ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 24, 1995 TAG: 9512270005
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN MARSHALL SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
RICHARD NIXON always played his game of peek-a-boo with the American public and the American psyche. The man who managed to be both an admired statesman and the reviled ``Tricky Dick'' might disappear from view for a time, but he always came back.
Election defeats did not change that, despite his 1962 assurance that ``You don't have Nixon to kick around anymore.'' His resignation in disgrace from the presidency did not change that, as he alluded to with his parting words to the White House staff and the watching American people: ``Au revoir. We'll see you again.'' And Nixon's death, it turns out, did not change that either.
Twenty months after he was buried in Yorba Linda, Calif., amid tear-filled tributes from loyal admirers, Nixon suddenly is back in the public eye once again.
There is Nixon on the big screen, with the opening of director Oliver Stone's three-hour ``Nixon.'' There is Nixon on the small screen, with Nixon specials during the next month on A&E, PBS, TNT and the History Channel. There is Nixon on the cover of Newsweek, as portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, with a bloodshot gaze sure to prompt nightmares in small children. And there is Nixon at the neighborhood post office, too, where his commemorative stamp, after much initial controversy, has gone on to do ``better than average'' at the sales counter.
This outpouring of Nixonia in popular culture may represent nothing more than the latest passing fad in a country where the collective attention span has now reached 3.5 seconds. Nixon turned into a kind of Cabbage Patch doll. Or it may represent the first attempt to assess the man and his life, now that it seems fairly certain he no longer can reinvent himself with another incarnation of ``the new Nixon.''
What historians know from experience is that a studied assessment of Nixon has only just begun. And they also know that that assessment is sure to pass through a variety of phases in the coming years, through times of public fascination and public amnesia and that it likely will prompt an ongoing debate, especially in academe.
For as Richard Kirkendall, professor of history at the University of Washington in Seattle, says, ``Historians are still debating Lincoln. Maybe they aren't debating Washington much, but they have been debating Jefferson quite a bit recently. And we still haven't settled down on Truman.''
Or as Jackson Lears, historian at Rutgers University, stresses: ``If you look at how long it has taken to `get over the Vietnam War,' you realize it is not going to be until after the generation which fought it or evaded it finally dies and ceases writing about the war or talking about it publicly.
``Nixon is part of that whole Vietnam-era scene. So it's obviously going to be a while before there is a dispassionate accounting of the man. For all the issues he raised, all the pain he caused, directly or indirectly, is still around.''
Popular historian David McCullough puts it succinctly: ``Nixon is the most controversial president of the later 20th century. People can't be indifferent to Richard Nixon.''
The new docudrama portrayals of Nixon seem likely to only further enflame the controversy, with many scenes of the private Nixon showing his hand surgically attached to a cocktail glass. In TNT's ``Kissinger and Nixon,'' an ebullient Nixon often turns the Oval Office into a full-tilt Happy Hour lounge, asking his most trusted advisers, ``Drinks? Bourbon all around!'' In Stone's ``Nixon,'' the drink in Nixon's ever-present glass is instead scotch.
These portrayals already have outraged veteran journalist Richard Reeves, who attacks those who made the cinematic and video Nixon ``this clumsy and babbling lush confined to dark rooms.''
``The stumblebum Nixon seems ludicrous to me,'' Reeves wrote in The New York Times. ``He was certainly not a graceful or comfortable man - he once walked me into a stationery closet as he showed me out of his New York office in the late 1970s - but no one in his right mind ever took him to be the demented clown being portrayed now.''
And Henry Kissinger, now tending two flames (his former boss' and his own), was so incensed by his portrayal in ``Kissinger and Nixon'' that he counterattacked in, of all places, TV Guide.
There, the former Harvard professor protested that the TV drama ``stands history on its head'' and that ``a skillful blend of innuendo, distortion and misrepresentation is served up to a new generation unaware that Vietnam-era passions are masquerading as history.''
Kissinger rises to an impassioned conclusion that ``Kissinger and Nixon'' is not ``an accurate and truthful docudrama.'' That anyone still might expect docudramas to be ``accurate and truthful'' is surprising, since the genre is clearly a bastard offspring of history and entertainment. Docudramas mix various historical sources, some more reputable than others, plus varying amounts of supposition, invention and interpretation.
``Kissinger and Nixon'' opens with the disclaimer that ``all history is subject to interpretation.'' Stone's film opens with its own disclaimer, stark white words on a dramatic black screen. They say, in part, that the film is ``based on numerous public sources and an incomplete historical record. In consideration of length, events and characters have been condensed, and some scenes among protagonists have been hypothesized or condensed.''
That technique seems all the more inevitable when the subject is Nixon, as historian McCullough discovered when he was writing his introduction to the American Experience's 1990 video biography of Nixon - which is being reshown next month on PBS. McCullough had written his own biography of Harry Truman, a best seller that went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, and he was struck by the difference between the historical records on the two presidents.
As McCullough said recently from Charlottesville, Va., ``Truman's appeal, during his time and in retrospect, was his authenticity. He was the genuine article. But no one knew the genuine Nixon. There was a new edition every six months. One interesting thing I found in this documentary is that there is very little about Nixon, the private man, the human being.
``There is just not much to work with with Nixon, no anecdotes. With Lyndon Johnson, anecdotes swirled around him, like gnats around a Texas longhorn. There were endless stories about Truman. But Nixon is a very, very hard man to know.''
Stone's film underscores McCullough's point with a final notation, voiced by the director himself, that only 60 hours of Nixon's White House tapes have been made public, while 3,400 hours still remain under guard, their contents shielded even from the research view of historians.
Kirkendall of the University of Washington felt stymied when he confronted a similar problem with ``the availability of materials'' during his initial studies of Truman.
As Kirkendall recalled, ``When I was working on Truman in the 1960s, I deplored the dearth of materials available in his papers. I even speculated with friends that the reason we didn't have good letters is that Truman just didn't put much on paper. But after he died, amazing private documents came to light, including wonderful diary-like letters. And when his wife died, it turned out there were Truman letters stashed all around their house. So we now know much more about Truman as a person.''
Letters and private papers are among the most-valued fodder for historians, as they try to formulate their considered view of historical figures. So, too, are serious biographies, usually biographies by respected fellow historians rather than journalists and acquaintances, the sort of big books that display diligent original research and voluminous footnotes.
William H. Harbaugh, retired historian at the University of Virginia, can readily trace the evolution of Theodore Roosevelt's reputation by the dates of various Roosevelt biographies, including his own in 1961. Each biography added to the record on Roosevelt and deepened understanding of the man, as did Harvard's publication of his letters in eight volumes in the early 1950s.
``I don't believe a reputation ever settles down really,'' Harbaugh said. ``Successive generations tend to reinterpret it, sometimes in ways that are insignificant, and in other times in ways that are significant.''
Harbaugh points out that Roosevelt's reputation among historians is ``increasingly affirmative,'' as is Truman's (``a kind of Andrew Jackson, with the common touch, a decisive leader, even though limited intellectually'').
Harbaugh says the reputation of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president is ``rising moderately,'' but that the reputation of John F. Kennedy among historians ``is really going down'' (``partly because of his character, but also because he was a real cold warrior in the view of many'').
Nixon's reputation, even with the current outpouring, has only begun to coalesce out of the strong opinions still swirling about him.
As Harbaugh stresses, ``Nixon's reputation is rising now, because of his substantive accomplishments as president. By modern standards, he was not conservative, and he instituted a number of progressive and liberal reforms. His foreign policy was very good on the whole.
``There is no greater irony in recent American history than this man - who was a member of the Joseph McCarthy school which blasted Truman and others for being soft on communism, who for 30 years opposed recognizing the largest nation in the world - actually did these things after he became president.
``But what we also have again with Nixon is a character problem. We confuse his substantive issues because of hate of his character. As soon as my generation of historians passes on, perhaps we can begin to look at Nixon dispassionately.''
Until that time, docudramas and documentaries on Nixon will fill the historical void, offering the chance for the public to demonstrate whether it cares to be titillated or repulsed anymore by differing interpretations of this confounding man.
To some, Nixon is a tragic figure, almost Shakespearean in stature, so close to true greatness before the fall.
As McCullough says, ``The fact that he resigned and is the only president to do so, and did so under a cloud of his own making, sets him apart from everybody else. But had he only told the country that Watergate was a mistake, that he shouldn't have done it - we're a forgiving people - Nixon probably wouldn't have had to leave office.''
To others, Nixon is a terribly flawed person, betrayed by his own hubris and deceits, a man elected in 1968 with ``a plan'' to end the Vietnam War but who allowed 28,000 more Americans to die before the war was finally brought to its conclusion.
As Lears says, ``The Nixon phenomenon is part of the attempt to forget or rewrite the Vietnam War, to airbrush key parts of the picture out of existence. Nixon was at the center of the bombing and prolonging the war, although one would never know that from what was said at his passing.''
Nixon himself would surely not be surprised by such divergent views. As he himself once said, ``The judgment of history depends on who writes it.''
LENGTH: Long : 183 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Richard Nixonby CNB