‘I am not a crook’
Watching Nixon’s fall while Trump is in the White House adds an extra dimension to what was both a personal tragedy and a national victory, says James Belfield.
When The Seventies was released as the rather obvious successor to the documentary mini-series The Sixties in June 2015, Donald Trump was still a month away from his first mention of building “The Wall” and announcing his candidacy for the US presidency.
But three years on (and 14 months into Trump’s presidency), the second episode – United States vs. Nixon – takes on a whole new life.
This series, on the whole, does little to dissect and reassess a decade which still resonates loudly today, preferring instead to focus on the tested formula of eyewitness talking heads and contemporary footage to show off US-centric, telly-friendly tales about pop culture, disco glitter balls, feminism, gay rights, the rise of terrorism and the Vietnam War.
It’s generally the sort of fodder a tired history or media studies teacher might decide to use to while away an afternoon class, or that might tempt a couch-bound couple of a certain age to “ooh” and “ah” over how the world used to look. But this week’s particular episode on Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal is a different matter – and well worth another look, given its new context.
Because the past year or so has seen almost anything produced out of the US become tinged by the partisan politics of deplorables versus neverTrumpers, the fact that The Seventies was assembled before the goldenmaned Potus took office means it’s effectively clean from deliberate innuendo.
And yet watching the fastidious chronology of Nixon’s fall from grace between his trip to China in February 1972 (during which he’s shown at The Great Wall saying “What is most important is that we have an open world. As we look at this Wall, we do not want walls of any kind between peoples”) and his gurning, V-forvictory-waving departure from The White House on August 9, 1974, it’s difficult not to draw comparisons between the two chaotic administrations.
The FBI investigations, the Senate inquiries, the firings, the president’s intrinsic dislike and mistrust of mainstream media (Nixon’s senior advisor Pat Buchanan says he deliberately created a “paranoid atmosphere” and was out to “get his enemies”) and not-so-subtle inferences about the presidential state-of-mind all ring true to the daily Washington briefings we’re used to from today’s news cycle.
What hindsight has provided for Watergate, though, is a clean narrative (something we’re probably still decades away from in today’s political maelstrom) and United States vs. Nixon is excellent at picking the choicest cuts off the bones of the two-year scandal that toppled an incredibly popular leader.
Because of his bogeyman status, it’s easy to forget that in the November 1972 election, Nixon painted the country Republican red in a landslide that included more than 60 per cent of the popular vote, 49 states and a sweep of the Southern states that had never been accomplished before from his side of the political divide.
And all that just five months after the revelations that linked the burglars of the Democratic National Committee HQ in the Watergate Complex in Washington DC to the Republican Party.
But the overarching difference and the doco’s lasting impression is that Watergate was a personal tragedy and a national victory. It was, as the show’s title and the impeachment process insist, a story about Nixon versus The United States – not an affair that split a nation.
Nixon is painted as an able, adventurous politician (his China trip is compared to the Moon landing for its impact) brought down because he challenged the pillars of US government. Evergreen US news anchor Dan Rather even goes so far as to say “when you weigh what happened with the potential of President Nixon, then this is almost the dictionary definition of tragedy”.
However the present administration plays out its days, it seems unlikely history will be so kind.
At the other end of the entertainment spectrum, TVNZ On Demand is becoming quite a nice little space for snippets of local comedy gold. Two series that offer bite-sized, sub-10-minute chunks of humour that you can probably chew over between work without spoiling your concentration are Suzy Boon and Stake Out.
Both rely on gentle, slightly surreal Kiwi banter and well-placed cameos to give extra shock value to some of the edgier action (Madeleine Sami is marvellous as a lecherous stop-go girl in Stake Out while Jennifer WardLealand’s vile, murderous Brazilian prison guard in Suzy Boon is hammed to perfection) but, maybe a little ironically for their episodes’ brevity, it’s actually how spacious the sketches are that makes them successful.
Gag-a-minute, fast-twitch comedy had made the sort of narrative humour that double acts such as Morecambe and Wise and The Two Ronnies excelled at in the 70s largely redundant – until the internet arrived to provide a space where run times simply don’t matter any more. And it’s great to see Kiwi comedians jumping in to fill the gap.
The Seventies is on Prime at 8.35pm on Tuesday, April 3 while full series of both Suzy Boon and Stake Out are available to stream now on TVNZ On Demand.