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THE WAGES OF SPIN

Richard Nixon and the death of political interviews
The Guardian, June 2002

RICHARD Nixon was a bully, a bigot, an anti-semite, a paranoid neurotic, a war criminal and, despite his most famous protestation of innocence, a crook. That he is remembered principally as the only US president ever disgraced into resigning, and that for covering up a burglary, seems a pitifully inadequate punishment for posterity to deal him – as ironies go, it is comparable with Al Capone’s lone conviction for tax evasion. Most of all, Nixon was a liar. When he went to his (doubtless very warm) eternal home in 1994, he left us absolutely no reason to believe a word he ever said about anything. As such, there would appear to be nothing at all to be gained by watching an interview with him.
  However, Sir David Frost’s “The Nixon Tapes”, shortly to be broadcast by Discovery, is grimly compelling television. The interviews were filmed in 1977, less than three years after Nixon quit, and amount to the only rigorous interrogation about his misdemeanours that Nixon ever endured (regrettably, Frost was not vested with the statutory power necessary to assemble a firing squad). Only five hours were ever broadcast out of nearly 29 hours recorded – for this series, Discovery will show ten hours.
  The David Frost shown here will astonish those who’ve only seen him spoon-feeding guests on that chat show nobody watches on Sunday mornings, or struggling to stay awake through “Through The Keyhole”. The Frost that met Nixon 25 years ago was exacting, disdainful and, most devastatingly, silent – on several occasions, he just sits for minutes at a time and lets Nixon talk and talk and talk himself into utterly unpickable moral knots. Nixon, having lied about so much for so long, clearly no longer had any idea what the truth was.
  Though Nixon’s testimony is, by definition, at best doubtful and at worst useless, “The Nixon Tapes” is fascinating as a close-up of the personality who defined the modern adversarial relationship between politics, press and public. Before Nixon, people may have thought their leaders were liars. After Nixon, they knew it, and the default position of the western world’s electorate ever since has been one of mistrust and apathy. Before Nixon, the press may have wondered about the limits of their power over politicians. After Nixon was scalped by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, they knew there weren’t any, and now the first resort of glory-hunting journalists on both sides of the Atlantic is the hysterical call for someone’s head. Before Nixon, politicians wondered who they should trust. After Nixon, they knew: nobody, and now they treat the truth as something that should be hidden from view at all costs.
  In this respect, “The Nixon Tapes” is the dawn of the modern age of the political interview. Nixon’s motivation for appearing, in common with all politicians who consent to such enterprises, was not a raging desire to lay the facts before the commonweal, but to look good, and be liked – the revelations that do escape are the result of Frost’s subtle technique and Nixon’s occasional failure to remember which whopper he’s supposed to be telling at a given moment.
  On television, the post-Nixon relationship between politicians and press has taken the form of attritional contests between people who ask questions and people who don’t answer them. Britain is blessed with some splendidly querulous interviewers, but their different personas – Jeremy Paxman’s crotchety Colonel, Jon Snow’s disappointed headmaster, Jonathan Dimbleby’s over-eager cub reporter – are wasted on hyperactively wary politicians who view every inquiry as a threat: it’s like watching world-class fast bowlers trying to tempt a rash shot out of a keep left sign. It almost never happens that the viewer feels better informed for having watched an interview with one of the people they pay to run their country; such broadcasts can only be welcomed by television repair firms, who must do a roaring trade replacing screens cracked by angrily flung tea mugs.
  This nation echoed to the clang of porcelain on glass just a few weeks ago, when our prime minister went three rounds with Britain’s most feared inquisitor, Jeremy Paxman – who once, as if seized by a perverse determination to demonstrate the futility of his job, asked a prevaricating Michael Howard the same question 14 times. Blair’s performance during the Paxman interviews was truly Nixonian in its opacity – witness his ridiculous vacillating about whether or not he believed that creationism should be taught as fact in schools (“I am not sure that it is and therefore I don’t know that it’s a relevant question,” he wittered, while you willed Paxman to grasp him by the lapels and yell “FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE, SHOULD WE TEACH OUR KIDS THAT GOD PULLED THE UNIVERSE OUT OF A HAT IN SIX DAYS, OR NOT?”). It was often less like an interview than a sequel to Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead”, reaching a celebrated apotheosis of absurdity when Paxman asked about the £100,000 donated to the Labour Party by Richard Desmond, owner of The Express, and one or two less family-oriented titles.
  “Horny Housewives,” recited Paxman, with a commendably straight face, “Mega Boobs, Posh Wives, Skinny & Wriggly. . . do you know what these magazines are like?”
  “No, I don’t,” replied the prime minister.
  This one moment illustrates the pointlessness of these encounters better than any other. Tony Blair may not be a regular reader of Horny Housewives, Mega Boobs, Posh Wives or Skinny & Wriggly, but he certainly knows what they’re like, in the same way that one does not need to subscribe to Railway Modeller to surmise that it contains articles about model railways. It would have been hoping too much that Blair might have chirped “Yes, they’re full of pictures of men with unfashionable moustaches copulating joylessly with surgically distorted young women,” but it speaks volumes for the pervasiveness of the creed that Nixon epitomised that Blair’s reflex response to a tricky question was to duck.
  It’s always an interesting exercise, at moments like this, to imagine that our leaders respect us sufficiently to tell the truth, rather than parading such nonsense – remember, not only did Blair know he was talking rubbish, he knew we knew he was talking rubbish. Why couldn’t he just have said “Frankly, the Labour Party is up to its neck in debt, so we’ll take it where we can get it, and it never hurts people in my position to keep newspaper proprietors on side”? It might not have been tactful, but it would have been honest, and it would not have created the impression that our prime minister thought the electorate were complete idiots. Indeed, had Blair adopted such a tack throughout the interview, his approval ratings would have rocketed (Paxman: “You have total confidence in Mr Byers?” Blair: “God, no. He couldn’t pour piss out of a boot if you wrote the instructions on the heel. But you can’t get the staff.”)
  It is staggering that modern governments, in thrall as they are to polls and focus groups, should fail to apprehend the patent fact that people much prefer politicians who give straight answers to straight questions – not every Londoner who voted for Ken Livingstone agreed with all of his policies, but every Londoner who did vote for him knew that Livingstone wasn’t a careerist stooge reading platitudes off a pager. As Richard Nixon discovered, but as few who’ve followed him have learnt, all lies fail eventually, because the subsidiary lies necessary to sustain them are too easily lost in the fog. When Nixon finally tells Frost the truth, even he looks briefly liberated.
  “I let down my friends,” he mumbles. “I let down the country, I let down our system of government, the dreams of young people who ought to get into government, [but] who think it’s too corrupt and the rest of it. . . I will have to carry that burden all my life.” So will we, Dick. So will we.

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