Starting next Jan. 9, the 100 or so municipal employees of Yorba Linda, Calif., where Richard Milhous Nixon was born in a farmhouse in 1913, will get a holiday on that date to honor the former president.
That doesn`t put him up there with Washington and Lincoln exactly, but for Nixon, who resigned in disgrace during the Watergate crisis, it`s a comeback of sorts. The mayor of Yorba Linda, where Nixon`s presidential library is being built, said of the city council`s decision: ”We`re not here to judge history, we`re here to recognize it.” ”He`s pleased,” the mayor added.
But the pre-emptively pardoned Nixon, whose campaign for rehabilitation has been moving apace, hasn`t been as pleased by another act of recognition its producers insist has the same aim as that ascribed by the mayor to Yorba Linda`s holiday.
In fact, Nixon`s lawyers waged a bitter skirmish to keep ABC from broadcasting ”AT & T Presents `The Final Days,”` a three-hour docudrama of the collapse of Nixon`s presidency during the Watergate investigations. The dramatization Sunday (7 p.m., WLS-Ch. 7) of Richard Nixon`s end game is based on the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who won the paper a Pulitzer Prize for Watergate coverage. With an irony that wouldn`t escape their client, one letter to the chief of Capital Cities/ABC Inc., accused the company of ”a pattern of deception and cover-up.”
For those who have little memory or knowledge of those events of 15 years ago, that`s basically the irrefutable charge that led Nixon to resign on Aug. 9, 1974, as he teetered on the edge of impeachment.
To anyone who was immersed in Watergate in 1973 and 1974, there was an awful sense of deja vu about the aggressive tone of his lawyers` 1989 letters. Implying Nixon could sue for libel and ”a violation of his privacy and an infringement of his right to use his name and image to promote his own writings and statements about foreign policy and other issues,” they reawakened memories of the desperate months of White House stonewalling as the emerging facts steadily eroded attempts to distance the president from the coverup.
A close look at the television version of ”The Final Days” suggests Nixon and his lawyers probably shouldn`t have bothered. He doesn`t come off half bad. Or, perhaps, it would be better put that he only comes off half bad. But he always was one to expect the worst, especially if it had anything to do with the media in any form. He never made much secret of that.
For an example, take his first news conference after the Saturday Night Massacre, when he unleashed a bitter attack, principally against the
”electronic media.”
”I have never heard or seen such outrageous, viscious, distorted reporting in 27 years of public life,” he raged when asked about the effect on the nation of the dogged Watergate coverage. ”I`m not blaming anybody for that. Perhaps what happened is that what we did brought it about, and therefore the media decided that they would have to take that particular line. But when people are pounded night after night with that kind of frantic, hysterical reporting, it naturally shakes their confidence.”
Anyone who paused, blinked and scratched his head at the term Saturday Night Massacre may have some problems with ”The Final Days.” Like the book from which it was taken, the program attempts a faithful behind-the-scenes look at what the network describes as ”one of the most momentous events in recent American history, as President Richard M. Nixon confronts the agonizing ordeal which rips apart his administration and ultimately forces his resignation from office.”
To do this, it relies on a large cast of characters and a lot of detailed discussions or rationalizations of fine points pertaining to what the president meant to say no matter what it sounded like on tape.
If you don`t remember or care that in the Saturday Night Massacre of Oct. 20, 1973, Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special Watergate prosecutor who would not shrink from his demand that the president turn over his tape recordings of conversations pertinent to the investigation, or that Atty. Gen. Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, quit rather than carry out the command, you probably will be bored by the trees and perhaps not comprehend the tangled forest of ”The Final Days.”
On the other hand, for someone who was there-involved in it, covering it or just consumed by it as a riveting morality play-it`s interesting and sort of fun to recall the players and relive the events and to judge how accurately they`re depicted.
Lane Smith, for instance, does well in the difficult role of President Nixon. It`s hard enough to be credible as a well-known living person, triply hard when he has been caricatured for four decades by cartoonists, comedians and parlor wags. Compounding the problem, Nixon`s awkward gestures, clumsy efforts at small talk and strained humor often make him seem a caricature of himself.
Despite the pitfalls, Smith does Nixon`s voice, speech mannerisms and body spasms convincingly. Even more admirably, he captures the former president`s mood swings from sweet reason to bluster to defiance to a broken confusion.
As the end nears, his resignation at hand, Smith`s Nixon is a sadly sympathetic figure with the weight of his loss suddenly crushing down on him. ”What have I done?” he wails. ”What have I done to this country and its people? Everything is so confused now. I don`t understand how all of this happened. How could a simple burglary lead to all of this?”
Well, if you were there at the time, this Nixon never surfaced, publicly at least. If he had, say about the time of the June 17, 1972, burglary of the Democratic National Committee`s headquarters at the Watergate complex, he would have survived the eight years of his presidency. A little contrition would have gone a long way then.
The embattled Nixon of the latter part of ”The Final Days” often seems a pitiful prisoner of complex events that have long since gotten beyond his control. But the truth was clearer earlier in the piece, that here was a man more manipulative than manipulated-a president struggling for acceptable rationalizations of his words and deeds, often appearing ready, even eager, to bend the truth to fit his cause.
Somehow, looking back on those rough-and-tumble days, the television version-played out almost entirely in richly appointed rooms and corridors representing those of the White House-never captures the throbbing sense of urgency and danger that pervaded the capital and, to some extent, the country. There was dynamite at hand, fire in the hole. And nobody knew how America`s most precious institutions would withstand the inevitable explosion.
In those scorching Watergate seasons of `73 and `74, there was a lot more sweating than usual in the Washington of memory, but even the perspiration-prone Nixon seldom mops a brow as the camera lingers on enough meaningful pauses to fill a season of ”thirtysomething” episodes. And as J. Fred Buzhardt, the honest, teetotaling counsel whom Nixon teasingly called ”the Baptist”-played by Richard Kiley-steadfastly, but with growing disillusion, pursues the thankless task of helping his uncooperative boss try to make his case, he is greeted at times with rebuke, but never, of course, with those not-for-prime-time deleted expletives that gave such a raunchy locker-room flavor to the Nixon tapes.
Filling out the production are solid performances by Theodore Bikel as Henry Kissinger, David Ogden Stiers as Alexander Haig Jr., Ed Flanders as Leonard Garment, Alan Fudge as Gerald Ford, Susan Brown as Nixon`s dutiful wife Pat, Graham Beckel as Ronald Ziegler and Diana Bellamy as the president`s faithful secretary Rose Mary Woods.
In ABC`s ”The Final Days,” we watch Richard Nixon and his loyalists calmly deluding themselves and destroying his presidency with a tragic certainty. But there is little evidence in these sedate scenes of the knee-in- the-groin battling going on in the trenches as they tried to fight off the special prosecutor, the Congress, the courts and the press. Anyone who was there will miss the elbows and the expletives.
