MysteriousFaith

Frost-Nixon on Broadway

Peter Morgan, who wrote the 2006 movie The Queen, recently debuted a new play on Broadway, now open through August 19th called Frost-Nixon. The play follows a post-Watergate Richard Nixon, a role utterly consumed by Frank Langella, in an attempt to vindicate himself during a four-part series of television interviews with British interview personality David Frost, played with equal deftness by Michael Sheen.

Both Frost and Nixon came into these interviews with a desperate need to be legitimized, to be relevant, and to be understood. Nixon wanted to justify his presidency – the country’s ongoing involvement in Vietnam, the expanded bombing campaign of Cambodia, the abuses of power illustrated best through the Watergate break-in – without admitting the slightest of errors. It would be safe to assume that Nixon felt no TV personality would be his intellectual equal, and that consequently somehow he could vicariously engage the American people once again through a cultural accoutrement like Frost, safe in the belief that Frost would not be able to penetrate his deft political maneuvers. Whether Nixon underestimated Frost or if perhaps Nixon’s hubris led him to underestimate Frost’s ability to tear down Nixon’s well-crafted defenses, is a question Morgan leaves the audience to ponder.

Frost had his own needs at work as he pursued the interview; to many, his career had become a farce. Having flown to close to the flame of fame, his career as a serious journalist was deemed by many to be over. One too many interviews with his generation’s version of Britney Spears had denuded the Frost brand of its previous value. Slightly before the Nixon interview, Frost’s career took a nosedive when he lost his role as host of a noxious Australian television series which had him interviewing the country’s rising personalities. Obtaining the first post-Watergate interview with Nixon would provide Frost with the legitimization he craved.

Through most of the first three interviews, Nixon masterfully bends Frost to his will, dancing away from the questions he does not wish to answer by consuming the allotted time with loquacious answers unhinged from any sense of time or proportionality. But on the evening before the final interview, Morgan takes us to an apocryphal phone exchange between the two. The poetic license taken by Morgan in no way goes outside what we know of Nixon’s habits – the fondness for drink, prescription drugs and loose lipped late night phone calls – each is necessary for Morgan to show Nixon’s propensity for self-immolation.

No tragedy based on Nixon’s story could avoid showing us this odd part of Nixon’s insecurity, a need to rescue defeat when victory seemed imminent. It should come as no surprise from a President who chose to cover up petty burglary after winning as one of the most popular President’s in the 50 years before. Yet this is precisely what Nixon manages to do: after deftly weaving away from Frost’s attempt to illuminate the errors of his presidency, Nixon is countered by a determined Frost who has realized that his financial, personal and professional future hangs on breaking Nixon in front of a television audience. And in a rare moment of bluster, pushed into a corner by Frost’s aggressiveness, Nixon admits his wrongdoing, his errors, and his broken trust with the American people.

Nixon’s brittle nature ultimately cracked at the hands of Frost’s gentile antagonism, his final break the product of a life of struggling to be something he thought he could be, someone he thought would allow him to be happy with himself. Morgan’s Nixon is true to what we know of Nixon’s penchant to see himself as the ultimate underdog, the constantly under-appreciated and always maligned leader who would never suckle at the teat of power, even when his every move led him to precisely the pinnacle of power and cultural ubiquity he so desired. In this, as in the whole tenor of the play, Morgan has a light touch, able to illustrate Nixon’s deep flaws without the preachy tendencies of many Nixon biographies.

What makes this play powerful now is not just that it is another opportunity to reflect on the deeply damaged man who became President Richard Nixon, but how the situation parallels our current national situation. The connections here are not obvious, and may even not be intentional on Morgan’s part. Consequently, the play becomes a Rorschach ink blot test for those who attend.

For me, in the moment we see Nixon crack I asked myself whether we will ever see a moment of similar reflection from George Bush? Will he ever know the ignominy that surrounded Nixon? Will Bush be able to re-engineer his public image in the same way Nixon did? What would it take to get him to acknowledge how profoundly mismanaged his War on Terror has been? Like Nixon, Bush’s failures are going to have to be acknowledged by himself if history is to see him as anything other than shrill, poor in thought and deed, and a President who mistook stubbornness for leadership.

The final scene of the play is the large multiple television screen above the stage freezing on Nixon’s face as he admits his mistakes, his lip quivering, his eyes rimmed with tears. We see a man broken, realizing in one moment that Frost bested him and that he, Nixon, was actually wrong. It will be a moment of national closure if anything like this ever happens for Bush, and the fact that it may never occur only reinforces what we know of this President, a man who believes admitting an error is the beginning of the end. Perhaps this is because for him, as for Nixon, it would be precisely just that.

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• July 23, 2007

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