Word: nixonization
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...Still, there's nothing like the real thing, in festering splendor, on the Frost/Nixon DVD. Here is Tricky Dick, smiling, wheedling, lawyering like crazy to get himself exonerated on a technicality, until he realizes that this isn't a courtroom, it's a TV show. Like any politician, Nixon was an actor - a bad actor, to be sure, but a great bad actor, in that he let the camera's surgical close-ups reveal more than he wanted to display, and sometimes the exact opposite of what he was trying to say. The performance is infuriating and hilarious, or unbearably...
...Richard Nixon, no less than David Frost, was a TV personality. Every U.S. president from John Kennedy on has had to be one: the nation's talk-show host, defining its agenda and character. (Franklin D. Roosevelt created the same niche on radio with his Fireside Chats.) TV stardom is a matter of connecting with the masses by peddling an agreeable personality. That's a challenge for which the brainy, devious Nixon was ill-suited...
...George W. Bush) who could convincingly play the good ol' boy with southern or Southwest charm. John McCain, who'd been so funny and sunny with his press gang on the Straight Talk Express, turned crotchety in the general campaign and lost to another Harvard smoothie. McCain-Obama was Nixon-Kennedy all over again...
...Nixon looked especially awkward losing to John F. Kennedy in 1960, and then following him as president eight years later. His White House was no Camelot; Pat Nixon, of the "good old Republican cloth coat," couldn't match Jackie Kennedy, the movie princess swathed in Cassini couture; and Milhous was, in media terms, a throwback. As Kennedy was the first TV president, Nixon was the last Chief Executive of radio. (See pictures of TIME's JFK covers...
...Before television, few would have noticed Nixon's perspiration problem, or his basset-hound jowls, whose stubble shadow always read five o'clock. He had a pitchman's handsome baritone voice, and relied on it to counterfeit intimacy, but his oily modulations couldn't erase the public's suspicion of phoniness; a salesman can't close the deal if his prospective customers know what they're hearing is just a pitch. On TV, his stabs at an intimate geniality showed the effort more than the effect, as if invisible wires were pulling his mouth into a smile. This...