Nixon's the one
December 5, 2008 Uncategorized, drama 
Remembering Nixon: The man, the myth, the monster
Editor’s note: This blog entry was written by outgoing Tribune copy editor and Central Coast Nixon expert Jay Thompson. We’ll miss you, Jay.
When Richard Milhous Nixon died in 1994, the disgraced former president — born Jan. 9, 1913, in Yorba Linda, Calif. — was a respected elder statesman and an adviser to presidents.
At the funeral, the only U.S. president to resign was canonized by then-President Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state, before an audience that included former presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Nixon was buried beside his wife, Pat, on the grounds of the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum and not far from the modest wood-frame house where he was born.
The funeral was a somber affair — with full military honors punctuated by 21 105-mm howitzer blasts — and a respectful farewell for a complex man who polarized the nation when he was alive and who has continued to make headlines since his death.
I like what gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson wrote about the April 27, 1994, ceremony:
“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.”
Harsh words indeed.
A new Ron Howard movie, “Frost/Nixon,” chronicles the series of televised interviews our 37th president granted to British journalist David Frost in 1977.
Frank Langella (Nixon) and Michael Sheen (Frost) reprise the roles the roles they created in Peter Morgan’s Tony Award-winning play.
No doubt the film will reopen the book on this complicated man, who dedicated his life to public service.
Many who lived through the Nixon years still hate the man, whose corruption soured a generation. If you wonder why people are often cynical about politics, look no farther than Nixon.
I attended the dedication of Nixon’s presidential library and museum in 1989, and have on my desk a Nixon bobblehead, presidential library coffee mug as well as a copy of a photo of Nixon shaking hands with Elvis Presley at the White House.
Nixon’s the one — my favorite president — to hate.
So as “Frost/Nixon” opens in selected theaters, I’d like to present the cultural legacies of Richard Milhous Nixon in three categories: music, TV and film.
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TOP FIVE NIXON FILMS
5. “Dick” (1999)
Two high school girls (Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams) wander off during a class trip to the White House and meet President Nixon (Dan Heday). They become the official dog walkers for Checkers, Nixon’s pooch, and Nixon’s advisers as the Watergate scandal unfolds.
4. “Where the Buffalo Roam” (1980)
Bill Murray stars as Hunter S. Thompson in this comedy chronicling the gonzo journalist’s rise to fame and his relationship with Chicano attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta (Peter Boyle).
3. “The Assassination of Richard Nixon” (2004)
This drama, which stars Sean Penn, Naomi Watts and Don Cheadle, is based on a real-life incident. In 1974, a man tried to hijack a jet with the intent of crashing it into the White House and killing President Nixon.
2. “Nixon” (1995)
Oliver Stone’s three-hour biopic is, according to a disclaimer in the film, “an attempt to understand the truth” about Nixon (Anthony Hopkins). It chronicles the president’s personal and turbulent political life. Joan Allen plays Pat Nixon.
1. “All the President’s Men.” (1976)
Alan J. Pakula’s film is based on the 1974 book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman), two Washington Post reporters investigating the Watergate scandal from the arrest of the burglars to the resignation of the president.
The film won two Oscars and features a cameo by Frank Wills, the private security guard at the Watergate office building who alerted police. (In 1994’s “Forrest Gump,” Wills takes Forrest’s call complaining about men with flashlights disturbing his sleep while he is staying in the Watergate Hotel.)
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TOP FIVE SOUND BITES
5. “The Checkers Speech” (Sept. 23,1952)
Nixon was the Republican candidate for the vice president when he was accused of accepting $18,000 (about $140,000 in 2007 dollars) in illegal campaign contributions.
He told a national audience that his wife Pat didn’t own a mink coat, but instead wore a “respectable Republican cloth coat” and that his family was going to keep their cocker spaniel, Checkers.
The speech was a milestone — one of the first uses of television to appeal directly to voters — and it kept Nixon on the GOP ticket, saving his political career.
4. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around …” (Nov. 7,1962)
After failing to defeat California Gov. Pat Brown in 1962 (losing by 300,000 votes), Nixon uttered the famous line in what he described as his “last press conference.” He took his family to New York and began what historians call the “Wilderness Years” preceding his successful 1968 presidential campaign.
3. “Sock it to me?” (Sept. 16, 1968)
“Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” comedy-variety series debuted on NBC on Jan. 22, 1968, and ran 124 episodes over the next five years.
Some of the show’s classic catch phrases were: “You bet your bippy,” “Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls” and “Sock it to me.” (When castmember Judy Carne was tricked into staying the last phrase, she was was hit with a bucket of water).
A dry Nixon appeared on “Laugh-In” less than two months before the election, and asked “Sock it to me?”
His opponent, Hubert H. Humphrey, was also invited on the show, but he declined. It may have cost him the election.
2. “I’m not a crook …” (Nov. 17, 1973)
With the Watergate controversy heating up, President Nixon denied his involvement in the cover-up during a televised press conference. He told an Associated Press reporter that “people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.”
1. “I shall resign the presidency …” (Aug. 8, 1974)
In an era of afternoon newspapers, the banner headline for Aug. 8, 1974, was Nixon’s intention to resign. The embattled president gave this 15-minute televised speech that night.
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TOP FIVE NIXON SONGS
5. “Campaigner” by Neil Young (cover by Isis)
4. “Tricky Dicky” by Country Joe McDonald
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