Adapted from a piece that originally ran in December 2011.

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When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal. -Richard Nixon to David Frost

British television journalist David Frost is dead at 74. While it isn’t necessarily clear that a man who spent time as a comedian and game show host ought to have his visage chiseled into Journalism Rushmore, there is simply no way to ignore his substantive moments, which are headlined by his famous interview series with disgraced former president Richard Nixon.

This is more about Nixon, perhaps, but as we reflect upon Frost’s career and the public reception of the play and film about their encounter, it has become nearly impossible to think of him in any other context, at least on this side of the Atlantic. And if a media personality is to be judged on one moment, what better one than the events commencing on March 23, 1977?

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After a community theatre performance in late 2011 of Frost/Nixon, my companions and I found ourselves discussing a topic that has come to intrigue me a great deal: the curious rehabilitation of Richard Nixon. It’s probably safe to say that Tricky Dick was one of the most reviled figures in American political history and on August 9, 1974 he became the only president in the nation’s history to resign the office.

There was much about Nixon to hate.

• The unforgivable  “Southern Strategy” established the overtly racist blueprint for every major Republican electoral success of the past 40 years.
• His prosecution of the Vietnam War (and its incursions into Laos and Cambodia) sacrificed thousands of lives for military and political goals that were questionable, at best.
• Then of course, there was that whole Watergate thing.

Hunter Thompson, perhaps the most reliable voice of the American conscience during Nixon’s heyday, painted the man as an epically corrupt political fixer, famously writing that:

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

I can’t help wondering what Hunter, who died in 2005, would make of the increasingly flattering light bathing Nixon’s memory in the last few years. Frost/Nixon, the dramatization of the famed interview series that David Frost conducted with Nixon in 1977, which debuted on the London stage in 2006 (with a successful film version following in 2008), didn’t let the disgraced former president off the hook by any means, but its portrayal humanized the beast by looking deeply into the tribulations that shaped his soul. As he squared off with out-of-favor talk-show host Frost, a man also waging a battle for his professional life and legacy, Nixon almost seemed to be inviting the dagger that would end his suffering. He wanted, he needed, Frost to be a worthy adversary and he promised to be relentless in return. Only one of them could survive, he explained in a booze-addled late-night call to Frost on the eve of the final showdown, and if he was consciously fantasizing about a return to the bright lights of Washington, DC, he seemed subconsciously desperate for the absolution that attended final defeat.

The Frost team finally uncovered the discrepancy in the official record that broke Nixon, forcing an admission of guilt and setting the stage for the apology that ultimately was as important to him as it was to the nation he betrayed. The portrayal by Frank Langella (who starred as Nixon in both the original stage production and the film adaptation) doesn’t argue for vindication, but does insist on a measure of forgiveness.

The question, then, becomes why? Why the play? Why the movie adaptation? After all, playwright Peter Morgan could have written about anything. Once he did write the play, audiences could have rejected it. Other troupes could have opted to mount a different show instead, something with more perceived social salience or more box office promise.

I’m a culturalist, and as a result I pay attention to the artifacts of the popular culture. If vampires are in vogue all of a sudden, then it’s probably meaningful. The broad social response to a theme, a trope, a meme suggests something about the collective psyche, and if you’re interested in understanding the society in question it’s a good idea to pay attention to its books, its plays, its music, its games and television and movies.

The answer, then, to why Nixon, why now, seems fairly obvious: His presidency, as twisted and corrupt and doomed as it was politically, was actually the last time we had a White House acting more or less in the best interests of the citizens of the United States. And we miss it. We know that power politics has always responded to wealth, but we long for the days when the sell-out wasn’t so comprehensive, so shameless, so arrogant and sneering. We wish those who control the political and economic direction of the nation would drop a crumb or two every now and then. We hate that corporations are citizens and that money is speech.

Four years ago, during the run-up to the 2008 election, I wrote an article recalling some of the high spots in the actual Nixon record and inviting readers to compare what they saw with the records and platforms of the candidates vying for the White House. The conclusion was unmistakeable, and for many perhaps a bit shocking: “If he were a candidate in the 2008 presidential election, Richard M. Nixon would be more progressive than either the Republican or Democratic nominees.” In truth, he’d have been more progressive than any of the even remotely viable Dems we’d heard from that year, with the possible exception of John Edwards (and the question there, of course, was how much of what he said you could actually set stock by).

I revisited the topic in 2011 because all of a sudden I seemed to have company. From the wide right we had Bruce Bartlett, who used to work for Ron Paul, Jack Kemp and Bush the Elder, articulating Nixon’s liberalism and arguing that he was to the GOP what Obama is to the Democrats. From the other end of the spectrum we had Noam Chomsky, one of the most outspoken, unapologetically liberal voices in the country, telling a packed house at the University of Colorado that “Richard Nixon was America’s last liberal president.” I pointed to Nixon’s record in both of those posts, and it’s worth repeating the finer points here:

• He got us out of Vietnam.
• He was a keen foreign policy type whose diplomatic efforts strengthened our relationships with both established and emerging world powers.
• He implemented the first significant federal affirmative action program.
• He dramatically increased spending on federal employee salaries.
• He oversaw the first large-scale integration of public schools in the South (something the crackers where I grew up were none too happy about).
• He proposed a guaranteed annual wage (aka a “negative income tax”).
• He advocated comprehensive national health insurance (single payer) for all Americans.
• He imposed wage and price controls in times of economic crisis. This wasn’t a terribly good idea, but it was the furthest thing from a conservative idea. Truth is, it was positively socialist.
• Both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities thrived under his administration in ways they have not since.
• He indexed Social Security for inflation and created Supplemental Security Income.
• He created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Office of Minority Business Enterprise.
• He promoted the Legacy of Parks program.
• Title IX became law on his watch.
• Social spending eclipsed defense spending for the first time in U.S. history.
• He appointed four Supreme Court Justices. Three of them voted with the majority in Roe v. Wade.

If you put Bartlett and Chomsky in a room, this might be the only subject in the world they’d find any degree of agreement on. That someone as intellectually contrary as I can be agrees with both of them, well, that may be the 7th Sign.

So who was right? Hunter Thompson or Noam Chomsky? The answer, of course, is both. In a sane, coherent political climate characterized by service to the well-being of its citizens a crook like Nixon could not be tolerated. We might view the above bulleted list as a minimal set of requirements for the office. There would be nothing special about them and we’d therefore be free to swing away at the character deficiencies of a pol as tricky as Dick. Thompson had a burr under his saddle where Nixon was concerned, no doubt, but his every rant was grounded in truth and his verdict on the amorality of Richard Milhous Nixon was more than justified.

We don’t live in a sane, coherent political climate, though, and from the perspective of the sociopathocracy of our day even a man as vile as Nixon begins to look pretty good. All you really need to consider is that “relativity” thing: we have, in the 37 years since he was chased from Washington with torches and pitchforks, slid so far to the right that the architect of the Southern Strategy, the man who expanded an already-unjust war across a couple more borders, the mastermind behind the highest felony in US political history and the reason why we attach “-gate” to everything that’s even remotely scandalous looks good by comparison. Chomsky certainly couldn’t have felt good about what he told that audience in Boulder, but only a fool walked away thinking the comment was about Nixon.

The odd case of Richard M. Nixon teaches us a valuable lesson about history. As Churchill once observed, history is written by the victors – and those who defeated Nixon wrote a good bit of history. But history books also get revised, don’t they? Unfortunately, we now know, with a vengeful certainty, that a couple generations of contemptible successors can transform a malevolent tyrant into a good and faithful custodian of the common weal.

We all owe a debt to David Frost for his critical role in helping us understand the story, even if it’s a lesson we’d be better off without.