Nixon at the Movies (review)

During his tenure as president of the United States, Richard Nixon watched more than five hundred movies at private screenings. Some, like Patton, he saw several times. Mark Feeney, a writer and editor at the Boston Globe, believes that Nixon's interest in movies is politically and culturally significant, and he has written a book that attempts to illuminate Nixon's character and personality through various Hollywood films. This book is a meandering series of meditations on the life and career of Nixon and the movies that he watched.

The moviegoer, Feeney says, is fundamentally a lonely figure, and Nixon embodied this loneliness. Feeney's central premise is that Nixon was solitary, isolated and contradictory, "a man almost oceanically alone throughout his life's journey." The defining characteristic of Nixon's adult life, according to Feeney, was "the fact of not belonging." He was a politician "who shrank from his fellow citizens"—perhaps the principal contradiction of this "incomparably contradictory man."

Feeney devotes some attention to analyzing Nixon's taste in movies. The films that he saw were a "miscellany, as varied in genre and date as they were in quality." Nixon had a preference for "block-buster narratives and big-budget epics—films with sweep and splash." His favorite film was Around the World in 80 Days, "just the sort of leisurely spectacle that Nixon delighted in." The movie with which Nixon is most identified in the public mind is Patton. Nixon's liberal critics contended that "Nixon fastened on Patton as a way to stiffen his resolve to invade Cambodia." Feeney, however, rejects this interpretation and says that like Patton, Nixon saw himself as "a bold and decisive outsider who loathed red tape."

The Nixon that emerges in this book is neither hero nor villain. Often highly critical, Feeney nevertheless gives Nixon due credit for his achievements. For example, in the 1950s, Nixon transformed the office of vice president. Before Nixon, "vice presidents had been expected to be neither seen nor heard— except, perhaps, at election time. It was Nixon more than any other person who helped change that." As Vice President, Nixon went on diplomatic missions to fifty-eight countries."By the time he left the vice presidency, Nixon had become an international figure second only to [President] Eisenhower among U.S. officeholders."

In a narrative of well over three hundred pages about politics and movies, Feeney makes only one patently dubious statement. He says that Nixon "failed to make anything of his 'New American Majority'" (the coalition that reelected him in 1972). In fact, Nixon forged the electoral building blocks that would form the basis of Ronald Reagan's presidency in the 1980s. Feeney includes an appendix that lists all of the movies that Nixon saw during his presidency, as well as when and where he saw them. While this book has manifest strengths, it is also often curiously unsatisfying. Its style is too meandering, too discursive. Still, embedded in the stream of its narrative are nuggets of insight into Nixon's character.