Comments on: Frost/Nixon Is a Revelation

By: remy

remy — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:14:52 +0000

Frost comes off as a lightweight straight ponce, his cronies are screaming fit-throwing children, and Nixon appears as a good sport.

I think it shows how the media was starting to become one-sided.

By: arthur

arthur — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:46:48 +0000

Nixon was a terrible president, a crook, a real criminal who thought he was above the Constitution, and why anyone would want to praise him or alternatively watch this is beyond me.

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:32:12 +0000

#9, Tex Taylor:
“I doubt our new president-elect and his rag-tag crew of Clinton lackeys are going to inspire the same degree of confidence if the pressure is really on.”

Sometimes awesome responsibility builds character. Lets hope so!

By: Mike G

Mike G — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:03:50 +0000

“I don’t get how anyone is supposed to buy in to a Nixon with a British accent. Whose idea was that?”

Langella’s from New Jersey, although i’ll grant you he has a sort of indeterminate theatrical manner of speaking by now.

By: mike

mike — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 12:53:38 +0000

I watched the original Nixon/Frost interviews and David Frost’s comments in getting the interview. He was not out to make Nixon “look bad”. What he wanted was for Nixon to admit the obvious, that he had broken the law. He wanted an historical moment and a psychological drama. There’s nothing wrong with either. And the interviews themselves were interesting to watch.

By: NahnCee

NahnCee — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 18:58:27 +0000

Question: how does Opie know what went on behind the scenes when the camera’s weren’t on? How does Mr. Howard — with an admittedly liberal bent determined to show that all Republicans including George Bush are evil — know that Frost’s intent was to make Nixon look bad?

Frost is still alive — is that what *he* says? WAs someone filming him while all this was going on so that there are transcripts?

I’m remembering that it was a fairly big deal at the time, partially because of the spin that it took a Yurpizoid to get the real facts because American journalists were too stupid and/or lazy. But I also seem to have a dim recollection that part of that spin was that only someone from across the pond would be able to stand back emotionally and ask the questions that a pissed-off American journalist wouldn’t think to ask.

Am I misremembering or is the “Frost was out to ambush Nixon” meme a typical HOllywood misinterpretation of history?

By: Harry

Harry — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 20:57:19 +0000

As for “political” films, one might revisit Oliver Stone’s “JFK” which opens with Eisenhower’s parting footage warning us of the “Military/industrial,
[congressional] complex”, which which rings true to in Haliburton/Cheney war mongering reality . . . . how right was that?

By: Maggie

Maggie — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 14:50:23 +0000

Bravo #1 syn’s comment. I’m sick of liberal propaganda movies.

By: whiskey

whiskey — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 07:33:42 +0000

Nixon’s enemies were not Jews but WASPs who hated him. Nixon was the Californian outsider, the Westerner, who has been hated (Jackson, Lincoln, Reagan) by the East Coast elites, and vice versa, for very good reasons.

Power flows either to the West, where the demand for cheap land and expensive labor and lots of opportunities are the rule, or the East where it is the converse. It’s Reagan or JFK.

Nixon’s enemies were all the “proper” folks from the Ivy League, but that’s normal for America. Nixon himself was a domestic disaster, wage-price controls, and a fool who could not take Yes for an answer.

Oddly enough, the guy who most reminds me of Nixon, being uncomfortable in his own skin, deviously stupid, “Charismatic” in that awkward, totalitarian way “Nixon’s the One” … is the One. Obama.

By: cedarford

cedarford — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 06:14:21 +0000

Richard Nixon — a man who signed notes to his wife “RN” and was photographed walking the California beach in dress shoes — was a deeply strange personality whose disgust for his perceived enemies and perpetual aggrievement did have much to do with the many abuses of power we call Watergate.

Nixon had legendary quirks, but the same could be said of a range of distinguished men gifted with a high IQ (Nixon was believed to be in a range of 148-153). In everything he did, from school to post-Presidency, he remained a person of significant, consequential accomplishment.

He didn’t have “perceived” enemies, he had actual enemies – who gunned for him for going after mostly Jewish communists that Nixon and history had proven guilty beyond doubt..while giving Harvard elite Bobby Kennedy a complete pass and Jewish elite Roy Cohn a near-pass…further embittering him. Nixon was Target #1 of a then-mostly Jewish owned TV and newsprint media (as well as the Jewish intelligensia and Gentile East Coast Establishment) for his “McCarthyite” attacks on their Jewish friends, prep school classmates. Relentlessly from the 50s through Watergate.

His aggrievement started with not getting East Coast lawfirm offers despite the Harvard Scholarship he was too poor to take even with tuition paid, and finishing 3rd at Duke Law – because his “breeding” was so pedestrian and “country bumpkin”. It went on…

Historians, particularly in Europe and Asia, are consistently elevating Nixon higher as a great, but flawed American ( a la DeGaulle, CHurchill) as years go by. Also benefiting are Eisenhower, Bush II…while JFK and Reagan (after the failure of Reaganomics) are headed lower as men of consequence.