Nixon and the Silver Screen

By Mark Feeney

Richard Nixon and the film industry arrived in Southern California in the same year, 1913. In Nixon and the Silver Screen, Mark Feeney offers a new and often revelatory way of thinking about one of our most controversial presidents: by looking not just at Nixon's career—but Hollywood's. Nixon viewed more movies while in office than any other president, and Feeney argues that Nixon’s story, both in politics and in his personal life, is nothing if not quintessentially American. Bearing in mind the events that shaped his presidency from 1969 to 1974, Feeney sees aspects of Nixon’s character—and the nation’s—refracted and reimagined in the more than 500 films Nixon watched during his tenure in the White House. The verdict? Nixon’s legacy, for better or worse, is forever representative of the “Silver Age” in Hollywood, shaping and being shaped by that flickering silver screen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Dec 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226049236

Book preview

Nixon and the Silver Screen comes from Nixon at the Movies by Mark Feeney, © 2004 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved.

Chicago Shorts edition, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-226-04923-6

Nixon and the Silver Screen

Mark Feeney

Chicago Shorts

Contents

Nixon at the Movies

Nixon in the Movies

What the President Saw and When He Saw It

Notes

NIXON AT THE MOVIES

It’s a way he likes to relax.

NIXON PRESS SECRETARY RON ZIEGLER, ON HIS BOSS’S MOVIEGOING

Oh, we sat through some real lemons. Bebe would fall asleep. Mother and Tricia would tiptoe out, but Daddy would stick with it.

JULIE NIXON EISENHOWER¹

Toward the end of The Senator Was Indiscreet (1947), William Powell’s title character suddenly gets cold feet about seeking the highest office in the land. Then he’s reminded that among the attractions the presidency has to offer is a projection room right in the White House: run your own pictures! Learning this, Powell reconsiders. Lana Turner? he asks. All of them, he’s told. Powell decides the Oval Office may be worth the effort after all (Henry Kissinger would have understood).

Richard Nixon, who saw but two Lana Turner films while president—The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)²—needed no such inducement to seek the presidency. This did not mean that once he reached the White House he wasted much time in taking advantage of this particular presidential perquisite. On January 22, 1969, only his third night in the White House, Nixon screened his first movie there, The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968). He didn’t even wait for the weekend: January 22 was a Wednesday.

Over the course of the next sixty-seven months at the White House, Camp David, Key Biscayne, San Clemente, and a handful of other locations, Nixon would spend well over five hundred nights at the movies. As Watergate worsened, in 1973, he averaged almost two and a half a week. Of course, few other Americans had the opportunity to screen movies for themselves: at the White House Theater, in the family room at Camp David, at Key Biscayne, or San Clemente in the living room with a projector and screen set up for the occasion. Even fewer can usually get any picture you want, as Rose Mary Woods explained in a memo to the Nixon family written shortly before they saw The Shoes of the Fisherman.³ Remember, too, this was in the days before VCRs became a mass consumer item; one can hardly imagine the bliss a movie fan might have felt three decades ago presented with Nixon’s situation. What movie fan wouldn’t find him- or herself sitting in the dark as often as Nixon did?

Lest we forget, though, he wasn’t just the nation’s first film buff but also leader of the Free World. The two positions do not balance out—the call of office rather obviously takes precedence—a fact that Nixon was uncomfortably aware of. He made a point of qualifying his remarks about Chisum with a (false) disclaimer that I don’t see too many movies; and in RN writes, Our favorite relaxation after dinner at Camp David or in Florida or California was to watch a movie,⁴ pointedly omitting the White House, where, in fact, he saw many movies, too. Nixon’s awareness that all this moviegoing might call into question how hard he worked—something he took inordinate pride in—makes all the more striking that he should have nonetheless managed to spend so much time watching movies.

For all that the president was unusual in how much he saw, he was much less so in what he saw. Nixon saw at least two of the five top-grossing films for each of the years between 1968 and 1973; more often, he saw three. From 1968, he saw Funny Girl, The Odd Couple,