News coverage in England only hit the highlights until Watergate, which fascinated the Europeans as much as it did Americans. We watched as much of the Watergate story and hearings as we could, and Nixon resigned three weeks after we returned from Europe. We saw the Frost interviews in 1977, and I recall thinking that he was a tragically flawed man, which was a more sympathetic view than I had when he was in office. He’d done any number of criminal and crazy things to sway an election [1972] that he couldn’t have lost if he’d tried. It was all driven by his paranoia.
I think the thing that the movie captured beautifully was Nixon’s inability to ever focus on what he’d done to the Presidency and America. He said he’d made "mistakes." He said he’d let the country down. But he never seemed to grasp that it went further than that. I suppose that I ended up feeling that if he had the capacity to feel that, he probably would have never done the amazingly wrong things he did in the first place. Nixon was a criminal, a real criminal. And his remorse was the remorse of a criminal – sorry he got caught, sorry he let the country down by getting caught, always living the myth of his "greatness."
Like the latter day saints – Reagan, George H.W. Bush, & George W. Bush – he wanted us to accept his explanations for why he did what he did rather than look at the outcome. Like Reagan and George W. Bush, he had some kind of notion about his place in history, about his destiny. But Nixon had a pained arrogance all his own. And outside his reluctant acknowledgment of his "mistakes" in Watergate, he had nothing else but praise for himself, in spite of a number of shaky decisions, not the least of which was pursuing the Viet Nam War way beyond the time for leaving.
When it finally ended, I thought America would never get over Nixon. I felt he would leave a scar on the Presidency that would never go away, and I haven’t changed my mind. Personally, I still connect Nixon/Segretti/Watergate, Reagan/Bush-I/Atwater/Iran-Contra, and Bush-II/Cheney/Rove/Iraq [etc.] as a continuous equation – a sickness on the land that reaches back to my own youth. It felt then just like it does now – some kind of dark force that’s recoiling against our Constitution, trying to change us into a country ruled by the powerful, not by the people. Maybe its always been this way, and I just didn’t know it.
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