Customer Reviews

An evening with Richard Nixon,

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Nixon is described as the ideal person for his football team to have on the bench. At Whittier College "he'd sit there and cheer the rest of the guys." When he was in law school at Duke, he still wanted to play football. "We used Dick for purposes of dummy tackling." Nixon had a lot more conscious thought processes running through his head than most people embedded in complex social systems. The play written by Gore Vidal in 1972 suggested using a tape of something Nixon said on the day of the performance. The example seems geared to provide a combination of maximum contrasts.

NIXON'S VOICEOVER By devaluating the dollar -- something this administration will never do -- there will be greater prosperity for all Americans both here and abroad . . .

Nixon took the world off the gold standard so a trading mechanism would establish currency values. Working people usually slave away at whatever mechanism is supposed to provide prosperity within the organizations that establish institutional thinking. Some aspects of American life have not changed much since Nixon was president when I was in Vietnam 41 years ago as the war there was winding down by changing the colors of the bodies from American soldiers to more Vietnamese casualties. I consider Daniel Ellsberg the greatest psychiatric case of the Vietnam war, and Nixon's plumbers tried to find the Ellsberg file in the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist. My own interest in Freudian humor of the Vietnam War has a lot in common with expletives that were deleted in White House Transcripts released after this play was written by Gore Vidal. This play is not deep enough to drown anyone.

In this treasure, Gore Vidal puts Tricky Dick on trial for his political career... but it was written a year before Watergate became known, so it has even more piquant quality to think that the past was just so much prologue to his real crimes.

Using his own words, and those of JFK, Ike, Helen Gehagan Douglas ("The Pink Lady"), Vidal proves Richard Nixon's career is one of the main reasons politics has gone to heck in a handbasket.