James Naughtie: Nixon's long shadow
[James Naughtie presents Today on BBC Radio 4.]
Watching Frost/Nixon is to have an encounter with sharp nostalgia. More than 30 years on, the quivering jowls and dark eyes are as familiar as ever, a president breaking down and revealing for a moment his understanding of his own tragedy. It's an image that's part of the tableau over which Barack Obama will preside on Tuesday, the ghost at the inaugural feast.
No one who remembers Richard Nixon's last days in office can forget the resignation's strange mixture of pathos and grand choreography, that week where he sobbed on the Oval Office carpet, with Henry Kissinger down on his knees alongside him in horrified comradeship on the last night; and where his pugnacious departing gesture was the familiar salute with arms stretched in a V for victory sign, complete with the grin, before the helicopter lifted him from the White House lawn. As his campaign buttons used to say, Nixon's the One.
That scene has never faded. For the generation who lived through it (I was a student in America at the time) it turned the presidency into a dark drama that encompassed Vietnam as well as Watergate; and that, as Peter Morgan's play and film show, consumed the figure of Nixon, in a fire of his making. It flickers still.
Obama is the first real break with that era because he seems to demonstrate a quality that none of Nixon's other successors had: an ability to keep his distance. It was obvious in the campaign, and it may well survive in the White House, because his political character is built on a determination to protect that space around him, as if he knows how easy it would be to get sucked down. He always seems surrounded by an invisible screen. Nixon, the consummate schemer and political manipulator, found in the end that a presidency constructed as a permanent campaign against your enemies will destroy you ("I gave them a sword"). That's the truth bequeathed to Obama, who had only just reached his teens when Nixon resigned on 8 August 1974.
Obama's election has a parallel with Ronald Reagan's in 1980 that seems unlikely at first glance. The old boy wanted to talk about politics in a different way, and did. Despite the muddles and scandals of the later years, he delivered a social revolution unparalleled since FDR's, stirring up the conservative tide that has run through America ever since. But Reagan's appeal was to the past, as if the assassinations, wars and scandals of the decade or so from Kennedy's death to Nixon's fall could be expunged by the picture of a president who always looked as if he was about to step on to a Norman Rockwell set. Reassurance was all - "It's Morning Again in America" said his 1984 campaign ads - and it worked. Bush's victories were the playing out of the Reagan years.
Obama's election, much more than Bill Clinton's in 1992, is a similar transition, though of a different character. He tries to steady nerves by suggesting not that he will recover the past, but that he'll escape from it. And that's why Frost/Nixon is finding such an unlikely niche in proceedings: somehow the figure of the only president to resign catches the spirit of a whole era, one that spanned most of Obama's life. He was elected in 1968 - the year of assassinations - inherited Vietnam and gave us Watergate, leaving his successors to deal with the consequences of a political system that seemed to have turned in on itself. Only now are Americans beginning to escape from it. The crises attending Obama's approach to power are from the new century, not the old...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
Watching Frost/Nixon is to have an encounter with sharp nostalgia. More than 30 years on, the quivering jowls and dark eyes are as familiar as ever, a president breaking down and revealing for a moment his understanding of his own tragedy. It's an image that's part of the tableau over which Barack Obama will preside on Tuesday, the ghost at the inaugural feast.
No one who remembers Richard Nixon's last days in office can forget the resignation's strange mixture of pathos and grand choreography, that week where he sobbed on the Oval Office carpet, with Henry Kissinger down on his knees alongside him in horrified comradeship on the last night; and where his pugnacious departing gesture was the familiar salute with arms stretched in a V for victory sign, complete with the grin, before the helicopter lifted him from the White House lawn. As his campaign buttons used to say, Nixon's the One.
That scene has never faded. For the generation who lived through it (I was a student in America at the time) it turned the presidency into a dark drama that encompassed Vietnam as well as Watergate; and that, as Peter Morgan's play and film show, consumed the figure of Nixon, in a fire of his making. It flickers still.
Obama is the first real break with that era because he seems to demonstrate a quality that none of Nixon's other successors had: an ability to keep his distance. It was obvious in the campaign, and it may well survive in the White House, because his political character is built on a determination to protect that space around him, as if he knows how easy it would be to get sucked down. He always seems surrounded by an invisible screen. Nixon, the consummate schemer and political manipulator, found in the end that a presidency constructed as a permanent campaign against your enemies will destroy you ("I gave them a sword"). That's the truth bequeathed to Obama, who had only just reached his teens when Nixon resigned on 8 August 1974.
Obama's election has a parallel with Ronald Reagan's in 1980 that seems unlikely at first glance. The old boy wanted to talk about politics in a different way, and did. Despite the muddles and scandals of the later years, he delivered a social revolution unparalleled since FDR's, stirring up the conservative tide that has run through America ever since. But Reagan's appeal was to the past, as if the assassinations, wars and scandals of the decade or so from Kennedy's death to Nixon's fall could be expunged by the picture of a president who always looked as if he was about to step on to a Norman Rockwell set. Reassurance was all - "It's Morning Again in America" said his 1984 campaign ads - and it worked. Bush's victories were the playing out of the Reagan years.
Obama's election, much more than Bill Clinton's in 1992, is a similar transition, though of a different character. He tries to steady nerves by suggesting not that he will recover the past, but that he'll escape from it. And that's why Frost/Nixon is finding such an unlikely niche in proceedings: somehow the figure of the only president to resign catches the spirit of a whole era, one that spanned most of Obama's life. He was elected in 1968 - the year of assassinations - inherited Vietnam and gave us Watergate, leaving his successors to deal with the consequences of a political system that seemed to have turned in on itself. Only now are Americans beginning to escape from it. The crises attending Obama's approach to power are from the new century, not the old...