The President Who Never Came In From the ColdHow Frost/Nixon gets Nixon right.

(Continued from page 1)

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Once the interview tapings begin, Langella's Nixon portrayal deepens and tension builds. For Nixon, the series of four face-offs serves as a repetition of his four debates with John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential contest: Again, he is squaring off mano a mano against a fair-haired rival who is better-looking, more popular, more sexually accomplished. (Morgan has the good sense to draw his biggest laugh lines from reality—he includes the question that Nixon asked Frost before one of their interviews: "So, did you do any fornicating this weekend?") But if Nixon is reliving the "Great Debates," this time he means to win. He's even put it in the contract that he can stop the filming and dab his sweaty lip or apply new makeup as needed.

As the first few interviews proceed, Nixon seems headed for a victory. He artfully parries Frost's questions. He turns a query about the emotionalism of his White House farewell into a filibuster about his utterly banal feelings on the occasions of Dwight Eisenhower's death and his daughter's wedding. The research team squirms, Frost slumps in his chair, and Nixon prattles on merrily—with Langella conveying the subtle sadistic pleasure that Nixon takes in besting his antagonists.

As anyone acquainted with the actual interviews knows, Frost ultimately prevails, and Reston's quiet heroism proves responsible. For all his sleeve-borne political commitments—the kind we normally distrust as prejudicial in a reporter—Reston turns out to be right about Nixon, and his instincts serve him well. His hatred of Nixon is vindicated, not because we feel no sympathy for Nixon (we do), but because Nixon's pathos never obscures his villainy. Reston helps Frost slay Nixon by finding a transcript from Nixon's White House tapes that becomes a second smoking gun, further implicating the president in the Watergate coverup. Nixon never saw it coming.

Frost's contribution to Nixon's slaying, ironically, resides in an aspect of his own superficiality: his intuitive grasp of television's power. Although Frost never actually gets Nixon to apologize, he comes close. More important, he elicits from Nixon a series of pained, remorseful facial expressions—portrayed beautifully by Langella and magnified for the theater audience via a mammoth TV screen—that speak volumes. "The power of the close-up," Reston marvels, with both disillusionment and satisfaction. "The first and greatest sin of television is that it simplifies. … Tranches of time, whole careers, become reduced to a single snapshot." Television—Nixon's friend and aide so often in his career, from the 1952 Checkers speech to his 1972 trip to China—this time did him in. It was 1960 all over again.

The play's irony is true to life. Everyone expected Frost's interviews to offer Nixon an easy platform on which to grandstand. The four programs that resulted drew 45 million viewers, or 42 percent of the TV audience, the same as a typical episode of Happy Days, the No. 1 show that year. But the polls detected no improvement in Nixon's public standing. Even old loyalists were unsympathetic. John Ehrlichman judged Nixon's performance a "maudlin rationalization that will be tested and found false," H.R. Haldeman called it an effort "to rehabilitate himself over the prostrate bodies of his aides," and Sen. Bob Dole, who had chaired the Republican Party under Nixon, sniped: "It takes more than four interviews to properly rehabilitate Richard Nixon."

Morgan's grasp of Nixon's place in American culture is confirmed near the play's end, when Reston endorses an opinion that one seldom hears in routine journalistic commentary but that I believe is undoubtedly true: Nixon was never rehabilitated. He never came back. Despite the pomp and fine words at his funeral, his name remained a synonym for presidential corruption and crime, and the "-gate" suffix attached to scandals ever since certified Watergate's cultural importance. Earlier in the play, Nixon fumed to his aides that the audiences at his speeches were asking questions only about his wrongdoing. That tendency continued years afterward. Indeed, as late as 1990, after Nixon had published another memoir, his third, he sighed to his research assistant: "None of the other stuff in there, like on the Russians or the other personal stuff, made it into the news or even the reviews. Watergate—that's all anyone wants."

James Reston Jr. and Nixon haters everywhere can sleep easy.

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David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers and author of three books of political history, has written the "History Lesson" column since 1998.

Photograph of Nixon on Slate's home page courtesy National Archvies.

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