Like most of my generation, born in the mid-60s, I watched that decade and the grinding transition to the ’70s over the shoulders of my parents and older siblings.
Their relationship to Richard Nixon — as fervent as the tie they had with Pierre Trudeau, though usually for different reasons — was one we could only witness, though like the Mexican blankets and plastic chairs that they once used to decorate their homes, we inherited it as we moved into our adult lives.
I can’t help but compare it to the scene in Ang Lee’s movie of Rick Moody’s novel The Ice Storm, set during the Watergate hearings, when Christina Ricci puts on a rubber Nixon mask as she makes out with Elijah Wood. The confusion and trauma on his face is priceless, and if he wasn’t dead before the credits rolled, you knew that he was going to carry that emotional scar with him for the rest of his life. Death, it seemed, was the preferable alternative.
The release of Frost/Nixon this weekend marks the peak of yet another cycle in Nixon’s posthumous half-life, the ebbing and surging of public fascination with the man, played in Ron Howard’s film by Frank Langella as halfway between an impersonation and an interpretation.
Sam Rockwell’s portrayal of writer James Reston Jr., one of the team who helped David Frost with his landmark four-part televised interview with the disgraced president, echoes the betrayal we saw in our parents and especially our older brothers and sisters as they confronted Nixon before, during, and after Watergate.
I think my generation has always been more ambivalent, though no less fascinated by Nixon, and the film connects with our image of the “tragic” Nixon when, at the end of their verbal battle, Langella’s Nixon tells Frost that his biggest regret is how his betrayal of public trust has made politics irredeemably compromised and corrupt for young people from 1973 on.
It’s a bit disingenuous —there have been devastating political scandals before, and disillusioning young people is only marginally less difficult than getting them to listen to bad music. Just as a hyperbolic ululation to transformative change peaks, there’s always something like this week’s parliamentary crotch-kicking to remind us that getting and holding power is often the only real policy a politician will wholeheartedly embrace. I don’t know if my Nixon is better than the one looming over the political imagination of my older brother and sister, but I know I prefer our Nixon, betrayed by his own ambition and no less human for it, to the bogeyman who taunted my siblings from his ghostly lair in San Clemente.
