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...

See No Evil

Steve Donoghue demolishes Don Fulsom's hack job Nixon's Darkest Secrets and then turns on Nixon:

[T]he greatest disappointment of Nixon's Darkest Secrets is how minor those secrets come across as being when measured against the full evil of the man. When Nixon went before the nation on Aug. 8, 1974, and announced his resignation -- only a few days after a White House tape recording surfaced proving beyond question that he'd known everything about the Watergate break-in -- something unspoken and completely vital to the nation cracked along its entire axis. And three years later (during a 1977 interview with David Frost), when Nixon said, "When the president does it, that means it's not illegal," that crack shattered open and has never been closed since. It was an inky stain on the nation, and it spread forward in time even to the present, with the United States launching two wars, one of them illegal, mainly at the urging of two former Nixon acolytes, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the vice-president and defense secretary under president George W. Bush. The real Nixon was far darker than the bumbling cartoon villain Fulsom paints here -- perhaps the sharpest irony of them all.

When Nixon released the transcript of the June 23, 1972 "smoking gun" conversation, we learned that he'd briefly acquiesced in a Watergate cover-up, not that he'd "known everything" about the break-in. Still, it's actually reassuring to see the emergence of a critique of Nixon and Watergate based on his national security rather than alleged criminal predispositions. Donoghue traces a direct line between Nixon's "not illegal" formulation and Bush's Iraq war (presumably the one he thinks was illegal). Ironically, most people think the theory had to do with the Watergate break-in or coverup, but Nixon was actually offering a justification of surveillance of domestic militants during the Vietnam war. In 2008, when the misunderstanding was perpetuated in Ron Howard's film "Frost/Nixon," I wondered if Howard and scriptwriter Peter Morgan had blurred the record because post-Sept. 11 audiences would've been inclined to agree with Nixon that presidents have extra-constitutional authority to protect the the U.S. from violent extremists. Some may well think, as Donoghue does, that such impulses make a leader evil. I'll bet most probably don't.
Hat tip to Dona Christensen

The Alpha And Omega Of A Great Love Story

Antidotes to cruel, unproven denigrations of Richard and Pat Nixons' marriage are the passionate letters the young southern California attorney wrote to his beloved during their courtship in the 1930s, such as this one:

Somehow on Tuesday there was something electric in the usually almost stifling air in Whittier. And now I know. An Irish gypsy who radiates all that is happy and beautiful was there. She left behind her a note addressed to a struggling barrister who looks from a window and dreams. And in that note he found sunshine and flowers, and a great spirit which only great ladies can inspire. Someday let me see you again? In September? Maybe?

At the end of their first date, Mr. Nixon proclaimed to Miss Ryan that he intended to marry her. She wasn't quite as sure. The letters he used to help close the deal go on display this week at the Nixon library, where longtime curator Olivia Anastasiadis (below), couldn't be prouder, according to the AP:

These letters are fabulous. It's a totally different person from the Watergate tapes that people know. President Nixon started out as an idealistic young man ready to conquer the world and with Pat Ryan he knew he could do it. There's a lot of hope, there's a lot of tenderness and it's very poetic. He loved her, he was absolutely enthralled by her and that's all he thought about.

Those alleging that 37's tender feelings for his bride didn't survive the rigors of their public lives should have heard what his last chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor, who knew both Nixons as well as any of his aides, said in an October 2008 talk at the Nixon library to women serving in government:

The President and Mrs. Nixon enjoyed nothing better than the opportunity to make each other laugh. Since he had spent so much of his working life on the road, the delight that he took at home with his First Lady and their four grandchildren is impossible to overstate.

One day in the late 1980s, I followed the President home from the office because I had forgotten to give him a file he has asked me for before he left to go home for lunch with Mrs. Nixon, which was his daily practice.

I raced into the kitchen, which had a one-way glass wall looking out over the deck where he and Mrs. Nixon would eat lunch when the weather was good.

Just as I arrived in the kitchen, the President was walking across the deck toward Mrs. Nixon, who was waiting to greet him with a smile and hug. He pulled out her chair and helped her take her seat. She smiled at something he said. I’m pretty sure she blushed.

When the Nixons’ critics say, as they sometimes do, that their relationship lacked affection and intimacy, I always smile, remembering that precious, private moment. I even told director Ron Howard about it when he visited the Library last year. We’ll have to see if he includes the scene in his upcoming movie, “Frost/Nixon”!

He didn't, but that's okay. Kathy (shown here with Nixon in Shanghai in 1993) remembers.

Kathy/John and "Frost/Nixon"

When director Ron Howard visited the Nixon Library in September 2007 to film scenes for "Frost/Nixon," his PR company filmed interviews with President Nixon's last chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor, and me about the Library and its genesis as a privately run institution. (It's now part of the National Archives.) That's Kathy and I below with Frank Langella, who skillfully portrayed our former boss.

The "Frost/Nixon" DVD came out this week with a brief special feature on the Library that Kathy and I essentially narrate. Quite a thrill and an honor for a couple of old Nixon hands.

Ought To Have Done Vs. Ought Not To Have Done

Though he praises Frank Langella's subtle, powerful portrayal, Carl Bernstein doesn't like "Frost/Nixon" because it makes Richard Nixon look too good.

That, at least, was journalist and Nixon biographer Elizabeth Drew's assessment, which Bernstein embraced during a restaurant chat with buddies. Drew actually called director Ron Howard "dishonorable." Specifically, Bernstein wishes filmmakers had included RN's denial of an illegal coverup of the Watergate burglary.

If that's a sin (and we may discuss it if you wish), then it's a sin of omission. Neither Bernstein nor anyone else (besides The New Nixon's Robert Nedelkoff and us other true believers) acts offended about another transgression, namely the film's contention that RN's famous "it's not illegal" comment was made about Watergate rather than a controversial plan for cracking down on dissenters during wartime. The demerits of the never-implemented Huston Plan notwithstanding, Howard and playwright-screenwriter Peter Morgan may have worried that, in the age of terrorism, some moviegoers would nod their heads at a President saying that extra steps to combat violent groups such as the Weather Underground were justified.

So what's worse, Carl: Leaving something out, or rearranging the narrative to avoid burdening the audience with ambiguity?

Howard: Nixon "A True Visionary"

Hugh Hewitt finds "Frost/Nixon" director Ron Howard in an especially friendly mood:

Well, you know, [I learned] little things, like I didn’t know that he loved music, and that he’d really trained as a musician as a kid. And I knew a bit about his history. Going through the Nixon Library was exciting and enlightening, and I realized on a lot of levels how socially progressive he was, and what a true visionary he was.

"Being A President Is An Impossible Job"

As he has before, Ron Howard (shown on the set of "Frost/Nixon"), the ultimate boomer director, suggests he had a silent majoritarian perspective on the 37th President while he was in office. Stuart Jeffries interviews him at the Guardian as the film opens in England:

So, back then, did he despise Nixon? Is that also what tempted him to make the film? "Not before Watergate. In fact, he had done me a favour. I didn't particularly want to go to Vietnam and so, belatedly, he had at least done the thing he said he was going to do - which was get us out of Vietnam and undo the draft. I appreciated him for that." So it was thanks to Nixon that Howard never saw real combat. "I remember watching the interviews. Being a president is an impossible job - it's naive to think someone can do the job and not bend the law here and there."

Hey, Kathy: When Did Ron Meet Richard?

Peter Morgan (left), Ron Howard, and Kathy O'Connor

Apparently, you don't have watch "The View." Someone prepares a State Department-like memcon. From today's show:

Ron Howard appeared on the show. He received an Oscar nomination for best director for Frost/Nixon. He said that it is a real thrill and it never gets old. Ron said that it is a surprising and unusual story based on the behind-the-scenes drama of the interview. Barbara loved the play and the movie. She mentioned again that she did an interview with Nixon three years later that was unpaid and asked Ron if he was going to do her film. He said that he will see how this film does first.

Ron met Nixon once briefly and doesn’t think he would have seen the movie, noting that Tony Blair never saw The Queen. He said that Frank Langella did a wonderful job capturing Richard Nixon and has gotten a lot of positive feedback. He saw both actors in the play and wanted to make a movie version with them in it, but knew it would be a tough sell with the movie studio. Ron was sent audition tapes by Academy Award winning actors who wanted to be considered.

I'll have to ask my wife and Nixon colleague Kathy O'Connor when and where the P. and Howard met. When I was the former President's aide in the 1980s in New York, I got a call from Brian Grazer, Howard's production partner, who said that the director was interested in Nixon and wanted to do something that was more friendly than we might expect from Hollywood. Nothing came of it at the time, although by my lights "Frost/Nixon" fills the bill admirably.

At least I was able to fulfill my journalist mother's wish that the suggestion somehow be lodged at Hollywood's loftiest level that Tom Hanks one day be cast as Richard Nixon. I pitched it to Howard himself in the Nixon Foundation men's room when he and "Frost/Nixon" playwright Peter Morgan visited the Library in December 2006 as they were preparing to do the movie. The idea lived for at least 15 minutes, since a colleague overheard Howard ask Morgan in the elevator, "So what do you think about Tom for Nixon?" But Frank Langella (now nominated for best actor) already owned the part.

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.

Was RN "Forced Out?" Ask Mark Felt

An intriguing UPI interview with director Ron Howard. Reading Peter Morgan's play "Frost/Nixon" and then seeing it on stage, he began to ask himself some good scholar's questions about RN:

"I was rediscovering (the interviews by) watching the play, sort of realizing how brilliant a man Nixon really is," the filmmaker said. "Realizing he had a lot of tough decisions to make. ... (Going through in my mind:) 'Did he step down because it was the politically expedient thing to do? Was he forced out by political enemies -- the media. What really went on?'"

"Frost/Nixon" Praised By Close Nixon Colleague

Over at The New Nixon, the discerning and thoughtful Frank Gannon -- who sat at Richard Nixon's bedside taking notes when the former President thought he was dying in 1974 and, a few years later, helped him write his memoirs -- gives "Frost/Nixon" TNN's highest (and indeed first) movie rating of "five Checkers":

Frank Langella gives a serious and stirring account of RN. He wisely eschews imitation, much less impersonation. Aside from some of the obviously applied physical characteristics, and the adoption of a recognizably husky vocal timbre, Mr. Langella’s Nixon is convincing not because it is derivative, but because it is complete. In fact, quite unlike RN whose locution was formal and whose diction was precise, this Nixon speaks casually and colloquially and often even drops his “gs.” Mr. Langella uses his brain (and undoubtedly his heart) to embody the balanced elements of confidence, formality, toughness, shyness, insecurity, and vulnerability, and then renders them into a character that must move and compel even the people who knew RN, and have that high standard of comparison. Of course, that’s what acting at this exalted level is all about.

And Ron Howard, much of whose work has been open and optimistic and straightforward, has turned out to be the ideal director for this complex, essentially cerebral, and decidedly dark two finger exercise. He is above all a story teller, and he keeps his eye on Frost/Nixon’s clear, compelling, and chronological story line. And while he knows how to keep the story moving forward, he also shows a willingness —and the confidence— to slow things down and take the time it takes to let the story also sink in. This is brilliant directing — authoritative and unobtrusive.

A Humanized Nixon? Bah, Humbug!

If you can't count on your home town newspaper, whom can you count on? But for its Christmas Day review of "Frost/Nixon," the Orange County Register used copy purchased via a news service from the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Colin Covert, who was appalled at director Ron Howard's worthy attempt to be fair to the 37th President:

[Actor Frank Langella gives] Nixon sympathetic, humanizing dimensions the man never possessed in real life....Ron Howard is too nice a guy to comprehend the cruelty that coexisted with Nixon's formidable intellect, so he becomes a co-conspirator in romantic revisionism.

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.

This Explains Everything!

Variety, in a massive package celebrating "Frost/Nixon" director Ron Howard's 50 years in show business, has this detail:

"My dad once spanked me on the set of 'The Andy Griffith Show,' " Howard says, recalling a downside of growing up in Mayberry. "It wasn't about trying to get me to do a scene. I was being a smartass, a 9- or 10-year-old brat who was disobedient."

How Do You Talk About RN? Carefully

As the "Frost/Nixon" promos come fast and furious, one's inner Columbo issueth forth.

On the CBS morning show, director Ron Howard said:

There is no part of Frank Langella's personality [that] has anything to do with Richard Nixon whatsoever. He is not only making us believe and understand and relate to somebody we think we kind of know, but it has nothing to do with his personality.

Whereas the actor has repeatedly stressed a sense of commonality with his subject.

This week, Howard said his 1972 vote for RN was a gesture of thanks for his enfranchisement:

That was my first opportunity to vote. He had been the president that sort of made it possible for people under 21 to vote and I went back and forth. And, ultimately, decided to vote for the incumbent...

Whereas last month, Howard (though sounding less sure about whom he voted for) said is was all about Vietnam:

I did turn 18 that year. Richard Dreyfuss, when we were doing “American Graffiti,” was pumping me to vote for McGovern. But I think I wound up going for Nixon. I thought he could get us out of the Vietnam War quickly. Ha.

That version, told to the New York Times, didn't quite wash, since the Paris Peace Accords were signed around the time the President was sworn in for his second term, which would seem to have been quickly enough for anyone.

In short, this most admirable of movie business figures gives the impression of being able to calibrate his comments about RN to suit the expectations of his audience. Perhaps he too is called to public service.

Too Late For Another Edit, I Guess

"Frost/Nixon" Oscar buzz could turn to raspberries if too many critics say that director Ron Howard was too kind to, um...well, you know. Ty Burr in the Boston Globe:

It's a most sympathetic portrait of a statesman-villain, one that matches the current, post-Bush view of the 37th president as a tragic figure rather than a scoundrel. Once again, the movies have given us not the Nixon that was but the Nixon we need.

Peter Morgan's Not-So-Youthful Perspective

In a "Newsweek" column, "Frost/Nixon" playwright and screenwriter Peter Morgan, who won an Oscar for "The Queen," imagines being at next week's Washington premiere of Ron Howard's movie and being asked by the city's older denizens what business a whippersnapper such as he had writing about Richard Nixon, whose peccadilloes they know far better.

Dramatists love straw characters. Obviously, Washington's media and political elites won't act like that. Would anyone with a brain tell an historian, "You weren't at the Battle of the Wilderness, so keep your opinions to yourself"? They'll probably jostle one another for photos with Morgan and autographs for their "Queen" DVDs.

Morgan uses the device to explain the advantages for the moviegoer of his gift of a more objective, less emotionally involved perspective:

As a European from a different, younger generation, I wasn't really gripped by the trauma that was Nixon's presidency.... The horrors and betrayals that Nixon visited upon his electorate left me comparatively unscathed, though I have clear memories of my late father's anger and sense of disappointment as the Watergate scandal began to unfold. (He died in December 1972, close to two years before Nixon resigned from office.)

Nor did I set out to write "Frost/Nixon" as a metaphor for the failed imperial presidency and abuses of power of George W. Bush...

Not to minimize the traumas, horrors, and betrayals, but Watergate was a political scandal, not the Siege of Leningrad. I still meet people who loved every minute of it, never missing the Senate hearings and even throwing Watergate parties. So it's not as though if Morgan were 20 years older and had actually experienced the Ordeal, it would be completely beyond his considerable powers to imagine a Nixon character who was halfway human.

Though not gripped by trauma, Morgan is obviously gripped by a fashionably left-wing perspective on U.S. and British politics. Nothing wrong with that, but since it's the same perspective most of RN's critics had during Vietnam and Watergate, his youth doesn't seem to add much value, notwithstanding his play's merits. As for an accurate rendition of the era's real trauma, the war President Nixon inherited and ended, that's yet to come.