The true story of what really happened
By Jonathan Aitken
24th January 2009
What really happened behind the scenes in Frost/Nixon? The new film tells the story of the epic series of interviews between David Frost and Richard Nixon in 1977 that ended in one of 20th century television's most dramatic confessions.
The tale has been given a riveting screenplay by Peter Morgan (The Queen, Longford and The Last King Of Scotland) and is magnificently acted by its two stars - Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost.
But Hollywood history and accurate history are sometimes uneasy bedfellows. The true story of the interplay between the two protagonists and their entourages that resulted in such an unexpected and gripping climax is much more intriguing than the dramatic license employed to portray the events on screen.
The real thing: David Frost (right) interrogates Richard Nixon in 1977
I can give the inside story because, as Nixon's biographer, I knew the ex-President and his inner circle well. After he was forced to resign from the presidency for his part in the cover-up of a burglary at the Democratic Party offices in the Watergate building in Washington DC by undercover agents linked to the White House, Nixon withdrew from the world in disgrace.
But during those difficult post-resignation years (1974-79), I was a regular visitor to La Casa Pacifica, the Nixons' hacienda-style estate overlooking the Californian coast at San Clemente, where most of the movie was filmed.
After my first marriage in 1979, my wife and I spent part of our honeymoon at La Casa Pacifica.
There, an awkwardly but determinedly romantic Richard Nixon presented us with a formal corsage of flowers, made delicate inquiries on how we were sleeping, and took immense pains in putting on a festive dinner party which he called 'La Casa Pacifica's welcome to the honeymooners from three happily married couples'.
They turned out to be ex-President Nixon and his wife; David and Julie Eisenhower (President Ike's grandson and Nixon's daughter); and Congressman and Mrs Jimmy Roosevelt (FDR's son and daughter-in-law).
The newly-wedded Aitkens came a poor fourth in such dynastic circles.
Scandal: The Watergate Hotel where shamed former President Richard Nixon attempted to bug and burgle the offices of the Democratic National Committee
Almost as crucial to my understanding of the real events behind the film as knowing Nixon himself was knowing the team around him in his years of exile. They were his senior aide, Colonel Jack Brennan (who, played by Kevin Bacon, co-stars in the movie); my old Oxford friend and contemporary Frank Gannon, who was chief researcher on Nixon's memoirs, and his girlfriend Diane Sawyer, now a top TV presenter but then Nixon's principal Watergate researcher.
Then there was former speechwriter and researcher Ken Khachigian, who was keeping a diary that is probably today's most reliable historical record of the Frost/Nixon drama; Ray Price, another of the ex-President's speechwriters; and the former White House press secretary Ron Ziegler.
On my non-honeymoon visits, I usually stayed with Sawyer and Gannon, and formed a particularly good relationship with Jack Brennan, with whom I co-organised Nixon's first post-resignation visit to London in 1978.
Those of us who were around at the time are united in our incredulity over three major historical flaws in the Hollywood version of the story. Without giving too much of the plot away, the most dramatic twist in the movie comes when Nixon makes an extraordinary and emotional latenight phone call to Frost.
This phone call did not happen. Nixon's weird rant about his personal motivations and social resentments, which purportedly gave Frost new clues to hidden secrets about the Watergate cover-up, is, from start to finish, an artistic invention by the scriptwriter Peter Morgan.
Frost and Nixon leave an unidentified home in South Laguna, California , after taping the interview
He uses this dramatic device as the turning-point which gave a demoralised Frost fresh hope and adrenalin, firing up his psyche so that he became transformed into a pugnacious interrogator whose brutal line of questioning ultimately broke the former President.
That never happened either. For Frost did not ambush Nixon during the final interview into a damaging admission of guilt. What the former president 'confessed' about Watergate was carefully pre-planned. It was only with considerable help and advice from his adversary's team that Frost managed to get much more out of Nixon, in the closing sequences, by reigning in his fierce attitude and adopting a gentler approach.
And, finally, the consequences of the interviews for the lives and futures of the two principal protagonists were quite different from the winner-takes-all sequences we see at the end of the film.
Back in 1977, Nixon was at rock bottom as a disgraced political pariah in exile. He bore more than a passing resemblance to Napoleon at Elba, with the added indignity of being desperately short of money. Unable to meet his doctors' and lawyers' bills, Nixon was on the verge of no longer being able to pay his staff.
Frost's willingness to sign a contract paying Nixon $600,000 - around $8 million in today's money - for 24 hours of taped interviews which would be edited down to six one-hour programmes, was a financial lifeline; at least three times more than the previous offers he had received from major U.S. networks.
Nixon was driven solely by this urgent need for cash, so he accepted the highest bid, even though it came from an improbable British source.
Unfortunately for Frost, most of the recorded interviews were a journalistic disaster. Nixon, the master stonewaller, fulfilled his contractual obligation to get through all 24 hours of televised interrogation. Although he never actually gave an answer lasting 23 minutes to a single question (as the film suggests), he did succeed in weaving a web of maximum tedium and minimum disclosure.
Worst of all, Nixon gave no ground on Watergate; nor did he come anywhere near offering an apology for it.
Frank Langella playing Richard Nixon in the film Frost/Nixon for which he has been nominated for best actor in the 81st Academy Awards
The film accurately captures the Frost camp's despondency at how badly things had gone. What it does not say is that the Nixon camp was equally downcast. They realised that by offering nothing new to the American public, no attempt to explain or justify the events of three years earlier, Nixon could not even begin to repair his shattered reputation.
Indeed, so great was the San Clemente team's disappointment that they decided to move the goalposts - but for Nixon's benefit.
As Colonel Jack Brennan tells it: 'Frost sent his aide, John Birt [later boss of the BBC], to see me. He said: "This has been terrible. We need more time."
'My immediate reaction was "Tough. We've kept our side of the deal: the taping is over."
'But later I talked it over with my staff. We all agreed that Nixon should voluntarily go further and express some regret.
'So I went to see the boss and I said to him: "Listen, if this ends the way it has, the world is going to say, there goes the same old Nixon."'
At first, Nixon was curtly dismissive of this criticism. But Brennan and his team persisted. Their argument was that some expression of regret for Watergate needed to be put on record.
At the time of his resignation, and in his subsequent three years of selfimposed silence, the absence of an apology from Nixon had become a contentious issue in the media. So Brennan's argument that this was an opportunity to say sorry for causing the national trauma of Watergate carried some weight.
David Frost, pictured late last year, was said to be more of a kindly therapist in his interview with Nixon
Eventually, Nixon was grudgingly convinced, agreeing to gratuitously offer one more additional interviewing session. However, he wanted to do it some weeks later, in late May 1977.
Frost pointed out that the delay would result in the interviews being screened in August - a notoriously poor month for ratings.
With a flash of his famously self-deprecating humour, Nixon retorted: 'I got pretty good ratings on August 9, 1974' - the date of his resignation from the presidency.
A compromise was found. 'From that moment onwards,' recalled Brennan, 'I knew that Nixon was spending all his time preparing himself for how to say something that would not be a confession or an expression of guilt, yet would say sorry for what had happened.' Throughout his life, Richard Nixon had difficulty giving apologies. This one was the hardest of all.
As an assiduous rehearser of his own speeches, and an amateur dramatics actor of some note in his college days, the ex-President set about practising some of the lines that were later to be made famous by Frost: 'I gave them a sword . . . I let the American people down. . .'
However, in the first half of the final interview session, they were never delivered. Nixon seemed to be suffering some strange emotional block which, despite his intentions, resulted in more stonewalling and no expression of regret.
It was only some intuitive teamwork between Brennan and Frost that finally broke the impasse. The final session was suddenly interrupted, not by a blazing row as in the Hollywood version, but by Brennan holding up a notice to Frost with the words: 'Let him talk.'
Misreading the sign as 'Let us talk', Frost called for a break. During-this unexpected short interval, Nixon was persuaded by his team to overcome his reticence and put his mea culpa on the record once and for all.
But he did this only because Frost changed gear, too. Instead of crossexamining like a prosecutor on steroids, as he had been, Frost offered empathy, sympathy and gentleness to the visibly tormented ex-President.
Both men were in different frames of mind as a result of the promptings they had received during the break. Nixon was struggling to unlock his guilt, while Frost threw his clipboard away and adopted the mantle of a kindly therapist encouraging a patient to release his innermost feelings.
The result was one of the most gripping moments in television history. Under Frost's coaxing, Nixon finally conceded that he had participated in the cover up and lied to the world about it.
'Yes,' said Nixon, 'I let the American people down. And I'll have to carry the burden the rest of my life.'
As Frost's top researcher Robert Zelnick describes this cathartic moment: 'It happened because the Nixon staff made it happen.'
Making it happen again in the 21st century with Frost/Nixon is undoubtedly a cinematic triumph; but the film has other weaknesses when measured against history. As one of the few people who has known both Nixon and Frost well, I can say that it only catches one of their characters accurately.
The Hollywood portrait of David Frost is far too flip and flashy. Even in the 1970s, he was a considerably more substantial character, and his journalistic track record to that point far more accomplished than Peter Morgan's screenplay suggests.
Michael Sheen plays David Frost in the new film Frost/Nixon
He is a deeper and kinder man, too. It was these underestimated qualities which earned Frost the trust of the Nixon team and eventually prised the historic lines of regret out of the 37th President of the United States.
But Frank Langella's portrayal of Nixon brilliantly captures his Shakespearean complexity with a faithfulness that seems uncanny to those of us who were close to the ex-President at that time. The mean streaks, the inability to trust, the defensive circumlocutions and the self-serving evasiveness are all authentically re-created on screen.
But so, too, are Nixon's bottledup vulnerabilities, the pathos, the hurt, the self-deprecating humour, and even the wounded dignity of this surprisingly touching lion in winter.
'I prepared for the part by trying to understand the inner life of Nixon the man, not Nixon the President,' Langella told me in an interview last week. 'As I studied him in his boyhood, in his adolescence, and as a young man making his way, I gradually got to the individual hidden deep underneath the image he tried to project to the camera.'
These preparation techniques have resulted in a tour de force by Langella that this week earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor - one of five nominations awarded to the film.
This film is no vindication of Nixon, but it has already resulted in a resurrection of human and historical interest in him.
And that highlights the final flaw in the film. Frost is depicted as the clear winner of the contest, jetting off to greater fame and fortune (correct, although he only just broke even financially on the interviews), while Nixon is seen as the abject loser, marooned forever in golf-playing exile.
Not so. This was a win-win result. Nixon used his massively viewed 'confession' to Frost as the springboard to a re-invented role which the cynics called 'running for ex-President'.
Liberated from the earlier criticism that he had never apologised, Nixon emerged from the shadows of San Clemente and re-entered the spotlight of public life.
He moved back to New York, wrote nine best- selling books, became well respected as a sage of foreign policy, returned to the White House to advise Presidents Reagan and George Bush Snr, was a broadcaster and writer on national security issues, and addressed influential audiences across the world before his death in 1994.
Now he is a big hit at the box office, too. Who would ever have believed it at the time of those Frost/Nixon interviews?
[Nixon v Frost: The true story of what really happened when a ...
