Frost/Nixon TV interview - 6 May 1977

While the government leaders of Western Europe were coming face to face with President Carter for the first time in what is rather grandly called the London Summit, down on the lower slopes which you and I inhabit something like 70 millions of the lesser fry in the United States and heaven alone knows how many more millions around the world, found themselves, much to their surprise, riveted to the television sets by the sight and sound of that old and, we'd assumed, long discredited performer, Richard Nixon.

The only comment Mr Carter made on the Frost/Nixon dialogue was that if a question came up about China that we couldn't answer without consulting President Nixon – and he said ‘President’ – ‘I wouldn't have any reticence whatever’. A polite remark if ever there was one, but a startling one just the same when you think that if he'd made it, say, a week before the presidential election, he would almost certainly not be in the White House today. 

I don't think it's possible or sensible to guess why the Nixon interview held about one half of all American viewers without going into the up and down history of the arrangement between Mr Frost and the ex-President. In the wake of Watergate, certainly for a year or more after Mr Nixon's resignation, there wasn't a broadcasting network that would have touched any more public talk from Nixon about anything at all. And, which is saying the same thing in a more pragmatic way, there wasn't a sponsor, not a manufacturer of soap, potato chips or any other product, who wouldn't have run for the hills at the mere hint from their advertising agency that Nixon was available. A general atmosphere of revulsion, disgust or plain boredom lay heavy over the San Clemente exile, so much so that it was a matter for mild surprise when we heard that one of the most astute Hollywood agents, who had handled the most high-priced theatrical talents, had taken on the job of trying to sell Mr Nixon's memoirs. 

Now, on the face of it, you might suppose that nothing is more marketable than the memoirs of an ex-president, but it's something every new publisher has to learn, that the stardust of a president very quickly turns to ashes once he has retired to private life. Publishers, however shrewd and knowledgeable about the market value of various authors, are just as gullible as the rest of us when it comes to predicting the survival value of a political reputation, and the experience of the ones who've tried it has been that once a president has left office and starts to recall in print the miseries and grandeurs of his term, the meetings and treaties and feuds and setbacks, the prose is about as warming as a coal grate the morning after. To be exact about it, an old publisher I know, of almost seventy years' experience, told me years ago that he would not touch a book of presidential memoirs. First, he said, you accept the man's own assumption that everybody wants them. This means that you have to put up a whacking advance. Then you get your best editors to work with the great man and then the book's finished and is published to the accompaniment of a flourish of trumpets. Only then do you discover that what the president felt in 1953 or '65 was the sensible policy towards Russia or inflation or hospital care for the elderly is a matter of aching boredom to the book-buying public. What matters is the price of bread today and whether there's a hospital bed available tonight for Uncle Fred and his heart attack. 

In fact, since Harry Truman's memoirs, which came out in record time before the memory of his bounce and sassiness had faded, I don't think I can remember a contemporary statesman's memoirs, not in America, anyway, that has even paid its way. The book comes out at, say, $15 a throw and in six months it can be picked up on remainder shelves as a feverishly advertised bargain for $4.95. The scores of thousands of unsold copies eventually go to libraries and are written off as a form of literary amortisation by the publishers. When Mr Nixon's agent announced that he was open for offers for the Nixon view of life, a vast yawn engulfed the publishing industry. And then, at some point, the same man got in touch with Mr Frost, who had the extraordinary and, everybody said at the time, the ruinous idea that a large television audience at home and abroad might be interested in hearing and watching Mr Nixon's television account of everything from his life as a Congressman to his desperate last days in the White House. Nobody I talked to at the time who had had any experience of such things gave Mr Frost a chance of making the programmes, or if he did make them, of ever making a penny. And this apathy raged for the longest time, until, in fact, the interviews had been taped. Until, to be brutal about it, something like a month or more ago. By which time, Mr Frost himself had, to put it mildly, galloping misgivings. The two most knowing American news magazines reported that there wasn't a sponsor in sight who wanted to have his product, however non-political, associated with the disgraced president. 

I don't know who then advanced a desperate remedy, which was to leak to the New York Times the text of two or three White House tapes that had been in the hands of the public prosecutor, that had not been published and that, for some odd and never explained reason, could be had for the asking, presumably by you and me. Even Mr Nixon had never heard them. And yet one of them was damning, if further damnation were called for. It seemed to show that Mr Nixon, only a few days after the break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters was aware that some of his own men were involved and he was talking about handling the affair adroitly enough to stay, and I quote him, ‘one jump ahead of the sheriff’. Now, this was heady stuff and the New York Times duly printed the transcript of the tapes. The bait was now dangling in the stream and who should leap for it but the two national news magazines who'd affected such stony unconcern about the whole topic. They were allowed to see the video tape, the films, if you like, of the Nixon interviews. Of the first one, certainly. And both of them decided last week to do big cover stories on the interviews, stories written in retrospect, that's to say as if the show were already over. They not only printed great chunks of the Frost/Nixon dialogue about Watergate, but offered a running commentary on who winced, who bridled, who sweated. 

Now you might think that this would have ruined the actual telecast and pre-empted the audience for it. Not at all. It did just what Mr Frost had hoped. It whipped up half the American people and Lord knows how many tens of millions around the globe to say, ‘This we have to see!’ So, on Wednesday in the United States, and Thursday in Britain, people who a month ago would have fainted with boredom at the mention of Watergate, hung on what turned out to be surely the most fascinating, the most emotionally intimate sustained look at any politician in modern history. The fact that Mr Nixon and Mr Frost suddenly made a pile of money – and Mr Nixon needs all he can get to pay off back taxes and a fortune in lawyers' fees – seems to me to be no more than a carping irrelevance, like trying to belittle the quality of a heavyweight championship fight by mentioning the millions that the boxers earn from it. What matters is the quality and the intensity of the human exchange that came over the tube. 

Many people and, I'm sorry to say, many of my colleagues in the press, felt called upon for reasons I can only guess to boost their political prejudice or avoid the discomfort of having to feel new emotions, felt called upon to rewrite their 1974 judgements a little more tartly than before. But surely anyone who gave himself, herself, freshly to what was said, to the sight and sound of these two men – Mr Frost especially, it seemed to me – restored to his old stance of a serious and probing political interviewer, not blustering, not being for a minute the unflappable professional TV interviewer. I defy any human being trusting entirely to his reflex instincts at the time to say that it was not absorbing, emotionally engaging in the literal sense and presenting a view of Nixon which showed how deeply intertwined, perhaps from the start, had been his emotions and his judgements. He's plainly done a painful amount of brooding and self analysis. He has, I believe, a deep and disturbing inability to distinguish tactics from simple honesty. But the new and pathetic element was that he now believes, quite sincerely, two things that public men avoid admitting till the day they die: namely, that by lying he demeaned his office. And, at the same time, that he did nothing criminal. In spite of Mr Frost's reading out to him the text of the statute on what constitutes obstruction of justice, a passage that was, so far as I can recall, fatally omitted from the British showing. 

So, it's not to me, any longer, a question of whether Mr Nixon was hounded by the press or whether he was, to the end, a victim of his incorrigible chicanery – in other words, whether he was a dupe or a scoundrel. Such serious questions of right and wrong were transcended in the face-to-face experience itself, into the, if you like, the substance of a novel, into a psychological study of a tragic human being who may not have come to terms with us or with the law but has come to terms, however pathetic, with himself. In spite of all the crisp editorialising, the defence of positions taken long ago, it does seem to me that in the long run Mr Nixon will come out of it better than he dared. Not as a politician, not as a wronged man, not as a president who could possibly have escaped impeachment – he still cannot face the overwhelming evidence that the Senate would have given him no more than a handful of votes – but as an engrossing human being. Once in high office, with all his defences down, a character of Shakespearean complexity and pathos. Pitiable, sympathetic, and gone for good. Unless, by one of those enormous and unpredictable backlashes of history, he turned into Napoleon at Elba. 

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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