Presidents Are Acting Not Illegally More And More

When Richard Nixon told David Frost in April 1977, "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal," he was talking not about political burglaries and campaign dirty tricks (though his operatives did all that, too) but a leader's sovereign powers during wartime. That Ron Howard and his screenwriter, Peter Morgan, suggested otherwise in "Frost/Nixon" was one of the few disappointments in an otherwise fine movie. Continuing his argument, Nixon said:

[I]t has been...argued that as far as a president is concerned, that in war time, a president does have certain extraordinary powers which would make acts that would otherwise be unlawful, lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the nation and the Constitution, which is essential for the rights we’re all talking about.

Tom Campbell, Chapman University's law school dean, battled President Clinton over Kosovo when he was serving in Congress. He argues that when presidents grasp for broader foreign policy and war-making prerogatives, judges and Congress wax timid, and especially so since Sept. 11. On the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, John Dean, who turned on Nixon during the the Watergate investigations of 1973-74, says recent presidents have widened the realm of "not illegal" far more than 37. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Executive orders issued by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of Sept. 11 claimed power for the Oval Office to ignore U.S. laws and international treaties.

President Obama has retained some of those extraordinary wartime powers, and his use of drones to attack terrorist suspects has drawn accusations of international law violations.

"I don't think Richard Nixon, in his darkest hour, would have authorized torture," said Dean...

The Seeds Of Regret

Jonathan Aitken is a former member of the British Parliament and author of Nixon: A Life (sadly and I hope temporarily out of print, though you can grab a copy here). A frequent visitor to San Clemente after President Nixon's resignation, including during his honeymoon with his first wife, he had a fascinating insider's account of the Nixon-Frost interviews in Saturday's London Daily Mail.

Aitken begins with a glimpse of the honeymoon visit:

[A]n awkwardly but determinedly romantic Richard Nixon presented us with a formal corsage of flowers, made delicate inquiries on how we were sleeping, and took immense pains in putting on a festive dinner party which he called 'La Casa Pacifica's welcome to the honeymooners from three happily married couples'. They turned out to be ex-President Nixon and his wife; David and Julie Eisenhower (President Ike's grandson and Nixon's daughter); and Congressman and Mrs Jimmy Roosevelt (FDR's son and daughter-in-law).

Having recently interviewing RN's then-chief of staff (played in "Frost/Nixon" by Kevin Bacon), Aitken describes what really happened after the former President successfully filibustered David Frost in their first videotaped exchanges:

As Colonel Jack Brennan tells it: 'Frost sent his aide, John Birt [later boss of the BBC], to see me. He said: "This has been terrible. We need more time."

'My immediate reaction was "Tough. We've kept our side of the deal: the taping is over."

'But later I talked it over with my staff. We all agreed that Nixon should voluntarily go further and express some regret.

'So I went to see the boss and I said to him: "Listen, if this ends the way it has, the world is going to say, there goes the same old Nixon."'

At first, Nixon was curtly dismissive of this criticism. But Brennan and his team persisted. Their argument was that some expression of regret for Watergate needed to be put on record....

'From that moment onwards,' recalled Brennan, 'I knew that Nixon was spending all his time preparing himself for how to say something that would not be a confession or an expression of guilt, yet would say sorry for what had happened.' Throughout his life, Richard Nixon had difficulty giving apologies. This one was the hardest of all.

Imagine: Frost Complaining More Than We

Sir David Frost is steamed about the 10-15% of Ron Howard and Peter Morgan's "Frost/Nixon" that he says is pure fiction. Does he mean the drunken phone call from President Nixon that never happened? RN saying that Watergate was "not illegal" as opposed to aggressive measures to combat domestic extremists during wartime? His appearance before the "Orthodontists Society of Houston?"

Those weren't the fictional parts of the movie that piqued Frost. They were the parts about Frost:

I voluntarily gave up my rights to editorial control of it. I'm not complaining but it does mean that 10 to 15 per cent of the film is fiction. I wasn't just a talk show host before (Richard Nixon). I'd done British prime ministers - Harold Wilson, Ted Heath - all the U.S. presidential candidates, Robert Kennedy, Ronald Reagan. I think Peter (Morgan) did it this way to make me out to be the underdog - more a showman than a journalist.

For Nixon insider Frank Gannon's review of the movie, which received the coveted full five Checkers rating at The New Nixon, go here. Mine's at the second link above.

"Frost/Nixon" Defrosts The Historical Nixon

The most riveting scene in "Frost/Nixon" is completely fabricated, as playwright and screenwriter Peter Morgan has candidly admitted. A tipsy former President (Frank Langella) calls David Frost (Michael Sheen) and describes them as a pair of overachievers out to show the world that they were good enough. He says that by "our success" in their televised interviews, they'll prove their critics wrong.

Frost gulps and agrees with RN's analysis. You get the feeling that he'd never voiced his own fears and motivations or even admitted them to himself. Imagine that: A fun-loving child of the 1960s bowing to the superior introspection of the most introverted and outwardly stoic of Depression-bred public figures. He then warns Nixon, "Only one of us can win."

About that, the fictional Frost is wrong. Thanks to the original Frost-Nixon interviews, the British TV personality won the fame and riches he craved. Thanks in part to Ron Howard's "Frost/Nixon," the historical Nixon is beginning to win the measure of redemption he never dared hope for in life.

As my New Nixon colleague Frank Gannon has noted, Langella's gripping Nixon, like the statesman's milieu he occupied and the world he changed for the better, is large and consequential. He dominates almost every scene in which he appears. (One exception is his awkward, imaginary appearance before something called the Orthodontists Society of Houston, the kind of speaker's circuit event that he never did.) When Nixon passes through a room in the movie, the factotums and crew members part like the Red Sea. It's obvious why alarmed Nixon critic Elizabeth Drew called Howard "dishonorable." His Nixon shatters the confines of marginalization, one-dimensionality, and caricature thrust upon the historical Nixon as the result of Vietnam-era passions. It's the first film Nixon worthy of the real thing, the first that will help younger audiences begin to understand him and his tumultuous era.

Not surprisingly, the film doesn't convey much Watergate understanding. Its main conflict, between TV lightweight and political heavyweight, depends on fudges. Morgan and Howard misconstrued RN's famous "if the President does it, that's means it's not illegal" as being about Watergate rather than a plan to increase surveillance of domestic militants during wartime. As for Watergate itself, the movie Frost accuses Nixon of having claimed he didn't know about the break-in until June 23, which is obviously untrue. He read about it in the paper on June 18, along with the rest of the world.

All in all, "Frost/Nixon" is conventional in its failure to communicate that Watergate and Vietnam were inextricable. Whether Mr. Nixon ever intended a criminal cover-up of the June 17 burglary is doubtful. The preponderance of the White House tapes from 1972 show that he believed that anyone involved in the burglary itself (as opposed to previous national security matters) should own up. Russ Baker's intriguing if highly speculative new book, Family of Secrets, asserts that President Nixon correctly assumed from the beginning that the botched burglary was a CIA setup, but that's a blog for another day.

At the film's climax, Langella's Nixon owns up by saying he let the American people down, a moment that occurs after adjutant Jack Brennan (portrayed by the less-entertaining-than-the-real-McBrennan Kevin Bacon) panics and interrupts the final taping. Afterward, James Reston Jr. (Sam Rockwell), the most anti-Nixon of Frost's team members, exults at seeing the former President's face "ravaged by self-loathing and defeat."

It's a deceptive denouement, since it was actually Frost who interrupted the taping after misunderstanding a sign the real Brennan was holding up that said "let him talk." Mr. Nixon had chosen to make a statement of accountability. Neither Frost nor Reston maneuvered him into it.

Besides, self-loathing wasn't in Mr. Nixon's nature. By his death in 1994, he was at peace with what he had achieved in the nearly 20 years since his resignation, both personally and publicly. What mattered most, besides his family, was having the ears of his successors, and at that he succeeded, advising each one from Ford to Clinton and even playing a decisive role in U.S. relations with Russia and China.

Contrary to most conventional wisdom, he never expected broader rehabilitation during his lifetime. He said it would take at least 30 years before he began to get a fair shake. Yet again, he called it about right.

Cheney Ends Up As The New Nixon, Anyway

The VP was evidently so grateful to Chris Wallace of Fox News for defending the Bush Administration against comparisons to Richard Nixon that he agreed to give Wallace an “exit interview” — ironic, since Mr. Cheney’s interview with Wallace has itself drawn a comparison by Matt Corley to RN’s famous assertion to David Frost about the President’s latitude during a national security crisis.

As TNN’s Robert Nedelkoff has noted, when Frank Langella, portraying RN, says that when the President does something, “it’s not illegal,” the script makes it appear as though he’s talking about the Watergate break-in and cover-up. In real life, Frost and the former President had been talking about the Huston Plan for wartime intelligence-gathering about domestic radicals. The plan was approved and later rescinded by the President.

It’s hard to defend illegal activity by the government under any circumstances. But it would be interesting to know how much latitude the American people would give it in the event of an imminent threat. At his appearance at the Nixon Library on Friday, Bill O’Reilly said that arguments against extreme measures would lose much if not all of their salience if the U.S. is hit again as on Sept. 11.

That doesn’t justify such actions, either. But journalists should not assume that Americans are of one mind on the subject. That’s why, at the start of the new administration, debate and dialogue would be better than the legal scapegoating of Bush Administration officials which is so intensely craved by the President’s and VP’s political opponents.

As for “Frost/Nixon” director Ron Howard and playwright-scriptwriter Peter Morgan, it would be interesting to know why they chose to misconstrue RN’s quote. Without knowing their motives, its likely that most theatergoers are more appalled by the “not illegal” formulation when it’s applied to political shenanigans as opposed to wartime national security policies.

"Frost/Nixon" vs. Gibson/Bush

Ezra Klein in the LA Times, offering the new CW: Richard Nixon’s apology to David Frost was a statesmanlike gift of Watergate closure to the American people which can now be used to leverage an apology from George W. Bush.

Old CW: Nixon arrogantly refused to apologize.

We’re making progress. After all, if an influential journalist says it, that means it’s not inaccurate.

Frosted

David Frost complains to Reuters about made-up bits in "Frost/Nixon." Does he mean the fictionalized drunken phone call to Frost that RN never would've made in a million years? Nope. The infraction is that director Ron Howard and writer Peter Morgan made Frost look like more of a lightweight than he was:

"To build up the ending so he left out all the things I'd done by the time of the Nixon interviews -- three prime ministers, three ex-presidents, all sorts of stuff," he said.

It's Really All About The Shoes

And about the hair

If Oscar buzz is evidenced by every little thing about a movie getting ink before it’s even released to the public, then “Frost/Nixon” is a shoe-in. Booth Moore:

In “Frost/Nixon,” [Michael] Sheen plays dandy British talk show host [David] Frost with all the wide ties, and even wider collars to match. His hair is something of a character itself– coiffed into a perfect helmet and worn with deep sideburns and arched eyebrows — a parody of all that TV journalism has become since that moment. Frost, the forerunner of the modern day metrosexual, is too well-dressed in Nixon’s opinion, his horse bit Italian loafers too effeminate. “I think a man should wear shoes with laces,” one of Nixon’s trusty aides says.

The shoes are a defining point of difference between the two men, between Nixon and a generation he never understood. But in the end, it’s those shoes that bring the characters together in what might be the most poignant moment in the film.

It’s fun to relive Los Angeles in the 1970s for a couple of hours, from the glamour of Frost’s Beverly Hilton Hotel suite, to the inside of the hotter-than-hot Ma Maison restaurant, with Frost’s gal Caroline Cushing dressed by costume designer Daniel Orlandi in a liquid jersey a la Halston.

But what was really a hoot was the first class cabin of the plane Frost took across the Atlantic, with its silver tea service and cocktail bar. Can you imagine? Let’s chew on that as we head out of town on the busiest travel day of the year.