Word: nixon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...RICHARD NIXON has really gone off the deep end. In a new play by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone, he spends his time in his study talking into a tape-recorder, defending his career before an imaginary judge. He claims that the multi-millionaires of California's Bohemian Grove--the real rulers of America's industry and military--put him in the presidency. He didn't really want to continue war in Vietnam or get involved in the Chilean counter-revolution, but rather those filthy moneymongers forced him to. Finally, sick of prostituting himself and his country, he resolved...
...this information about this former president ought to be intriguing and provocative. But Secret Honor: Nixon's Last Tape is baffling and boring; a self-indulgent, sophomoric parody of a political figure who was actually very complex. The play's concept is amusing, but its unstructured, hour-and-40-minute monologue without intermission is sleep-inducing. Besides, Nixon (Philip Baker Hall) drops names and scandals in such an incoherent jumble that only someone minutely familiar with his career can grasp what is going on. Mixing facts and falsehood, he'll jump from the topic of Watergate to his first grammar...
...POINT Nixon complains to the judge: "You know the cartoons with the stubble and the jowls--do you realize that I have feelings too?" And in many ways the writers of the play themselves are cartoonists who place Nixon in the most humiliating light possible and mock him; theirs is the mentality of postcards that show a bald Reagan in nothing but his sweatsocks. At the beginning of the play, Nixon spends 10 inept minutes hemming and hawing the words "Testing: one, two, three...uh...uh...four," while fumbling with a tape that keeps blasting out the Goldberg variations. Nostalgically...
Reagan did not retire - never wanted to. Nor did Johnson, Nixon, Ford or Carter. Leaving the presidency is tough on the ego. Once you've played the White House game there isn't much else that looks like...
...litigator for the ACLU. Shattuck represented Morton H. Halperin in his suit against the government at the height of the Watergate scandal. Halperin, an assistant to Henry A. Kissinger '50 when the latter was National Security advisor, was a victim of wiretapping illegally authorized by then-President Richard M. Nixon and Kissinger in the early days of Nixon's presidency. During the case, Shattuck obtained depositions from Nixon, Kissinger, H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman and Attorney General John Mitchell. Included in these was an eight-hour session with Nixon at his San Clemente estate. After two years of hearings, the court...