Hopkins Or Langella Who was a Better Nixon???

Don't count out Philip Baker Hall in "Secret Honor", which is the most claustrophobic of all Nixon movies; a one-man 90 minute exploration directed by Robert Altman and available in a nice Criterion edition.

I have to vote for Anthony Hopkins though, since his performance and that movie in '95 was the first time we were able to see him in a more sympathetic light; as a man done in by a system with a machinery that moves regardless of who's President.

When in Frost/Nixon they mentionned the moment of Nixon and Kissinger praying on their knees, all I could picture was that spellbinding scene between Hopkins and Paul Sorvino as Kissinger where Nixon just breaks down.

Langella is wonderful, particularly in that phone conversation late in the movie. That monologue he delivers is fantastic.

So pretty close for me, but Hopkins wins out.

Slow_dissolve, this is more of my interpretation of what I've read, rather than any author's argument (that I can recall off the top of my head, at any rate). Some of the books that I think influenced me in coming to this conclusion were: Nixon's books (esp. Beyond Peace, RN: Memoirs, In the Arena, and Leaders), Bud Krogh's Integrity, Bill Safire's Before the Fall, Jonathan Aitken's Nixon: A Life, and Kissinger's books (either Years of Upheaval or The White House Years, or maybe both).

Now, I think these self-same books could probably be used to make a strong argument that Nixon was a true pragmatist too, so let me just stress that I too think that he tended to be far more pragmatic than idealistic. However, I do not think he can entirely be explained as a cold-hard realist. Why? First, I think merely his belief in the possibility of a "framework of peace" that would prevent nuclear war through diplomacy was idealistic in and of itself. He may have played diplomacy as Realpolik, but his ultimate goals seem a bit on the Utopian side to me. I think this is even clearer when one remembers that one of his biggest heroes was Woodrow Wilson, perhaps the most idealistic person ever to inhabit the White House. Although Nixon did note that Wilson was overly idealistic in his opinion, Nixon's goal reminds me at least somewhat of Wilson's goals for the aftermath of WWI, supposedly the war to end all wars (I mean here world peace and not anything dealing with methods--Nixon wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the UN from anything I've seen, certainly nothing like Wilson felt toward the League of Nations).

Think too of the great denouement of the Frost-Nixon interviews. In Nixon's climactic apology that this movie makes so much of, Nixon didn't just say he was sorry for letting down the American people and our system of government, he also specifically said that he was sorry for destroying his own dream of creating a "lasting peace." Apparently, he felt that this lost goal of his was one of the biggest failures of Watergate. Also, the impression that I got from Julie Nixon's book on her mother was that Pat Nixon viewed her husband's political goals from an idealistic standpoint. This could, of course, have been entirely of her own imagining, but I would suspect that she was basing this view on things that her husband had said or attitudes that he had expressed.

I think also that Nixon's midnight trip to the Lincoln Memorial soon after the Cambodia invasion was not that of a pure pragmatist and realist. Although the press focused on his talking solely about football to a few young people as he was leaving, Bud Krogh in Integrity and Safire in Before the Fall have very thorough descriptions of what occurred that night. I forget the details, but Nixon told a bunch of young protesters that although they disagreed on the conduct of the war, they should still try to work together for the good of the world on other subjects, like the environment. He added too (like he did when talking to Frost about Watergate) that he hoped their disillusionment with the war wouldn't translate into disillusionment with the country and with government. Krogh, who was there with Nixon that night, said that what Nixon said moved him greatly and made him significantly change his opinion of Nixon. Although I don't remember exactly what he said, Nixon's plea to a small group of young hippies for everybody to work together for the good of society struck me as at least somewhat idealistic (and unrealistic, if still a laudable--if bizarre--attempt at communication).

Although not outright "idealism," I think too that Nixon's belief in the mystique of the leader, which he so admired in Charles de Gaulle, in particular (although also in other people such as Churchill), is not entirely compatible with cold, hard political realism. Also, Kissinger wrote about Nixon's "romantic imaginings" that tempered his take on things. Listen too to the taped conversation that Nixon had with Kissinger about their meeting with French writer Andre Malraux and how excited Nixon was when Malraux told him that he could "change the world" with his opening to Communist China.

I'm probably forgetting a lot of stuff here, but my main point is that yes, in many ways, Nixon was a political realist and pragmatist, but as I tried to indicate by saying he was "something" of an idealist, I feel that those labels just doesn't entirely explain him politically. Just an opinion.

Thanks for the lesson about Nixon, but I still say Hopkins made the better Nixon!