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A sorry, sorry tale

Thursday, June 14, 2007

That fine actor Frank Langella (pictured left) showed tremendous, quiet graciousness in his Tony acceptance speech this week, certainly if compared with the disgraced US President whose character he played so commandingly in FROST/NIXON to win the Best Actor award.

But the American Theatre Wing gracelessly, or maybe just obliviously, insisted on perpetuating the claim by FROST/NIXON’s producers that their play shows Richard Nixon being forced - in a history-making moment on television in 1977 - to apologize to the nation for his crimes. As I’ve pointed out before in THE MEDIA BEAT, this is at the least an exaggerated claim. And its repetition, rolling down the Tony presenters’ teleprompter, made me reflect more fully on the various attempts on record to get Nixon to make such an apology – all pretty much as ineffectual as, in actual reality, David Frost’s was.

Long forgotten now – and not much regarded at the time, frankly – is a lengthy set of recordings made seven years after the Frost tapings, by Nixon’s former Special Assistant in the White House, Frank Gannon – who (I must believe alone out of Nixon’s huddle of aides) held a PhD in English history from Oxford, but who also more typically had previously worked for the J Walter Thompson advertising agency.

His 38 hours of interview with "the Man" (about nine more than Frost’s) were intended to be the first-strike in a broad and audacious Nixonian stratagem - or a pathetic one, depending on your viewpoint - for rehabilitation via the world’s airwaves. It was to be a multi-part television series devoted to global affairs and world leaders, with the notorious “un-indicted co-conspirator” as anchor.

Gannon said at the time that “we'll range wider” to include footage of Nixon with overseas Prime Ministers and Presidents, but a basic “building block” would be Gannon’s own one-on-one with the ex-President “to get his own story down, his own life down”, and so create “a separate program in itself, a filmed life using an interview format”.

Money for the enterprise, for which Nixon would be paid “a contribution toward his expenses” was to come from some British financiers led by then-Member of Parliament, Jonathan Aitken, a Conservative ex-journalist noted for his business links with members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family.

 

Aitken later rose to Cabinet level in Prime Minister John Major's increasingly sleazy administration, but also sank to prison level - jailed for perjury in a case where he lied to cover up receiving improper financial favors from the Saudis. (These included paying his hefty bill for him after a stay at the Ritz Hotel in Paris - which he falsely claimed had been paid by his wife. The Guardian newspaper obtained a copy of the bill, to prove Aitken's lying.)

Since jail Aitken has devoted himself to Christian prison ministry and has even taken a prayer meeting in the current President, George W Bush’s White House, along with his friend and mentor Charles Colson, another convict-turned-convert, this time from among - tellingly enough - Nixon’s lawbreaking Watergate gang.

GANNON HAD FIRST MADE HIS CONNECTION WITH AITKEN back in 1974. Together with his then-girlfriend Diane Sawyer - yes, that Diane Sawyer, who at 24 had moved on from being a Kentucky TV "weathergirl" and was now an administrator in Nixon spokesman Ron Ziegler’s office (Sawyer, Ziegler at his desk, and Gannon are pictured together, above) - Gannon was staying downstairs in the basement apartment of Washington society figure Kay Halle’s house. Aitken, visiting from England, was briefly a Halle houseguest, and the two White House staffers invited him in to a ringside seat in the West Wing during the impeachment crisis.

Aitken was able to ingratiate himself with the Nixon team enough to find himself writing, 20 years later, a very friendly book called simply Nixon: A Life and published by the right-wing propaganda house Regnery, of “Swift-Boating” infamy. Rare among Nixon biographers, Aitken was able to win his subject’s agreement to entertain questions, albeit only written ones. (And no question regarding a public apology, unsurprisingly.)

Possibly even greater Nixon admirers than Aitken, both Gannon and Sawyer took their loyalty as far as decamping with the First Resignee into Californian exile, and both helped him write his memoirs there. Allen Weinstein, now head of the US National Archives, was once simply a lone historian with a book to write, and he traveled to San Clemente in 1975 anxious to gain access to the ex-President for research into his crusade, when freshman Congressman Nixon in the 1950s, to have Alger Hiss condemned for Soviet spying. Weinstein spent what he calls “a nice evening chatting about their boss” with Gannon and Sawyer in the breeze-block quarters they occupied as personal staff on the Casa Pacifica estate. He gained from them some insights into the life of “the loneliest man in America” - but no interview.

GANNON’S OWN EXTENDED INTERVIEW EVENTUALLY EMERGED, and it was distinguished - if that’s the word - by “a congenial spirit”, according to communications professor Fred Guida of Quinnipiac University who recently appraised all the tapes for archiving purposes. (They are now lodged at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA.) In April 1984 a portion of them was sold for half a million dollars to CBS NEWS's 60 Minutes show – and somewhat defensively presented by Executive Producer Don Hewitt as not exactly probing journalism, but more like “a personal memoir on TV”. Gannon’s own description of his role in the questioning was: "I'm a loyalist, but not a blind one”.

Blind or seeing, he certainly didn’t push very hard on that vexed “apology to the nation” matter. Never disposed to ask any substantive follow-ups, Gannon let this pretty well-honed evasion from Nixon go unchallenged:

Needless to say, the CBS airing marked the limit of the San Clemente partnership's broadcasting prospects, and there was never any filming with the great and powerful of the world.

DIANE SAWYER MANAGED OVER THE YEARS to establish more distance from her old boss than Gannon, and a reputation for greater objectivity - but she didn’t get that far on the apology issue, either.

Or did she? In the days when she worked for CBS, before she flew to her present ABC NEWS perch, she once did press Nixon on his resignation and “the thing you're most sorry about”. His answer was most eloquent in its lack of eloquence – its near speechlessness, in fact.

I quote verbatim:

“Well, the. . . the. . . well. . . well, the. . . if. . . if. . . well, it. . . I th- . . . I've - I've covered it already.”

Now if only Frank Langella had been called upon to re-enact those exact words … we might have been left with a much clearer idea of what Nixon really felt he owed the nation.