Customer Reviews

Nixon - The American Experience [VHS]

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Richard M. Nixon, loved, hated, misunderstood. The masterfully researched, edited, and narrated American Experience documentary paints a three dimensional picture of the good and the bad of America's most controversial President. The presentation is unbiased and reveals a great deal about the pained inner-workings of the mind of a man who was no stranger to power. Nixon changed the world--and his men enabled him. I have been inspired to learn all I can about the man since viewing the 3-hour video. And I challenge you tame your intrigue.

We've come to expect high-caliber quality from PBS' "American Experience" series, and its treatment here of the ex-president meets the standard. The documentary, intelligent and probing, takes us from Nixon's birth in 1913 in Yorba Linda, Calif., to his final departure from the White House Aug. 9, 1974. In between, we get an extraordinarily concise portrait of a man of still-inexplicable contrasts, his political genius and undisputable intellect undermined by a deep character flaw of petty resentments and a near paranoia that prevented anyone from defining the definitive character of this complex being. John Erlichman, one of the Watergate defendants, probably said it best in his comments that no one, including Nixon's wife, could ever write the "definitive" Nixon psycho-biography. This is one of the few Nixon bios that hasn't used words like tragic to describe the disgrace that brought down what could quite likely have been one of the most effective administrations in presidential hsitory. Yet the facts of Nixon's downfall as presented here don't require the use of adjectives. We still get the sense that Nixon was truly a tragic figure who, because of his own character flaw and getting caught in a trap he set for others, was done in by his own pathos. "American Experience's" version of Nixon is an important historical resource for everyone interested not only in the man but a defining incident in presidential history.