Introduction
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Introduction He would have made a fantastic tragic figure in a Bergman film, if only he were a better actor. liv ullmann, after sitting near richard nixon at a state dinner In 1956, when [Tricia Nixon] was ten years old, she was taking piano lessons and I was trying not too successfully to convince her how important it was to practice. She finally turned to me and said, “Daddy, you should have practiced more when you were a little boy. If you had, you might have become famous and gone to Hollywood and they would have buried you in a special place.” richard nixon, In the Arena In a century of celebrity, it was inevitable that the most powerful man in the world and the most alluring medium of mass commu- nication should find themselves frequently intertwined. William McKinley was the first president to be filmed. Woodrow Wilson gave The Birth of a Nation (1915) what remains the most memorable blurb any motion picture has ever received—“It is like writing history with Lightning,” he allegedly said—an endorsement D. W. Griffith him- self couldn’t have bettered. In 1928 the nation’s First Family, the Coolidges, had the nation’s First Couple, Mary Pickford and Doug- las Fairbanks, to lunch at the White House. Louis B. Mayer, the sec- ond “M” in MGM, cherished a friendship with Herbert Hoover. They “are practically sleeping in the same bed,” Marie Dressler, one of Mayer’s most popular stars, complained when he forbade any- one on the studio’s payroll from attending a rally for Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1932. Mayer may have loved Hoover, but it was Roosevelt the rest of Hollywood loved. FDR loved Hollywood right back, and they were IX a perfect match. As he once told Orson Welles, “You and I are the two best actors in America.” Harry Truman didn’t much like movies—though he was such a big fan of Frank Capra’s State of the Union (1948) that a Hol- lywood trade paper called him “a one-man sales-staff” for the political comedy—and Dwight Eisenhower cared only for Westerns. John F. Kennedy changed the equation even more than FDR had. He was the biggest star in America. The son of a man who bankrolled studios and slept with movie stars, he was the first candidate to explicitly utilize star power, both his own and that of such friends as Frank Sinatra. Other pres- idents have had their movie connections. Two decades after posing for a Hollywood studio portraitist, Lyndon Johnson saw his trusted aide Jack Valenti become president of the Motion Picture Association of America. Gerald Ford included among his Palm Springs golf partners Capra and Bob Hope. Bill Clinton was so starstruck he sat through Air Force One (1997) twice. Looking in the mirror the morning after, did he see Harri- son Ford? As for George W. Bush, he did his best Tom Cruise imitation landing in that navy carrier jet on the USS Abraham Lincoln. Kennedy’s special genius, though, was to have the movies associate with him. Only Ronald Reagan, of course, has surpassed him in this regard—Reagan ac- tually was a movie star and owed his political career to his association with Hollywood. When Jack Warner heard that his former contract player was going to run against Pat Brown, the mogul is said to have reacted with consterna- tion. “No, no: Jimmy Stewart for governor—Ronnie Reagan for best friend!” So, too, with the title of this book: Nixon at the movies rather than Reagan or any of the rest? The casting seems all wrong. Nixon’s is far from the first name that comes to mind for the protagonist of a book that refracts themes and incidents in a president’s life through various films and film genres (and vice versa). Yet that it should be Nixon at the movies rather than Reagan or any of the rest let there be no doubt. It is the fundamental premise of this book that no other political figure so well typifies what Stanley Cavell has referred to as “America’s special involvement in film, from the talent drawn to Hollywood in mak- ing them to the participation of society as a whole in viewing them.”1 The phrase “at the movies” pertains, after all, to those watching the screen rather than those appearing on it. The moviegoer’s fundamental yearn- ing and loneliness—why else sit for two hours in the dark if not in pursuit of yearning’s fulfillment and loneliness’ abolition?—find an unmistak- able embodiment in Nixon. Growing up hard by Hollywood as Holly- wood itself grew up, he added a particularly vivid strand to the pattern of X :: Introduction outsiderdom that would define him all his life: indeed, it was a pattern that helped elevate him to the White House and then remove him from it. The standard road to political success is to ape the lineaments of star- dom: glamour, grace, assurance. However unwittingly, Nixon followed another route: representing the rest of us—drab, clumsy, anxious—the great silent majority of moviegoers who don’t decorate the screen but stare at it. “Nixon must always be thinking about who he is,” Kennedy remarked once to John Kenneth Galbraith. “That is a strain. I can be myself.”2 True enough: there were all those “new Nixons” so painfully emerging from a man who had to keep reinventing himself. Yet fatiguing though such an internal process must be, its searchful unease and attraction to novelty more nearly approximate the condition of the moviegoer, the eager fan- tasist for whom such questions as Who am I? Whom can I identify with? What lives might I lead? can be answered (for a couple of hours, anyway) by nothing more demanding than the purchase of a ticket. Jack Kennedy was no stranger to such internal urges as he read John Buchan and Ian Fleming novels or David Cecil biographies, casting himself in his mind’s eye as Richard Hannay or James Bond or Lord Melbourne. No, JFK didn’t need movie fantasies (he’d had movie realities: sleeping with Gene Tierney, with Marilyn Monroe). He could afford the more rarefied pro- jections of the page. Little wonder that, as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. re- ports, he “was not a great movie fan and tended, unless the film was un- usually gripping, to walk out after the first twenty or thirty minutes.”3 Such an act, as we shall see, was unthinkable for Richard Nixon. In May 1967, on a fact-finding trip to Latin America, Nixon visited Rio de Janeiro. He had long ago learned the value of spontaneous encoun- ters with average citizens during foreign visits. Such meetings were often informative and always well publicized. Walking through the Rio slums, he came upon a pregnant woman with three children in tow. Nixon’s at- tempt to strike up a conversation proved awkward, at best. (When he in- quired, “What do you most need to improve your life?” the woman an- swered, “Money.”) After Nixon had moved on in search of someone more promising, reporters asked the woman if she had recognized the world- famous figure to whom she’d been speaking. “I think he’s connected with the movies,” she replied.4 That woman spoke with more wisdom than she ever could have imag- ined. No president has had a more charged relationship with the media than Nixon—and none has had a more peculiar relationship with the most glamorous medium, motion pictures. He married a woman who Introduction :: XI once worked as a Hollywood extra—and he enjoyed one of his greatest political triumphs matched against a woman who once worked as a Hol- lywood actress. He drew upon entertainment executives for major finan- cial backing and served on the House Committee on Un-American Ac- tivities at the time of the Hollywood Ten hearings. He demonstrated with the Hollywood-friendly provisions of the Revenue Act of 1971 that, as the MCA/Universal executive Taft Schreiber wrote him at the time, “No Pres- ident before you has shown such concern for this industry.”5 A dedicated filmgoer, he had well over five hundred motion pictures screened at the White House, Camp David, and his various vacation homes during his presidency—the most notorious instance being Patton (1970), which he saw three times before and during the invasion of Cambodia. Nixon’s fascination with motion pictures has long been reciprocated. Well before Oliver Stone and Anthony Hopkins assayed him, Nixon (or Nixon-like characters) had been portrayed onscreen by Cliff Robertson, Rip Torn, Jason Robards, Peter Riegert, and even Glenda Jackson. He has fascinated filmmakers as diverse as Robert Altman, whose Secret Honor (1984) brought to the screen a one-man play about Nixon; and Jean-Luc Godard, who gives a killer the name “Richard Nixon” in his existentialist noir Made in U.S.A. (1966) and who later requested an interview with Nixon so that he and Norman Mailer might discuss the subject of power with him for a segment in the filmmaker’s King Lear (1987). In what was surely art’s loss, and just as surely Nixon’s gain, the former president found that the demands of his schedule precluded such a meeting.6 Nixon has figured in various ways in a surprising range of films: from Shampoo (1975), which takes place on Election Day 1968; to The Ice Storm (1997), set in that autumn of the president, the fall of 1973; to the orig- inal Star Wars trilogy (1977–83), whose evil emperor George Lucas has said he based on Nixon.