Word: frosts
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...presidency was on rare display around Washington last Thursday. First there was the 37th President, deposed Richard Nixon, quoted as saying in a David Frost interview that a President was above the law. Before noon No. 38, Gerald Ford, now a genial Palm Springs jock, was traveling nostalgically through the corridors of power on his second visit as a private citizen to the place he wished he had never left...
...third Frost interview, he talked both of a country arrayed against him and of one held together by his courage and daring. He was comparing himself to Lincoln again, and his troubles to the Civil War, talking about heaven and hell and lamenting that the Kennedys had never had him to lunch .Here again was the evidence - and warning - of how personal the presidency can become, how easy it is in the comfortable recesses of power to drift beyond reality...
...Richard Nixon and a tenacious David Frost revived memories of the Viet Nam War and the domestic dissension that it sowed, that was the startling defense of the former President for some of the actions of his Administration against the antiwar movement...
...exchange, part of the third of the televised Nixon-Frost interviews, was fascinating. Nixon insisted that when "a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude" was involved, a President could readily use otherwise illegal acts, including burglaries (he preferred the euphemism "warrantless entries"), wiretaps, mail openings, and IRS and FBI harassment against any "violence-prone" dissenters. But if this was so vital to national security, why not ask Congress to make such acts legal? "In theory," said Nixon, "this would be perfect, but in practice, it won't work." It would alert the targeted dissenters, he said...
...Frost kept probing for Nixon's view of the limits on presidential power. If burglary is all right, why not murder? "Ah, there are degrees, ah, there are nuances, ah, ah, which are difficult to explain," replied Nixon. He said that it might have been better to kill Hitler before he could order the murder of millions of Jews. Frost reminded Nixon that domestic dissidents were hardly comparable to the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Nixon finally agreed that only "the President's judgment" determined what was legal under this Nixonian doctrine of presidential supremacy...