MEDIA
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
to undermine the Committee's conclusions even before they are reached. Of course it's only fair to repeat that reporters can't help themselves. They're supposed to hover about, cultivate sources,...
...It would have been far more amazing had someone been able to keep him off...
...What we saw on TV that night literally reduced the scale of our feelings...
...I can't think when the tragic dilemma has been more classically stated...
...But by the end Frost looked dazed, like someone about to dribble on himself...
...That he had done nothing wrong, but somehow everything had gone wrong--that he had done nothing wrong, but it had all come out as if he was guilty anyway, so he was sorry...
...In other words, a tragedy...
...Nixon had Frost utterly spellbound...
...It may have given some of us pain, but the method did assume that everyone could be trained to be poised and reasonable...
...Here was the revelation that Nixon was the one person we had always feared he was: himself, the person he had always seemed...
...Both made the distinction between what was fake and what was real meaningless, beside the point...
...How else can we explain what happened on TV May 4, when one of the most odious men of our time turned into a tragic hero fight before our eyes...
...Nixon has always reminded us too much of that other Richard who was "sent into the world misshapen thus," that other crippled body politic, Richard III...
...Why else would he have made them, if not for the hazard, the masochistic joy, of risking their release...
...No further thought required or desired...
...THOMAS POWERS THE LAST SYLLABLE OF RECORDED TIME 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 MEDIA It was a central event of our time, and all the more depressing for being such...
...Anyone who could get to the top, no matter how loathsome he was, had to be more complex than Nixon appeared to be...
...It was as if there were a gap between the two sides of the conversation...
...My frame of mind can not be programmed 100 percent on the game as long as these matters are in question...
...Never before quite so equivalent as Napoleon claimed, politics and tragedy were bridged that night by television...
...We thought this was our cynicism, our way of being in the know, of being wise to what a phony racket politics is...
...J," stress his singularity...
...and let John F. Kennedy rest in peace...
...Frost would ask Nixon to admit criminal guilt, and Nixon would deny that he had used bad judgment...
...What had happened was not that a crime had been committed, but that a man in high office had been laid low...
...The one possibility we couldn't face was that he really felt the meretricious, God-awful emotions he professed...
...Commonweal: 339 Nixon's interview was the most compelling performance in American politics since Jackie Kennedy walked behind the caisson and the caparisoned horse at her husband's funeral...
...ROBEaT L KING teaches English at the College of Our Lady o] the Elms in Chicopee, Massachusetts...
...It was one of those places where art, life and politics met, and brought home to us how diminished our sensibilities have become...
...The two dramas had a lot in common, in fact...
...We were sure there must be something more than that to the man...
...His odiousness is the very thing which qualified him for the role...
...This is why the Frost interview was a great blow to us...
...The be~nner no longer 27 May 1977:340...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...j ulius Erving is the most colorful superstar of basketball, the sport without hats or helmets to obscure a player's face...
...The misnamed debates dramatize how far we have come from the time when schools tried to teach a student how to think on his feet...
...Like "programmed," many of our most popular expressions show that people who proclaim concern for human values actually worship man as machine...
...For whatever the intention of all that trickiness earlier, its effect was that he humiliated himself, and having humiliated himself, he became, like some Fellini hero, pathetic...
...Nor should there be any solace for us in doubting the sincerity of Nixon's final speech to Frost...
...You kept expecting to find in the next shot that his tie was pulled to one side, his collar ripped open and his hair mussed...
...Maybe the tapes were just an elaborate means to blurt out disappointment in public, the way he did after his 1962 defeat in California...
...Anyone who wondered how Frost had induced Nixon to come on TV again was crazy...
...It made us see that our imaginations now live, like some maiden aunt of history, in reduced circumstances...
...Yet, when he explained why he would not report for the start of practice this year, Erving imaged himself impersonally, as a machine: "I have several unresolved business matters of uncompromising proportions to deal with...
...Nixon seemed so absolutely graceless in both the physical and spiritual sense...
...They should illustrate the importance of the age, whatever it may be...
...I said before that one of the most odious men of the age had turned himself into a tragic hero, but the case is really worse than that...
...How could we continue to have fai0t in our own system otherwise...
...Such doubt has always been our mistake where Nixon was concerned...
...Nixon's psychological needs were always greater than his political needs anyway...
...It is only right, perhaps, that Camelot and Watergate should in the end come to the same thing...
...One wants the central events of one's time to be enlarging...
...So there he was on the first of the Frost-Nixon interviews once again telling us more than we wanted to know--dealing with his psychological needs the way he always has, by making Freudian slips, saying "yet" when he meant "again" or, best of all, "forget" when he meant "remember...
...Computer jargon constantly and casually runs through everyday usage...
...Only by dragging himself like a slug through all the lies, perfidy, pos_9 turing, perjury, evasions, self-pity and bad acting of the show's first half could Nixon have arrived at the tragedy of his final speech...
...Frost's interview became a rerun of the "Checkers" speech...
...The trouble with this revelation, as I said at the beginning, is that it makes life seem so small...
...His flashy style and his nickname, "Dr...
...It gave us the terrible feeling that life itself must somewhow be more limited than it once was...
...They're supposed to hover about, cultivate sources, ask questions, and report the answers...
...Earlier there were times when Frost and Nixon didn't even seem to be having the same conversation...
...It seems that the last syllable of recorded time predicted by Macbeth is to be uttered by Nixon...
...Despite all the cover-up and "stonewalling" that surround Watergate, all the efforts n o t to tell, you can't help wondering whether he didn't have a compulsion to end up in a position where he would have to tell after all--where he would have to surrender the tapes...
...We have always conceived of him as some Byzantine personality putting on a show of clumsiness, sincerity and gall...
...Ford's ignorant comment on Eastern Europe was, after all, forcefully delivered...
...That Frost allowed the editing to present him thus on his own program was a clear concession of defeat, as was the program's ending with a slow fade-out from Nixon...
...Maybe he is our Oedipus Rex as well, our true Nixon Agonistes, as Garry Wills saw him, and the only tragic figure we are capable of...
...No one could have imagined then how true that would be--how Nixon would stumble into revealing those tapes whose disclosures would make us cringe at every turn...
...How disappointing...
...Back during Nixon's first administration, I think it was, someone pointed out that he's the kind of guy who always tells you more about himself than you wanted to know...
...In truth, though , it was just our way of preserving a cock-eyed optimism and keeping our own polities, as they say, "viable...
...The New School advertises a course called "The Electric Mind...
...But now it is as if our Richard III has turned out in the last act to be our Hamlet too...
...A college president recently addressed a faculty as guest speaker and said that after a Catholic college formulates a statement of its mission, "one plugs into it...
...Or, program yourself, discharge your data, and be done with it...
...Now, many educators do not ask their students or colleagues for ideas as part of a rational exchange--they want "input...
...Despite his flamboyant play and his unquestioned success as an individual among individuals, Erring has apparently caught the disease of our time mlanguage that reduces the person to a thing...
...Until then, I think I'll go back to the movies, where the image is, physically anyway, larger than life...
...presumably so that he would not have to think...
...In Nixon's hands it really is a medium, an art form mediating between politics and life...
...What was he saying to us in the interview, after all...
...As Nixon talked about how he cried in the Oval Office before resigning, and how he feels he let his friends down, let the American people down, cut-away shots caught Frost hunched forward with his eyes vacant and mouth slack looking completely desolated, completely helpless...
...Both Carter and President Ford, however, were content in their debates to project themselves as robot-like figures more concerned with "image" than substance...
...Only there could he make Watergate into something personal rather than legal...
...At first Frost gave the impression of being a real adversary, a match for Nixon in toughness and insistence...
...THE MACmNING OF AMERICA ROBERT L. KING David BrinHey, without trying to be funny, reported on September 21st that Jimmy Carter returned to Plain.~ "to program himself for the debates...
...That's their job...
...But this made one feel instead the triviality of the age...
...his fans outdo one another with stories of Erring improvising a "move" in mid-air as he confounds the mere mortals he plays against...
...Would anyone say of Lincoln that he prepared himself for Douglas by stuffing himself with information (or is it "data...
...Here for certain was more than we wanted to know...
...By the end, however, Nixon had bridged all gaps, even the one which has always lingered in Napoleon's formulation that politics is what modem man has instead of tragedy...
...But it would be nice if everyone could simply step back even at this late date and say look, this isn't leading anywhere, there's no point to it, the hell with it...
Vol. 104 • May 1977 • No. 11
