Reviews on Eli Chesens Book About Richard Nixons Psychological Profie
 | The History Backside the Flick and Play 'Frost/Nixon': How David Frost Really Convinced Richard Nixon to Talk |
| Friday, Feb. 20, 2009 |
Among this year'due south Academy Award nominees, director Ron Howard'southward Frost/Nixon, which focuses on the 1977 interviews of former president Nixon by British television personality David Frost, has received five nominations. Only considering of scheduling issues, I have not yet seen the movie, which is based on a successful Broadway play by the same proper name. I did not come across the play either. Both were written by British screenwriter Peter Morgan (who has also written The Concluding Male monarch of Scotland and The Queen). But I know a bit most the underlying events.
Friends who accept seen either the Frost/Nixon movie or the play, and in a few instances both, and many of whom are very aware of these original Frost interviews, have all been struck by the dramatic license that Peter Morgan employed – first, in the play, and then, with steroids, in the flick. Washington author Elizabeth Drew, who is no Nixon apologist, nicely summed upwardly the accept of about of those with whom I have spoken when she explained in the Huffington Post, "The film's plot is a contrivance; its telling is so riddled with departures from what really happened as to exist fundamentally dishonest; and its climactic moment is purely and simply a lie."
However, while Ron Howard'southward film made be bad history, I am told it is wonderful theater. In improver, by bringing this historical event back to light, it has raised a couple of long dormant only of import questions: How did Frost become Nixon to get equally far as he did in admitting his role in Watergate? And, looking back at present, how much did Nixon really acknowledge during the interviews? To answer the first question, and to understand how Nixon was nudged, I turned to a friend who was involved in that process; indeed, he provided David Frost with the primal to getting Nixon to talk. In plow, I myself can comprehend the issue of how much or piddling, in fact, Nixon actually conceded to Frost and the American public.
A little historical context will help, and it all may offer more understanding to viewers of Ron Howard'due south latest work.
Preparing To Captive Nixon on National Television
In 1978, David Frost published his account of his dealings with Nixon in "I Gave Them A Sword": Behind the Scenes of the Nixon Frost Interviews. At that place, he explained how he negotiated the bargain with Nixon for his "television memoirs" for a payment of $600,000 plus 20 percent of the profits from the interview'due south ambulation. When the American networks refused to pay for the four-part plan of 90-minute shows, Frost had to assemble his own network and find sponsors. To get in work, Frost had to crack Nixon's I-didn't-practise-anything-other-presidents-hadn't-done defense. It was a high-take a chance venture that succeeded.
To prepare for the interviews themselves -- some 11 two-60 minutes-plus sessions, from which the edited programs would be taken -- Frost assembled a minor team of researcher assistants, principally announcer Robert Zelnick and the son of prominent journalist Scotty Reston, James Reston Jr., who would focus on Watergate. Frost asked his staff for confidentiality. Appropriately, Zelnick never wrote virtually his role, only Reston Jr. did, drafting a volume about the experience that was not published until iii decades later, after he had given a copy of his manuscript to Peter Morgan, who used information technology as the footing his dramatizations. (Having read Reston Jr.'s The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews, I believe information technology is very possible that Reston Jr. could non detect a publisher for it, since it added fiddling to the story that Frost himself had told in his book.)
When Reston joined the Frost inquiry staff, he had a good working noesis of Watergate, considering he had worked with Frank Mankiewicz, an attorney-turned-journalist who served as Robert Kennedy's press secretary, a syndicated columnist, and national political director of George McGovern'due south 1972 presidential bid. Mankiewicz had published two books on Nixon, with Reston Jr. researching and writing significant portions of the Watergate material in both.
At that place is neat irony in Reston Jr.'south Watergate muckraking. His begetter, Scotty Reston, who had been the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, held muckraking in low esteem, and Scotty had imbued the Washington bureau of the Times with his thinking. Scotty was writing a cavalcade for the Times when Watergate occurred, and both he and the New York Times would totally miss the biggest Washington story of the last half of the Twentieth Century. Following Watergate, the gentlemanly journalism of the Scotty Reston model disappeared, with muckraking becoming the new norm.
I talked to Reston Jr. in 1976 when he was preparing fabric for David Frost to interview Nixon, and later met with Frost as well. More than importantly, Eli Chesen, with whom I accept discussed Nixon over many years because of his 1974 volume, President Nixon'southward Psychiatric Profile, had a number of off-the-tape conversations with Reston Jr., which announced to me to take provided David Frost with a key to pressing Nixon to actually provide something of value during the interviews. I was curious about Eli'south take on Frost/Nixon film. Moreover, knowing of Eli's extensive off-the-record dealings with Reston, I was interested in his feelings about Reston's emerging as a central character in the motion-picture show and play. I was surprised by several of his responses – which are reproduced below.
Questions and Answers with Eli Chesen
Dr. Eli Chesen, M.D., practices psychiatry and neurology, in Lincoln, Nebraska. Given his profession, I am never surprised by his smashing perception of others. He is politically- and culturally-sophisticated, and smart as a whip. I have assembled a Q and A based on our exchanges about Frost/Nixon. Usually, we talk off-the-record, but Eli is now willing to admit his backside-the-scenes role in puncturing Nixon'due south stonewalling. Several people who had seen the film had asked me about the portrayal of Reston Jr., whom David Frost had cast in his volume as a minor thespian, while Peter Morgan had made a large deal of Reston Jr. And then I asked Eli about Reston Jr. every bit well, since he had spent far more fourth dimension with him than I had.
QUESTION: You have seen Ron Howard's film "Frost/Nixon." What did yous think of it as theater?
ANSWER: As theater, I thought the film was beautifully rendered and I offer kudos to Frank Langella for capturing Nixon'southward persona with so much nuance. While Howard and the playwright took moderate dramatic license with roughly equal parts fact and fiction, I loved the dramatic, middle-of-the-night phone call scene.
QUESTION: Was the Nixon graphic symbol sympathetic?
Answer: The amalgam of Howard and Langella's Nixon was sympathetic, reflecting Nixon's joyless existence on one hand and his not having suffered fools readily on the other.
QUESTION: Tell me almost the graphic symbol James Reston Jr. How would you describe this character in the film?
ANSWER: The Reston character was the movie's moral censor or, in Freudian terms, the film's superego. The film-Reston was a highly fictionalized, self-serving, Joan-of-Arc-in tennis-shoes kind of person. I see Reston as having been a cinemagraphic used car salesman vis-à-vis his narcissistic self-portrayal. While I have no fashion of knowing whether or not Reston objected to his sacrosanct movie paragon, he certainly roughshod short of objecting to the euphemistic treatment of his soul.
QUESTION: Every bit a professional, and someone who has studied (and written most) Richard Nixon'due south psychology, was this film a psychological portrayal of Nixon?
Answer: Yes. I believe the film effort captured the Nixon whom I felt I had captured over three decades earlier: A vivid, socially phobic, cumbersome, all-seeing loner.
QUESTION: On October 6, 1976 James Reston Jr. sent you a letter regarding "any possible help you might give in the forthcoming Nixon interviews." Reston added, "I want to repeat my promise that you will find it possible to talk in absolute confidence well-nigh your impressions…. And, I'll exist prepared to abide past rules you volition gear up forth." Was information technology you, or was information technology Reston, who was seeking confidentiality? And why?
ANSWER: Quite honestly, I did, at the time, enquire Reston to go along my role confidential. I had already defenseless rut from the book, for in 1974, I was a Major in the U.South. Air Force, stationed at The Nellis Air Force Base Hospital, Nevada, while Nixon was my Commander-in-Primary.
QUESTION: In a January 13, 2009 note (to me) y'all explained the essence of your advice to Reston. Y'all reduced "an estimated eight to x telephone conversations with Reston" to the following key points: (1)"I substantially advised that the questions [for Nixon] should be framed so as to accept guilt as a given; (2) I advised to start with questions having to do with foreign policy to enhance Nixon's baseline comfort levels, and (3) I brash to and then switch over to personal and personal-legal issues, again, e'er assuming guilt every bit a role of the ground of any given question." It appears that Reston and Frost followed your communication. Why was information technology important to proceed in this fashion?
ANSWER: I felt that Nixon had a compulsive personality. His fashion of thinking was very ruminative, over-organized and repetitive. People with compulsive personalities tend to recollect and re-think in logical lists and outlines. This leads to unspontaneity as per the touching scene, from Frost-Nixon, in which Nixon ineffectively tries to relate to a dog. In the issue that Frost's questions might accept been orderly, systematized and anticipated, the belatedly president would likely take seized on a familiar psychological-conversational rhythm to his ain advantage. Nixon thought and functioned with endless algorithms. Changing the order of questions and abruptly shifting the mood in a dour management, out of order, would, I told Reston, catch Nixon off guard, perhaps throwing him into the uttering of non sequiturs.
Moreover, I advised Reston that, given the propensities for compulsives to wallow in guilt, when possible, Frost should frame questions with the pre-suggestion of guilt. Nixon, to the very end, saw himself as the nether-appreciated underdog; the martyr. Information technology would accept been "Checkers" II and Pat'southward "Republican fabric glaze" all over once again had Nixon been given the chance. I believe Nixon could have taken the psychological ball and run with it, covering himself in sackcloth with the notion that, 'I do and I exercise and I do and this is the thanks I get.'"
Ironically, I would opine that the technique for the successful cross-examination of a typical criminal accused would exist, in many means, the antithesis of interviewing Nixon in that I believe Nixon had a stringent censor and felt remorse, characteristics, which are abomination to sociopathic, common criminals…Nixon was the most uncommon of criminals.
QUESTION: Given the appointment of your annotation, I assume you were not aware that Reston had written in an article for the Smithsonian Magazine (published online February iv, 2009) explaining that: "At my [Reston's] proffer, Frost posed his questions with an assumption of guilt." Apparently, this fundamental recommendation was in the ninety-six folio interrogation programme he outlined for Frost in a memorandum. Did Reston come to you with this idea, or did it strike yous at the time – every bit best you can recall all these years subsequently – that you lot were giving him an arroyo he had not thought virtually?
ANSWER: That was my thought.
Did Frost – And Reston – Publicly Captive Nixon?
Clearly, Chesen's was ane of the more important ideas about how to bargain with Nixon, for Nixon was more than forthcoming than he no doubt wished to be. Reston describes these interviews every bit the "conviction" of Richard Nixon. My American Heritage lexicon defines confidence as "the act or process of finding or proving guilt." Under this definition, Reston is correct. My Black'south Law Lexicon, nonetheless, defines conviction every bit the event of a criminal proceeding "which ends in a judgment or judgement that the accused is guilty equally charged." In this meaning of the word, Nixon was not bedevilled of annihilation, for the former president went to his grave claiming he had never committed any crime or crimes – simply as he did throughout the Frost interviews.
Nonetheless, the Frost/Nixon picture show, which I expect forwards to viewing, embodies the historical consensus: Nixon was, in fact, guilty and only he, and his apologists, are able to deny this reality.
Source: https://supreme.findlaw.com/legal-commentary/the-history-behind-the-film-and-play-frostnixon.html