Word: frosts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Zelnick who played Nixon's role in briefing sessions, to the point of using Nixon mannerisms and hand gestures. There was only one Nixon answer for which the briefing staff had not prepared Frost, says Zelnick. It came when Nixon blamed Congress for having failed to resupply the South Vietnamese, and thus causing the fall of Saigon. Says Zelnick: "I didn't think he'd have the balls to say that...
...assistant director and three cameramen scurried about the taping set, the staffs of both Nixon and Frost went to separate bedrooms from which they would watch the taping on monitors. The staffs were not allowed to communicate with either of the on-camera adversaries once taping began. Despite the high stakes involved, the Frost and Nixon teams mixed easily and cordially. Nixon often engaged in his stilted small talk when off-camera. He willingly obliged autograph seekers awaiting him outside the guarded gates as he left, smiling broadly as he chatted with them. Reporters were not allowed on the property...
...crucial turnabout for Frost came during an agreed-upon seven-day Easter break in the interviewing. It was then that his staff was close to panic. Frost later conceded that he was "genuinely daunted before Easter" by Nixon. Frost had been partying as usual, leaving one taping to don a tux and emcee the Hollywood premiere of a movie he had helped produce. But then came the baiting challenge from Birt before the birthday party and a telling jest in one of the songs sung that night in Frost's honor. To the tune of Love and Marriage, it went...
...following this needling, Frost set aside his favorite white wines (Montrachet and Pouilly Fuissé) and began closeting himself with his staff and reading far into the nights in his suite atop the Beverly Hilton Hotel. He was still in a mood for cramming, fortunately, as his rented blue Mercedes rolled toward the final Watergate taping. En route, he read the statute on obstruction of justice that was to prove so helpful...
When the tapings were over, Frost's people were confident, perhaps overconfident, that their boss had scored a journalistic as well as a financial triumph. But Nixon's inner circle was just as certain that its man, even with his battering on Watergate (or perhaps because of it), had done much to raise his standing with the public. The show's viewers, said one Nixon friend, "should be sympathetic. It gives a much better understanding of what he thought. Those who like to make judgments will be better informed on their judgments...