Nixon at the Movies (review)

Alone in the Dark

Nixon at the Movies is an enormously promising title. As its author notes, no President, not even Hollywood's own Ronald Reagan, is so intimately associated with the grand sweep of American movies of the second half of the twentieth century. Nixon supported the business first as the local congressman from southern California and subsequently (and importantly) as President; Nixon who made his early reputation as a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) that tormented Hollywood during the red scare; Nixon the avid movie watcher who famously unspooled Patton for repeated viewings as he ordered the invasion of Cambodia; and perhaps most influentially, Nixon the paranoid plotter whose implicit presence dominated so many great films from the every seventies, followed by the routine projection of his impossibly Shakespearean character onto the big screen.

Unfortunately, for the readership of this journal, Nixon at the Movies does not live up to the promise of its title. While this fine book is a knowledgeable and distinct contribution to the enormous Nixon literature, it is essentially a new Nixon biography, albeit one written from the pen of an author capable of drawing on an impressive wellspring of movie lore (and popular culture). But The Movies are clearly limited to second (and, over the course of the volume, decreasing) billing, and, most problematically, are too often relegated to separate and at times perfunctory passages. There are not enough scenes in which Nixon and The Movies share the screen; even HUAC is reduced to a cameo appearance. A reader of the chapter on Nixon and Elvis would be forgiven for not realizing the book had an interest in film; the chapter about Kissinger looses sight of both Nixon and the Movies. While occasionally repetitive and at times overconfident (had Nixon really "barely heard of Elvis" (p. 218) when they met in 1970?) the book does have formidable strengths. The vignettes featuring Wayne, (John) Ford, and Reagan ring true. And the two final chapters, "Nixon at the Movies" (what the President watched) and "The Conversation" (Nixon versus the New Hollywood) do indeed engage both Nixon and the Movies. Most notably, Feeney has compiled an invaluable appendix: "What the President Saw and When He Saw It," that chronicles every film the President saw while in office.

But it is the underutilization of this impressive list that disappoints the reader searching for that tantalizing intersection of Nixon, Politics, and Film. There is the occasional tidbit: we learn that Nixon saw The Candidate a month after his reelection, and complained to Haldeman that it "really jobbed the conservatives" (p. 286). But what of the President's reaction to Dirty Harry the cinematic embodiment of Nixon's commitment to Law and Order vilified by the liberal media elite as a neo-fascist fantasy? Nothing more than that he saw it on March 10, 1972, at Camp David.

Ultimately, the onus of this silence might fall to Nixon, who sure watched a lot of movies, but perhaps, the three screenings of Patton in ten weeks notwithstanding, they were less important to him than he was to them. On May 9, 1970, on the heels of the Cambodian invasion and days after the Kent State shootings, with the White House ringed by city buses as a makeshift line of defense, the sleepless President made his impromptu, pre-dawn visit to the Lincoln Memorial, mingling with astonished war protestors. The story remains irresistibly fascinating and is well retold here. But the smoking gun proves elusive: Nixon saw no films between the sixth and the twelfth of May.