation for cash is—the ubiquitous excuse—“complicated”.  It gives a fake-serious cover to a guilty exploitation.

Let us not, of course, forget that Nixon was a criminal—the latest release of his tapes show him yet again as paranoid nutball behind that—and ensure that he is remembered for that above all else.  And nail to him those who follow his America-hating anti-Constitutional example, such as the Bushit criminal enterprise.

Richard Nixon was to a large extent the product of his political environment. He was notable because he managed to carry political treachery to greater heights that any of his predecessors and it was his undoing.  Today the perception of who and what Richard Nixon was has become iconic. He is rightly vilified for his corrupting of the political and administrative systems to maintain his control on power, but that was not widely known at the time. Certainly insiders in politics and the press that knew him were in a position to judge, but by and large he was successful at managing his public image during his term in office.

He has always been a polarizing figure in American politics, but much more so now I think than during his life. There have been as Mr Barra points out a number of movies made on this subject. I personally think that you have to have lived through those times in order to really judge whether or not they portray a true image of the man rather than simply a caricature.

For all his faults he was an effective administrator, and governed with an essentially liberal ideology. He created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), promoted the Legacy of parks program, and implemented the Philadelphia Plan, the first significant federal affirmative action program. (From Wikipedia) And he had approval ratings in the 30% to 40% percent range before the Watergate story began to really gain traction in the summer of 1973.

Historians don’t even regarded him to be the worst American president of the 20th century, that distinction goes to Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, although I suspect that George W. Bush will probably push Harding off his perch.

The comedian Rich Little was probably most famous for his Nixon impersonation, and that line, “I’m not a crook”. But that petty caricature belittles both the office of the President and the magnitude of crimes that Nixon committed.

He was more than a crook and a liar, he was President of the United States and he betrayed his oath office and the trust of the American people.

Having seen the film myself I felt that Langela’s characterization was dead on target, even if it somewhat sympathetic. No matter what you think you know about Richard Nixon the man, the movie is well worth seeing.