Give Them a Sword

...But as Frost remained aggressive, Nixon once more became nit-picky and uncooperative...

...Haldeman, in which he seeks to have the CIA block the FBI probe...

...His tortured mien—captured on a wall of TV screens—is a study in humiliation...

...Further adding to the confusion, in Morgan's fictionalized version of events, the playwright has Reston discovering the new transcripts over Easter, just days before the "last" session on Watergate is scheduled to tape...

...Morgan not only ignores this community of interest between the two camps but also distorts Jack Brennan's role at a critical moment of the proceedings...

...But in Peter Morgan's re-creation of the confrontation, Nixon offers an additional argument...

...Morgan apparently concluded that, transferring Nixon's claim from an area where there was some historical precedent to an area where there was none, would better establish the character of the man he was describing and the underlying political issues as well...

...This tape clearly shows that to be a falsehood...

...Nixon, according to the narrator, was already like the bull who had "lost the fight, and by implication, the will to live...

...Langella does not mimic this Nixon...

...Hovering on the brink of failure, with no relief in sight, Frost is saved by the material, and at the end of the show seems less like a man who rose to meet a challenge than a guy who caught a lucky break...

...Now Morgan has Brennan burst onto the interview set, forcing the startled Frost to take an unscheduled break to "change tape" and allowing Nixon time to confer with Brennan and other aides...

...The event was stamped on Nixon's face, "swollen and ravaged by loneliness, self-loathing, and defeat—filling every television screen in the country...

...Yes, said Nixon, "I let the American people down...

...The delay, occasioned by Brennan's effort to get Frost to back off, allowing Nixon time to complete his apologia, wound up working because it gave the Nixon staff time to implore Nixon to go further than he had and for Bren-nan to urge Frost to be empathetic...

...It also gave Americans the opportunity to see him pained, contrite, and unthreatening...

...Morgan uses Frost researcher James Res-ton (Stephen Kunken) and Brennan (Corey Johnson) as narrators, setting the scenes and underlining with commentary the points he wishes to make...

...The play, which opened on Broadway late last month, is a compelling bit of theater...

...The writer behind such award-season heavyweights as The Queen and The Last King of Scotland—both of which garnered dual Oscar and Golden Globe wins for their respective leading actors—Morgan now tries his hand at a piece of Americana: the Richard Nixon-David Frost interviews of 1977...

...But to Morgan's Nixon, one's past has already determined one's future, and there is nothing left but hatred, bitterness, hopelessness, self-loathing, rage, and despair, a corruption of the soul so deep as to be beyond redemption...

...His political advice was publicly sought by the likes of Ronald Reagan, Ross Perot, and Bob Dole...

...In reality, three additional sessions followed the Watergate sessions...

...Morgan's Frost is a cheeky playboy, all style and no substance, whose interest in the interviews stems more from ego than intellect...

...Morgan tampers with dates and facts for what appear to be marginal returns...

...Nixon's striking return to public grace eventually encouraged political analysts and scholars to take a fresh look at his presidency—in particular, his moderation on race, his effort to achieve "peace with honor" in Vietnam, the opening to China, and his vital role in converting the South into secure Republican terrain while putting into play white Northern ethnic voters, long a bastion of Democratic strength...

...For the Frost presented by Morgan, the solution to all the world's problems is to have a good day at the office...

...But in fact, Nixon's assertion of inherent presidential power came not in response to questions about Watergate but three sessions later, when the two were discussing the so-called "second story jobs" briefly authorized by Nixon as part of the Houston Plan to combat attacks on police, banks, campus ROTC facilities, and other targets by groups embracing political violence...

...One particularly ingenious creation is a scene where a mildly intoxicated Nixon telephones Frost on the night before their fateful Watergate encounter to lament the inability of either man, despite lives of accomplishment, to win the respect of "them...

...Invitations to his dinner parties were cherished...

...He spoke to appreciative audiences...

...Still, Morgan puts the two characters on stunning display, and at times his inventions do elevate not only the drama, but also our understanding of both men...

...His shoulders sink toward the stage, his "victory" wave is stiff and exaggerated...

...The pain was stamped on Nixon's face, as Morgan's narrator describes...

...the physical resemblance between the two is not striking...

...The Nixon staff—Ken Khachigian, Frank Gannon, and Diane Sawyer (yes, that Diane Sawyer)—is mentioned by name but never shown...

...That is unfortunate because they, along with speechwriter Ray Price, played a critical role in persuading Nixon that, in order to begin the long climb toward his coveted elder statesman status, he would have to acknowledge his role in the Watergate coverup and apologize to the American people...

...A highly regarded national security think tank in Washington bears his name...

...Jack Brennan and his agent "Swifty" Lazar...

...But it most emphatically does not do what Morgan has Frost claim in the fictional play: "You have always maintained that you first learned of the break-in on June the 23rd...

...And though charm may have been his weapon of choice in 1977, he was already a skilled interviewer who understood the give-and-take of probing dialogue...

...To write Frost out of it is to rewrite history...

...But you do them because they're in the greater interests of the nation...

...Early in our research, some eight months prior to the interviews, my colleague Jim Reston discovered three previously secret tape transcripts, including a June 20, 1972 meeting between Nixon and his White House political aide, Charles Colson, in which the president describes Howard Hunt and his Cuban Watergate colleagues as "pretty hard-line guys" and says the plan should be "to leave this where it is, with the Cubans"—adding, "At times, I just stonewall it...

...No, says Nixon, misstating the law—not if his motive was to keep other embarrassing activities from coming to light...

...The truth is that Brennan never burst onto the set to stop the interrogation...

...Here the collaboration has Frost anguishing over his cancelled American and Australian weekly gigs, and the resulting snub by Sardi's—long a hangout of Broadway celebrities—depriving him of his favorite table...

...But I have also found him to be well-informed, a voracious reader, a fine writer and editor with a bear-trap memory of past events and conversations...

...Nixon: When you're in office, you have to do a lot of things that are not, in the strictest sense of the law, legal...

...A reasonable interpretation of the tape is that it shows Nixon bestowing his blessing on the coverup three days prior to the "smoking gun" conversation with H.R...

...True enough, Nixon never again held public office—hardly a novelty in a nonparliamentary system...

...In the other corner, British talk-show host David Frost, depicted here as something of a dandy, and his team of researchers...

...Obstruction of justice and abuse of power still mar the Nixon name and record...

...In fact, Nixon always acknowledged learning of the break-in within hours of its June 17 occurrence while returning with Haldeman from a visit to Key Bis-cayne...

...Even with the final curtain barely down, I had some trouble distinguishing which of my most memorable images of Nixon were those from our sessions 30 years ago versus the creature created by Langella...

...He traveled to more than 30 foreign countries...

...Instead, Langella finds the essence of the Nixon character and pours it into a physical form which one accepts as Richard Nixon...

...The smartasses at college...

...Over the years he would report first-hand on mass murder in Bangladesh, starvation in Africa, and the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East...

...The confession from Nixon—this moment of truth amidst so much subterfuge—was hard fought and hard won...

...His appearances on the prestige network interview programs became routine...

...The well-born," says Nixon...

...Nixon: I'm saying that when the president does it, that means it's not illegal...

...In the 1977 interviews, Frost pounded this theme for a few minutes and then moved on to other areas of presidential culpability, including the payment of money designed to buy the silence of the Watergate defendants...

...disgraced though heavily favored former president, buttressed by his chief of staff Col...

...The result was one of the most gripping moments in the history of television news, as Nixon finally conceded that he had participated in the coverup and had offered statements from the White House that were, at times, not true...

...Instead, he began waving an improvised little placard in Frost's line of vision reading LET HIM TALK...

...And who are "they...

...That response draws a sharp, prolonged laugh from audiences at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on West 45th Street...

...So thoroughly does Langella capture the internal life of Richard Nixon that I found myself recalling one point in the original interviews when a damning series of Frost citations of White House transcripts made Nixon's eyelids flutter like the wings of a moth shot through with electric current...

...It came as Frost had taken a defensive, nit-picking Nixon and, with skillful questioning, brought him close to accepting responsibility for the Watergate disaster: "I gave them a sword," Nixon acknowledged, "and they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish, and if I had been in their position I'd have done the same thing...

...And I'll have to carry that burden the rest of my life...

...Mistaking the words as LET US TALK Frost called a short halt to the proceedings...

...But when it came time for Watergate, the underdog came out swinging, piling up points against a Richard Nixon who became more combative and less credible with each blow struck...

...But he soon returned from his place of exile in San Clemente and took up residence in the politically brisk environment of New York...

...Today his name continues to be synonymous with corruption and disgrace, and his most lasting legacy is that any political wrongdoing is immediately given the suffix 'gate.'" Few political observers in this country would think that assessment tells anywhere near the whole story...

...Yes, the term "-gate" is affixed to many a Washington scandal, but often with the help of the Nixonites themselves, a not-entirely-convincing way of treating all executive branch misconduct as no worse than Watergate...

...and yes, I was disappointed when, after his long-running Sunday morning interview program was dropped by the BBC, he jumped lovingly into the waiting arms of Al Jazeera...

...The high-ups...

...In both the real-life interviews and on stage, Frost struggled in his early bouts with Nixon, losing points to long-winded answers and maudlin recollections...

...In one corner, the Robert Zelnick, professor of journalism at Boston University and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, served as executive editor of the original Nixon/Frost interviews...

...With Frost having bounced back from some early misadventures to score a decisive triumph, Morgan offers a final political judgment through the lips of Reston: "Despite being buried with full honors in 1994, Richard Nixon never again held public office of any kind, nor achieved the rehabilitation he so desperately craved...

...His insights on Russia and China were received over lunch at the White House by President George H.W...

...But the Nixon staff had intervened to help make it happen rather than to block Frost's effort for a full accounting...

...Having worked with David Frost on the initial interviews, plus two mildly profitable writing ventures over the years, my (perhaps biased) view is that he is easily underestimated—and was certainly underestimated by Richard Nixon...

...Did he not join a conspiracy to obstruct justice by ordering aides to approach the CIA about pulling the FBI off the case...

...Frost's character is played by Michael Sheen, who has twice done Tony Blair in highly praised interpretations of Morgan's work...

...Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft...

...In contrast, Morgan's Nixon, brought to life by the fine actor Frank Langella, is a lumbering caricature of a man bent and constricted by the weight of personal tragedy...

...Between sessions, the Frost staff is shown strategizing, bickering, prodding their man to play it hard, not to get pushed around...

...As a work of historical fiction, however, it shows too little allegiance to the facts that inspired it...

...The help, however, comes too late...

...Over a period of 16 years he wrote nine bestsellers, most dealing with profound questions of national security...

...But they are far from his complete legacy...

...Under pressure from Frost, the face of Langella's Nixon freezes in an eerie smile, then dissolves into soft clay while a film of saliva glistens on his lower lip...

...That claim was undisturbed by the new evidence and remains unchallenged to this day...

...Rather, the Frost/Nixon interviews proved cathartic, providing Richard Nixon with the opportunity to acknowledge his role in the Watergate coverup and confess that he had betrayed the trust of the nation...

...by Robert Zelnick With Frost/Nixon, Peter Morgan confirms his place as the multimedia master of a strange but engaging genre of fiction...

...Yes, he could be more selective in his choice of interview subjects...

...Morgan approaches the sessions as a kind of boxing match between two unequal opponents...

...Within moments he would acknowledge his participation in the Watergate coverup, and apologize to the American people for having let the country down...

...Frost: . . . Are you really saying that there are certain situations where the president can decide whether it's in the best interests of the nation and do something illegal...

...But, as Frost chirps in, participants in a game only one can win...

...Now they are both down, both seeking the limelight again, brothers under the skin...