Word: nixonization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Graham's ministry, as his critics have emphasized, became utterly entangled with the powers of this earth. He was close to Richard Nixon for years, but at last grew retchingly ill when he read the transcripts of the White House tapes. After much puzzlement, he blamed Nixon's behavior on "sleeping pills and demons." Graham has always expressed a truculent love of authority, a desire for social discipline, for a certain orderliness that he seems to consider almost a necessity of the soul. He has been capable of aggressive anti-intellectualism. He displayed what Frady calls his "capacity...
...story's truly exciting figures (Charles Colson, John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman, Bud Krogh) get such short shrift that it is often hard to tell them apart; they are interchangeable ciphers in a series of look-alike scenes. Pat Nixon (Cathleen Cordell) is a walk-on role, and Martha Mitchell is not even mentioned. The show has a surprisingly in consistent attitude toward the casting of famous faces. Ehrlichman (Graham Jarvis) and John Mitchell (John Randolph) vaguely resemble their real-life counter parts, but many of their White House cronies do not. This indecision extends right up to the stars...
There are some bright nuggets here and there. William Daniels has a hilarious deadpan scene where, as G. Gordon Liddy, he outlines his outrageous schemes to trap '72 Democratic Convention delegates with call girls. As the President, Rip Torn does a gleefully vicious Nixon impersonation, whether he is re-enacting private Oval Office conversations (with bleeps in place of expletives) or declaring to the world that he is "not a crook...
Still, Torn's caricature, deadly as it is, lacks the impact of Jason Robards' scary Chief Executive in Behind Closed Doors. Though Robards made no attempt to imitate Nixon's mannerisms, he probed the man's soul; Torn, mimicking Nixon's actual words and gestures, only manages to re-create the familiar public persona. The difference between the two performances is emblematic of the gap between the two series. In historical dramas, facts can be helpful tools, but it takes art to snare the truth...
Jimmy Carter had just been elected President, and the Kremlin was nervous. After eight years of dealing productively with Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, the Soviets found themselves confronted in January 1977 with a largely unknown quantity. Would this new American Administration finish the work on a Strategic Arms Limitation treaty begun by Nixon and continued by Ford? The SALT I interim agreement limiting strategic offensive arms, signed by Nixon and Brezhnev in 1972, was due to expire in October 1977. Brezhnev and Ford had agreed at Vladivostok in 1974 on the framework of a new treaty to run until...