While in the city last week, I went to see Frost/Nixon, a Broadway play about the 1977 interviews done by David Frost with Richard Nixon.  It was a great show.  Frank Langella, who played Nixon, was masterful, as was Micheal Sheen, the British actor who portrayed David Frost.  It closed on Sunday, sadly; but is supposedly being made into a movie.

    The main theme was selfish uses of power and fame.  This was the core of Nixon, after all.  His Watergate fall was all about his inability to accept mistakes and take responsibility.  He obsessed over his historical legacy, yearning, after his disgrace, to be "rehabilitated"  (sounds like something out of Chinese politics).  And his obsession is what ultimately kept him from achieving that goal.    As a character in the play reminds us, we still reserve the suffix "-gate" to define significant instances of political corruption.

     But Frost was also swept up in his own selfish pursuits.  He was using Nixon to advance his own career, just as Nixon was using Frost as a vehicle for his desired media make-over.  Although Frost "wins," insofar as Nixon came off looking bad and the interviews did not advance his political agenda, his victory signaled the transition to the age of hyper-mediated manipulation of political discourse.   It was all about the performance, the image, the sound bites.  Substance, analysis, deliberation – these take too much time and do not transmit well in the mesmerizing visuals of television.   In a way, Frost was the precursor of Michael Deaver, the man who crafted Ronald Reagan’s image.   And, in that way, Frost’s "victory" over Nixon set the stage for Reagan’s win over Carter in 1980.

      But Nixon was the center of the play, particularly in one scene that Langella carried with extraordinary power:

…This makes him [Frost] the ideal listener in the show’s high point, a
late-night phone call Frost receives from a drunken Nixon, on the eve
of the last of their series of interviews. 

The moment is one of the few in the play that is pure fabrication. Yet it rings ineffably true. It makes us feel, rather than only register intellectually, the extent to which these two mismatched men are emotional mirrors.

Throughout the production Mr. Langella’s Nixon has come across as a man
of quick intellect, maudlin sentimentality, vulgar wit and studied
social reflexes that have never acquired the semblance of natural
grace. You are always aware of someone who struggles to conceal not
only a defensive self-consciousness but also a cancerous anger and fear.

That’s what comes to the surface, like black bilious lava, in the
phone-call scene. And it’s one of those great moments, which only
theater affords, when acting takes on the tidal force of an operatic
aria.

    "Cancerous anger and fear" – that captures the Nixon I remember.  And it also reminds me of Nixon’s inability to grasp the Taoist point, expressed in passage 24 (with similar sentiments in passage 22, not quoted here):

Keep up self-reflection
and you’ll never be enlightened.
Keep up self-definition
and you’ll never be apparent.
Keep up self-promotion
and you’ll never be proverbial.
Keep up self-esteem
and you’ll never be perennial.

 Nixon could never let go, and he died without the fulfillment he desired.