Theatre Conversations: Frost/Nixon at The Kennedy Center

[Music]

Welcome to the Kennedy Center Performing Arts Series, brought to you by the Kennedy Center and the Prince William Network. I'm Colleen Sunette Jennings, co-director of theater and music theater at American University, and your moderator for today's program. I'm joined in the studio audience by students from Hilton High School. Welcome. With us are Stacy Keach, Allen Cox, and Dr. James Thurber.

Stacy Keach, who plays Richard Nixon, has devoted much of his theatrical career to the classics, playing the title roles in Richard the Third and Macbeth for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. He rose to prominence in 1966 in the off-Broadway political satire McBird, which won him the first of three Obie Awards. He was nominated for a Tony Award in 1969 and won a Golden Globe and a Best Actor Emmy nomination. He has many film and television credits, including his portrayal of the hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer and as the warden in the series Prison Break.

Alan Cox, who plays David Frost, worked extensively as a child actor, most memorably in A Voyage Around My Father with Sir Laurence Olivier and as young Watson in Young Sherlock Holmes. He attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and made his London West End debut at the age of 13 in Strange Interlude. He has done several productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he moved to the United States in 2007. He made his Broadway debut in the Tony-nominated production of Translations. Mr. Cox is a director in addition to his performance work in music theater, film, and television.

Dr. James A. Thurber is a distinguished professor of government and director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University in Washington, D.C. He's an author and co-author of numerous books and more than 75 articles and chapters on Congress, congressional-presidential relations, congressional budgeting, congressional reform, interest groups and lobbying, and campaigns and elections.

Frost/Nixon, currently playing at the Kennedy Center, is a chilling recount of one of the most monumental interviews of all time. This fast-paced production depicts former President Richard Nixon in his first interview since his resignation following the Watergate scandal. The play tells the story of how the historic interview came about and how it played out on television, as British talk show host David Frost, played by Alan Cox, elicits candid confessions from Nixon, who is played by Stacy Keach. This was what the rest of the world was waiting to hear.

Before we get started, let's watch a short video that lays out the progression of events surrounding the break-in at Watergate, the meetings held by Nixon after the burglary, and his attempt to stop the investigation.

It was on the night of June the 17th, 1972, that five men were arrested breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C. It turned out later that the break-in had involved such key Nixon supporters as Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy and had been planned by the president's own re-election committee, headed by former Attorney General John Mitchell and his assistant Jeb Magruder. Bob Haldeman, the president's chief of staff, was with Mr. Nixon in Florida when the break-in occurred. They returned to the White House on June the 19th, and they met on a number of occasions during the next few days. Two meetings I regarded as key. The first occurred on the morning of June the 20th and included a discussion of Watergate. A White House tape of that discussion was later found to have been erased, the famous eighteen and a half minute gap. The president met again with Haldeman on June 23rd. In that conversation, Mr. Nixon is told that the F, the FBI is moving into problem areas in its Watergate probe. Haldeman suggests, and Nixon agrees, that the CIA be instructed to ask the FBI not to proceed any further with its investigation of the burglary.

Mr. Keach, Mr. Cox, can you briefly take us through what part of history is covered in the play?

Well, it started, well, with the break-in, obviously. We're back in the '70s, and Watergate became, I think, the very first vestige of reality television. When, when the Watergate committee met in session, we were glued to our television sets. We couldn't take our eyes off of it because for the first time in our history, a big political scandal was being revealed, and we were sharing it with a television audience. That was the beginning of it. I mean, yeah, the play starts on the day of Nixon's resignation, which is August 1974. This process of putting things in place for this interview that eventually took place in March 1977. And it was the first interview that Nixon had given since leaving the White House, and it had been secured by this British talk show host, David Frost, over and above a lot of the American TV journalists that were pitching for this scoop of interviewing Nixon since he left office. Disgraced. And up until that point, David Frost had been, he'd been viewed as a television talk show host, like a John Daly or Jay Leno, or some of the lightweight, a lightweight, not as a serious journalist or a serious interviewer until this particular moment. He had covered the presidential debates in 1968, which Nixon eventually won that presidential race, and that exposure to the American public gave him the opportunity to run a talk show which ran from 1969 to 1972, which filmed out of a Broadway theater in New York. But he's, you know, he used to have political figures as well as entertainment figures, but he was a notorious schmoozer of celebrities in order to get them to appear on his show. So he was a surprise choice, I think.

And this was such an amazing time in American history. Can you talk a little bit about what the time period felt like? I believe you were working for Hubert Humphrey at the time. Can you talk about the, the feelings on Capitol Hill?

Is that when looking, Stacy was right. I was working on the Hill at the time, started in the fall of 1973 and stayed for several years with Senator Hubert Humphrey, who used to be the Vice President. Who ran against Nixon, lost by half of 1%. Was not bitter about that, you know, when we talked about it. But we, we impeached the president. That was the second president of the United States. Now we've impeached three. In other words, we indicted a president. It was a big deal. And we, we watched these, these hearings on TV to see how these things came out. And, and it wasn't predictable as to what people were going to say. But, you know, I want to point out something else. Everybody was working on the Hill on, it's going to sound very familiar. Energy, an energy crisis during that period, the economy, and an unpopular war because the president said he was going to withdraw from Vietnam. He did not. He invaded Cambodia, and that was part of this whole set, the war in Vietnam, and the fact that he was using the power of the presidency to stay there. So that was the context of this. And so it was very important.

You've worked with political candidates in various stages of their careers. Do you think there's a type of personality or certain qualities that you find in people who are attracted to that area?

Yes, I do. There's great variance across candidates. I worked for Hubert Humphrey, who talked a lot. Didn't really. I worked directly with Barack Obama. He's a listener. I'm very impressed with that. Nixon didn't like people, in my opinion. And so there's a lot of different characters. It's strange that he went into politics. And that comes out in the play. Humphrey loved politics. He needed to be affirmed by crowds and people. And, and Barack Obama is very balanced. You know, he, you, you get the impression that he could do it without all the adulation, but he's getting the adulation now. Nixon, it was really paranoid. I'm sorry, he was a paranoid president. He thought people were out against him, and that started this whole series of events of the break-in to the Democratic National Committee. The joke on the Hill at the time was, why did he break in there? There's nothing there. There's no information. And then he covered it up. It was stupid, but part of it, I think, came from his personality of being paranoid. I've never run into paranoid politicians that made it so far to the, you know, to the White House or other places, in my opinion.

Well, my next question was gonna be for any of the three of you. Why do we keep coming back to him? What is it that, paranoid? Of all the presidents we could write a play about and go and see, why him? What is it that fascinates us about him?

I think it's the dark side, as well as the, I think the paranoia that Dr. Thurber, Richard's, certainly part of his personality. But he was also a very intelligent man, and one of, one of the more intelligent presidents. He was enigmatic. He, he also had a certain drive for respectability. His passion to be like, he wanted to be liked. I don't think he was, I think you're absolutely right. I don't think he was comfortable around people. I think that he would have liked to have been, though. Yes, I think he would, he would like to have been invited to the parties and liked to have been, you know, the hero on the football team. But he, he wasn't, he wasn't a very good athlete. Even though he was very smart, he was, he was very self-conscious about his looks. He was convinced that perspiration was responsible for when his upper lip was responsible for his losing the presidency, and the shadow from his beard. He was very self-conscious and very suspicious and very distrustful of everybody around him. But, Colleen, he's, he's a historic figure in a positive way too, and that's why we go back to him. He fought relations with China. He opened up China. This, this conservative who ran hammering his first appoint, first opponent that's being a communist, and she wasn't. He fought relations with Russia. He created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He created the Environmental Protection Agency. He created the Council on E, on Environmental Quality. All these quote liberal things were created under him. So he had two sides. He did a lot with government. He didn't hate government. And then he had this, this other side. The other side was also related to the quote Southern Strategy. The Southern Strategy was the realignment of the South to get the old Dixiecrats to vote Republican, and he used race in that, which was a very unpleasant aspect of, of Richard Nixon in politics during that period. And I think we've gone beyond that after this last election. I didn't, the other thing about, as it occurs to me about Watergate and this trial by television is that the whole notion of guilt, what it means to be guilty, and, and the whole intellectual fencing around the notion of guilt that took place by Nixon himself, and also by, I guess, lawyers and advisers. That I think for the American people to see a figurehead being put under such scrutiny was a very traumatic thing. Whether or not he was guilty, whether or not he was guilty of committing a crime, somebody that had been trusted or had been elected into the, the position of commander-in-chief, was suddenly seen to be fallible. And I think that loss of innocence was sort of epoch-defining. And I think the nature of sort of governmental sleaze has been measured against that point because that's the most profound record, record of governmental sleaze, that whole Watergate period.

But in the play, you point out in the dialogue so well that he really destroyed trust in government for a whole generation, almost, version, at least ten years, trust in the presidency. And it's taken a long time to get that back. And, and it was because of this impeachment, what he did, what he did to cover it up, and a variety of other actions, not only just Watergate, but a lot of other things came out. And so people who really didn't trust presidents for, for a while. And he genuinely believed that what he was doing was not criminal. He, he honestly believed. He said, when you're in office, you have to do a lot of things that are not, in the strictest sense of the law, legal, but you do them because they're in the greater interests of the nation. And Frost then says, well, are you saying what you're, what you're doing, you're doing things that are not legal? You know, I'm saying, when the President does it, that means it's not illegal. And, you know, Stacy, he was above the law.

And says entitled. Whose days we come to modern presidency where some people think it's happening again with signing statements that change the intent of the law from the Hill, from redefining torture, from defending wireless taps and other things like that. It's very similar. It's okay. I think that's why the play is speaking to us today.

I agree with you. And this, and this thing that we were talking about earlier about that, that somebody out of a sense of crisis making a decision without going through the appropriate channels. The appropriate channel, I'd like to say, isn't the people's body, and, you know, Congress. We have separated powers where they have the power of the purse, they have the power to commit to war or not. And the appropriate channels certainly were not taken when Nixon did what he did. And that was part of the problem. He impounded money illegally also, and eventually that went to the Supreme Court. It was overturned, and he was forced to spend it. There were other actions that were quite controversial. So there was, there was a lot going on behind the scenes of the presidency. You know, obviously, he was at a very vulnerable state.

How did Frost get this interview? There were other journalists like Mike Wallace and others who wanted to do it. Why Frost?

I think he, I think he put the best deal on the table. I think he caught Nixon at a point where psychologically he was prepared to be grilled, or a grilled, rather. That he just written his memoirs, and I guess one of the results of writing your memoirs is you order, you're thinking about certain things. Especially if you were a trained trial lawyer, you learn how to argue that a cat is a dog, and that it's raining when it's sunny. So I think Nixon felt that he could rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the American people. I think he was, I think the flip side of his paranoia was that he was fascinated by how the medium, the media works, in the sense of the visual media. I mean, I think in his TV addresses, he used to number them, didn't he? He said, this is the 37th time I've appeared in front of you. Just again, which president before that logged the amount of appearances he made on a television? So I think that Nixon thought he, and Nixon's team thought that they could get one over on Frost in terms of rehabilitating himself. Whereas Frost, I think he was very smart in acquiring a team of specialists in the various areas of, of Nixon's failings as a president. So that he was incredibly well performed, at well informed, and well prepared to hopefully dodge this man's intellectual fencing. But what he also understood was about the nature of television, that you don't need to just play in a question-response situation to play the question on camera and in the response on camera. Sometimes you can play the question off the subject that's being interviewed, and also play the answer off the interviewer. So you, you get almost like an audience comment, or that you're in the position of the questioner watching the subject being interviewed. And I, from what I understand, that's what, that's what Frost brought to the interviews that no other journalist before had thought to bring.

But was he, sorry, yeah, what wasn't it the continued Nixon arrogance that he thought he could rehabilitate himself, that he was smarter than Frost, and that therefore he could change his image in history? And he, and moved from San Clemente back East so he could have people come to see him, leaders and others there. There's that statement, leaders and others to come and get his advice. It was a way to get out of Siberia for him. And there's a certain amount of arrogance that he had in office as well as out. Underestimated a man who was very, very involved with the, the development of television as an entertainment medium from 1961 onwards. So he knew about the cut, he knew about the edit, and he knew about the close-up. I think he was also nervous about Mike Wallace. He had an opportunity to go with Mike Wallace, but I think, I think he was a little nervous about that because Mike Wallace had a reputation of being, you know, somebody who would really nail him. I think you're right. I think he felt, I think it was arrogance. I think he felt like he could handle David Frost.

And excuse me, was also money? Yeah, it was offered more money. Well, yeah, very wisely. Step is, you know, because of Swifty Lazar, he's a good person. Because he was a British talk show host, it presented the market of Europe as somewhere where the, the interviews could be distributed around the world. And Nixon was on a percentage. So however popular the, the interviews would have been, Nixon would have got a cut.

Well, or that Frost never has admitted to that. You're talking about somebody then who's calculated all of this, who's maybe arrogant, guarded. How did Frost get such candid, you could say confessions? How did that happen? How would he let his guard down to reveal so much of himself, or did he? Is that our take on it?

I think he did. I think it was the missing third. It was that missing section of the whole anti-aging, the Hoffman account. That's it. And he called that, and that just pulled the rug out from anything Nixon had planned. What one, whatever revealed to the reality, he couldn't deny. One of Frost's researchers found another conversation on the same day that nobody had thought to kind of a comb over for evidence that the president was involved at an earlier date than the one that he'd admitted to.

May I have an outside theory? When, when you interview somebody for 28 and a half hours over 12 days, this came right at the end. The, the person being interviewed sort of gets tired, gets worn down, and he left an opening that comes out in the play. Yeah, very well. And he left an opening, and Frost came in and took, took advantage of it.

Why don't we take a look at a clip from the interview with the real Nixon and Frost?

"Let me answer it my own way about how do I feel about the American people. I mean, whether I should have resigned earlier or what I should say to them now. Well, that forces me to rationalize now and give you a carefully prepared and cropped statement. I didn't expect this question, frankly. Though, so I'm not gonna give it that. But I can tell you this. How did I? I could tell you this. I think I said it all in one of those moments that that you're not thinking. Sometimes you say the things that are in your heart when you're thinking of that bats, and you say things that you know are tethered to the audience. I had a lot of difficult meetings those last days or I resigned. And the most difficult one, and the only one where I broke in tears, frankly, except for that very brief session with Ehrlichman up at Camp David. It was the first time I cried since Eisenhower died. I met with all of my key supporters just the half hour before going on television for 25 minutes. We all sat around the Oval Office. Men that I'd come to Congress with, Democrats and Republicans, about half and half. Wonderful men. At the very end, after saying, well, thank you for all your support during these tough years. Thank you for the particularly for what you've done to help us end the draft, bring home the POWs, and have a chance for building a generation of peace, which I could see the dream that I had possibly being shattered. And thank you for your friendship. The relax, the friendship over the years. You know, you started remembering you with a birthday card. There is then something you haven't got much more to say. And half the people around the table were crying. Less Aaron's, Illinois, blessing, he was just shaking, sobbing. And I, just can't stand seeing somebody else cry. And that ended it for me. And I just, well, I must say, I sort of cracked up, started to cry, pushed my chair back, and then I blurted it out. And I said, I'm sorry, I just hope I haven't let you down. Well, when I said, I just hope I haven't let you down, that said it all. I had, I let down my friends, I let down the country, I let down our system of government, the dreams of all those young people that ought to get into government, but we'll think it's all too corrupt. And the rest, most of all, I let down an opportunity I would have had for two and a half more years to proceed great projects and programs for building a lasting peace, which was been my dream, as you know, from our first interview in 1968, before I had any thought I might even win that year. I didn't tell you, I didn't think I might win, but I wasn't sure. Yep. I, I let the American people down, and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life. My political life is over. I will never yet, and never again have an opportunity to serve in an official position. Maybe I can give a little advice from time to time. And so I can only say that, an answer to your question, that while technically I did not commit a crime, an impeachable offense, these are legalisms. As far as the handling of this matter was concerned, it was so botched up. I made so many bad judgments, the worst ones, mistakes of the heart rather than the head, as I pointed out. But let me say, a man in that top judge, top job, he's got to have a heart, but his head must always rule his heart."

Can you talk a little bit about the structure of the play? You've got these hours and hours of interviews. How did Peter Morgan put this together?

Well, he follows, first of all, he thought we start off with Nixon's resignation. Then we're introduced to David Frost, and we follow parallel stories. We follow David Frost's story, we follow Richard Nixon's story until they come together for these interviews. And then it's the sequence of events that lead up to the apology or the confession, basically. And it's like a thriller. It's, the first two-thirds of the piece, a lot of them, it's to do with whether the deal will hold together, right? Whether all the money will come together. There's tension and there, and, and also you see the two teams preparing their, their leaders for this confrontation, like a boxing match. That's, they're like training sessions. And, and again, he plays the two men as, as flipped sides of the same coin. I mean, on one level, there's a morality play going on, which is about ambition. The thing that they have in common is that they both, it's never enough. Whatever level they attain to, it's never enough. There's something in them that has to strive to go on further and further and further. And it's, it's very tightly, tightly constructed. It's also very funny. Yeah, there's a lot of humor in everything, which doesn't necessarily come across, you know, in terms of the way we're discussing this, but there is a lot of humor used in, in various ways, self-deprecating, and also to deflect the other person a little bit. Yeah, and also when something is running at a great momentum, a lot of the humor comes from when a spanner is thrown in the works, either there's an obstacle, or an inappropriate thing is said, or there's a slip-up, or, or whatever. In some, it's, it's very rewarding to play, like when Nixon says, you know, "I feel sorry for those Russian leaders. You never know when they're recording." Well, as a scholar of the political process, what was the impact of the play on you?

It brought back a lot of memories. I mean, I've lived through it, and I read the play. I've read other historical descriptions at that time, and it was very enjoyable. These, Mr. Nixon, you didn't find job, Mr. Frost, a good sign job, but it did bring back all those memories that sort of are back there. You continue with your life, and it was, it was good. You know, it was good because it also focuses on the power of the presidency in a democracy, where again, we have separated powers, where Congress has the right to oversee and to investigate, which they did, and to impeach a president who's very powerful, and to investigate not only that, but the war and the intelligence community. All that came back. I was working on some of those things with Senator Hubert Humphrey. So it's accurate to history, and it's quite moving, and I recommend it.

Could you both talk a little bit about your preparation for the roles? Had, how much did you know about each of the characters that you're playing? And then how did you, how did you approach the roles?

Well, I, the first thing I did was look at the actual interviews after reading the play, of course. And then I made a decision that I said, well, I've got to do everything in my power to be as much like Nixon as possible. So I had a nose made, I had cheeks made, I had an upper lip made, I had contacts down, I even had teeth made. Yeah, yeah. And I, and of course, there's a hairpiece, you can see. Yes. And I decided, no, and I can't do any of it because it's not really about an impression or impersonation. It's about, but capturing the essence of it, which is not to say that there are certain behavioral things that you have to indicate, not using indication in the negative acting sense of the word, but to, to reveal something about the internal workings of the character, the soul of the man. That became my, my, my goal. And I think it was Peter Morgan's as well, because I don't think that he wanted the actor to do an impersonation. In the beginning, I think it's important to catch the vocal intonations of Nixon and the body language of his character. And so I worked on that a great deal in the, in the opening sequences, particularly when he's doing the resignation, and when he, when he's talking in the East Wing of the White House to his press corps. But after that, it becomes a matter of the actor interpreting. And because, hopefully, by that time, the audience is willing, suspension of disbelief is very willing, you know, they really go along with you. And, yeah, likewise, my first step was to watch the interviews, and after having read the script, and then I, I put the, the audio of the interviews on my iPod, partly because I found, I found the actual fact really difficult, and also I'm a terrible student. I cannot let it down and read a book. I've got a good eye. So I'd go running, and I would listen to these, and I'd get to know more and more about the characters and the situation from the, the exchange between them. I didn't watch the interviews a lot because I didn't want to get caught in too many physical mannerisms, partly because at this stage, I was still in England, you know, I wanted to interview Stacy as it were, as Nixon, rather than replicate, you know, this thing about impersonation. Impersonation is good for a sketch for like five or maybe ten minutes, but after a while, we forget about the impersonation, and we're interested in the content and the relationships and the more human stuff. So, you know, you, you can have like Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin, but then after a while, you, you forget about that because you're watch, you start to identify with the car. You don't want that separation between the actor playing the role and the character they're depicting. Now, for me, I grew up with David Frost being on the TV's seemingly all the time. He used to do a Sunday morning show called Frost in the Morning for something like ten years, and before that, he was just, he was a figure. He was always on the telly whenever you turned it on. They used to be a thing in London, you say, "Oh, what's on that? What's on the David Frost tonight?" But again, he'd been in the periphery of my attention. So when it got to study him, it was, it was fascinating. And also, as I mentioned earlier, some of his achievements with respect to the medium. So then, you know, as a person in the audience watching them, within a few seconds, for me, if, if they were Nixon and Frost, and it was about personality, they were about these two personalities, and they really nailed it on the personalities. In terms of Nixon, I don't know David Frost that well, but I did watch Nixon and knew about him, and I, you know, I, I think they got it. And that doesn't mean that you have to look exactly like them, although they, after a while, you think it's Frost and Nixon because they nailed it in terms of personality in the dialogue. It was real. For me, did either of you feel that in order to do your characters justice, you had to find some personal connection to that character? And if so, what were the personal connections?

Well, I think for Nixon, I think it's the desire to be liked. The desire to be, which all actors could identify with, all people can. I did, when we all want to be, we don't want to be disliked by our friends. What every life, he really wanted to be liked, but he didn't do the right things in order to be liked. I mean, he didn't have the golden rule in his heart, I don't think. I really don't think he did. I think he felt that he was entitled, that he was, that he deserved to be liked, and that's, I think where he got into real trouble in terms of human being. Hmm. Yes. And that's first part of the process. You, you, you, you, I mean, now when you train, I'm more conscious about defining objectives, super, and intentions nowadays. That's almost like second nature to me. So now, if I think about it, and also as Stacy's answer, yes, you do. You sort of align yourself with the character's objectives. But then you're also aware of how they differ. So like, on, on one level, you know, Frost talks about success in America. And yeah, I moved here in 2007, so I have a sort of similar ambition to kind of make it in America. The question is that what the nature of making it means when you play a character like David Frost, that's, you know, his career is his life, and that's not something I particularly want to emulate. But I, I admire his, his ambition. And, you know, with respect to Nixon, I think he didn't quite understand why power didn't bring people to him that liked him. Yeah. I think that in this picture back here, his chief of staff probably didn't like him. I mean, that came out in the play, and people close to him didn't like him. And I think he, he knew that in some way, they respected him. He had power, especially when he was president, but that doesn't mean that they liked him. And I think that hurt him, and it comes out in the play. Yes. Yes.

Did, what were the obstacles for you in terms of playing this? Or were there obstacles? Did you slip into character easily, or were there obstacles along the way?

I think there are always obstacles, yeah. In any kind of, what is laughingly called a creative process, rather than a creative scramble. I, I don't know. I have quite protective amnesia about pain. Well, every, every day is a challenge. I don't know, obstacle, they're their challenges constantly. I mean, every audience is a challenge, yes. Every night is a challenge to get, you know, to, and to find ways of making it fresh and innovative and spontaneous, and the first time, because nobody wants to go to the theater and see yesterday's performance, you know? So you do this. There are always three things going on when, when you do a show, especially as we've been doing on the road, which is that one, the theater you're in, two, the audience that you're playing opposite, and also how you are in terms of doing the play. That, the more you do a play like this, which is multi-layered, the more you discover about it in terms of nuance and, and detail. So each time you go out, there's, there's something else to be found in that environment created by those three things. If, if you've got your wit shot of a road, and that's, that's, that's the challenge for me. So I wouldn't, yeah, the obstacles of the past, I kind of, I'm not aware of them. I'm more aware of negotiating that there's a powerful media, yeah, and how, where are you of the audience? I mean, this, this play moves very quickly, and you seem to have a, a rhythm that starts going. So does the audience affect your rhythm?

Oh, absolutely, totally. And every night, I think I come off stage after the first scene, every night, and I, and I give my assessment. I say, "It's a Tuesday night, it's during flu season, and you get a lot more." Did we just lose a key word? But it's been great. And I'll say this, being in Washington, doing this play here, actually, where the event took place, by far the best audience. And Stacy, one block from where the event has looked, and people in the audience probably that had been, you know, they were certainly here, but associated with this, right? Is the response different from the Washington audience? At the laughs and the comments, has become in different place? Yes, very much. Interesting. Much more active response here than anywhere else. Well, us of Washington and Watergate, I mentioned, and the resonance is Georgetown, and just the bars on Georgetown. Sure. Yeah, sure.

Let me ask another thing that fascinates me. Do you think the results would have been the same had Nixon been interviewed by an American? What, is there a cultural difference here that enabled the interview to unfold as it did?

I think this, I mean, Frost, he claims never to have voted in his life because he doesn't want to be seen to take sides, having become aware at a very early age that this was the environment he would be working in for the rest of his life. I have mixed feelings about that. But so the idea of one, him being a political, and two, him being not in any way sort of poletik, politically a find or opposed to Nixon, meant that maybe it was a slightly more, I didn't, a prismic environment. You know, it, you, you could see more facets than if it had been more of a head-on confrontation. That, that's my, my thought. Yes.

And at the time of the interviews, he was sort of on a trajectory down in his career. From my interpretation of it, he had a show in Australia that was barely making it, and a show in the UK. Sometimes I've seen this with politicians in the United States, that if you're interviewed by somebody across the Atlantic, they think, "Oh, well, you know, nobody in the United States is gonna care that much." And maybe there was some of that. Although he was reaching out to the world, the world he felt liked him, in the United States didn't. And so maybe he felt that it wasn't as much of a challenge because this guy was down in his career. But also, he was a foreigner. I don't know what was going on in Nixon's mind, but I've seen that with some politicians. They say stupid things here, and they go across, and then they come back. Interesting. Interesting.

Whoa, at one point, you say, I shouldn't say, you say Nixon says to Frost, "You must have been very popular, and you will, you go to parties and so forth." He kind of has a fantasy about Frost's life in some way. Do you think that left him a little sort of open and vulnerable, or was there an envy to a certain extent?

I think that's true. But I think he really, he really admitted something to Frost in that scene where he admits that he was not really suited to the life that he chose. That he, he chose a life, you know, in which, him, as he says, hinged on being liked. Yes. And then he was better suited to a life of intellectual thought, debate, you know, intellectual kind of disciplines, legal stuff. Yes. And that, and that maybe Frost should have been the politician, and he the rigorous interviewer, as he says. Those are, you know, right at the very end of the play. But I think that what Peter Morgan does is that he makes Nixon very self-deprecating in terms of, and very aware of himself in those terms. I doubt very seriously that he would have, Nixon, the Nixon that I studied, would ever really be willing, would have acknowledged and would have admitted that. That's not a scene that we, that occurred in history, as far as we know. Yes, but it's a, but dramatically speaking, it's perfect for the character that works.

In what way did this interview transform the relationship between the media and the, and the presidency?

It transformed it fundamentally. At the same time as this was going on, we had scandal in Washington, D.C., sexual scandal, and scandal with alcoholism by members of Congress. A lot of people don't remember these. I won't go through all of them. But all of a sudden, the press started handling scandal, and, and also hard-hitting interviews. Everybody wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein, you know, they wanted to dig something up now, and force people to resign, you know, force people to be forced out of government because of these controversies. And it went on with Koreagate. I won't explain that, it's about bribery. It went on with Iran-Contra affair, where the press really went after this through interviews, but also through investigative reporting. So it was right on the brink of changing the way we covered politics in America, in my opinion.

In what way do you think our politicians, actors, and actors, politicians?

Oh, that's, that's a tough one. I think it depends on the politician, depends on the actor, you know. But I mean, we know that a lot of actors, wherever I mean, Ronald Reagan, both, yes. Arnold Schwarzenegger, both. Yes. We have up-and-comers, Fred Thompson. I mean, I understand Kelsey Grammer's getting me interested in running for politics. You know, I mean, a lot, I think because you have a public persona, and, and private, the private persona is able to manifest itself in some ways for most, for some people, in a more convincing way in political terms, and in behavioral or acting terms. Some people want, it's, it's a desire for power. I think, Colleen, I may be way out there, but I think that professors teach, good teachers, actors, politicians, they're all salespeople. Mmm. You know, and they are storytellers. They're all actors. And some of them are exactly the same when you're alone with them, like Hubert Humphrey was, as publicly. And some are very different publicly and privately. And I think if you want to be a successful politician, you have to know how to use your voice, your body, television, always medium, and you, you are an actor, in my opinion. And there's nothing wrong with that, because you have to communicate complex things in a way to persuade people. And I, so I think most politicians that I've met, I met a bunch of them, you know, including, I've worked with Barack Obama. I think they're, they're actors. Also lawyers, I think. Yeah. I mean, the question with the politics, politicians, actors thing is, who writes the lines? Or are they just making it up? And again, with with oratory, you think, well, how much is this prepared, or how much of this is improvised? Does this person have a genuine skill at communicating ideas because of the way that they construct their sentences, or are they reciting a script that they've learned before? And that was one of the things I found watching the, the, the debates, the, the vice presidential debates, and the presidential debates, of how much of this is spontaneous in the moment thinking, and how much of this has been prepared beforehand. And the best politicians are people who can put together spontaneously what they're feeling because they really know it, and they're articulate. And we've seen some examples of people who are over-prepared in these debates and didn't quite do as well as the people who are very nimble at answering things. And I, again, the median now, it's like we're waiting for for politicians to slip up and deliver a gaffe of some sort. But the, the media is such now that a politician can hopefully get in and make reparation over that gaffe, or date, they're not in control of it. It takes on a life of its own, the particular gaffe that the politician has made. Otherwise, they'll be underestimated for everything.

Do you get this kind of overlap between the actor-politician in England? Is this a uniquely American phenomenon?

Brendan Jackson is MP for Hampstead and his Transport Secretary, the last, last time I checked. And Jim Brown is not a very good actor. That's great. He has great gravitas, and you know, he's, and he's Penny also, he's really, he's really good economist. It's just because you're a Scot. People, interestingly enough, I think that, you know, there's this strange transition that I don't understand from Blair to Brown without any general election. Yeah, when this economic crisis, Brown has really come into his. I know, I don't want to get his politic. Well, there's a play there where they agreed at the residence was. Yeah, it's been bright. I know. It's amazing.

I'd like to open up questions now to the audience because this has been such a fascinating discussion. Have you become any more sympathetic or less sympathetic toward Nixon as a result of this play?

Good question. Very good question. More sympathetic, for sure. And I think the play is the beginning of that. Peter Morgan paints a portrait of a man who has many contradictions and problems, but man, I think ultimately makes him human. I really believe at the end of the play when he says that he did what he did, but there were mistakes of the heart, not mistakes of the head. I think he really believes that. So I'm more sympathetic, certainly, than I was then.

I'm sorry, I'm not. I lived through it as you did, Stacy. But I'm playing him here. I know you're playing. You did a very fine job, and I did feel for him, but I still felt that he should have known better, and that he was calculating, and that what he did was constitutionally wrong. And so there, I'm forgiving him. I'm sorry.

Wait, we now have an email question from Matt Gelman from Walter Panas High School. How much preparation was required on the part of each actor to recreate the actual interview?

Well, as we discussed this earlier, quite a bit. I mean, ultimately, you read a lot of books, you look at the actual interviews, and then you throw a lot of that stuff out. Stuff out. But whenever you are playing a character who lived, a historical figure, I think there's a, there's a tremendous responsibility to do as much research as possible, which I, and I won't make that sound like it's a negative. I love it. I, I think one of the great joys of being an actor is the fact that you get a chance to learn something, not only about the period, but about the person. And it's said that, you know, you, as an actor, you, you have to be an advocate for your character. Even if you're playing a villain, you, you have to, you have to learn to love them. You may not like them, you may not approve of them, you may not agree with them, but you have to connect with them on an aspect, especially if they're a living character, on a sort of soul level, about fallible humanity. I mean, as Stacy said, I mean, personally, I had five months to prepare and, you know, assimilate information. And just the simple discipline, although very complex and execution of learning the lines, that our director, Michael Grandage, requested that we, we be off-book for the first day of rehearsals. Stacy and I met before the rest of the company joined us and kind of made sure that the, the interviews, that the exchanges in these interviews, before the rest of the company joined, before we had any questions about the, the philosophy, the politics, the artistry of anything, it was kind of us having trained ourselves. And also because you're, you're embracing certain characterizations and idiosyncrasies, you're suddenly putting the musculature of a character to the, to the voice of the character as well, and in relationship to your scene partner. Sure. However, thinking about memorizing the lines, I mean, I think Michael Grandage very wisely requested that we come in with

The lines or because until you know the music, you don't. You can't play the nose. You know, you don't know how to play the note. I think we have time for one more question. Yes. Have Americans become too distracted to watch an interview with the politician?

Absolutely not. If you watch, how many of you watch 60 Minutes this Sunday night? Okay, so about half the group has. It was with Mr. and Mrs. Obama, and it was a terrific interview, and they really set some records in terms of viewership. So I think it just depends on whether the person motivates people to come in and listen, whether they're controversial, whether they're loved or not. And I think that show shows that, you know, we're willing to see interviews. And before that, Palin, Governor Palin from Alaska, had very high numbers in terms of watching the two interviews that she had on two networks.

We have another email question. This one from Malcolm Pelletier. How close was the script to the actual interview? There are sections that are sort of verbatim. When those interviews were, were done, of course, they were, they were improvised. He's so he's tidied up some of the syntax, and also he's been fast and loose. He's sort of moved things around, transposed and transposed certain. But the, the flavor of the interviews is, is very similar to the originals. But for the economy of the theatrical medium, he had to cut things down into kind of bullet points and yet make it look as if it was a seeming flow of exchange.

Yes, yes. Another email question from Chelsea Keesler. Was it hard to portray the sincerity of Nixon's apology? No, it was not. Is it, it's not difficult at all because by the time we get to it, he's ready to give it. He's been, he's been pummeled pretty good, and he's humbled himself. And Frost, history has come to that moment with it. He's been caught too. He's been, you know, he's been cornered. So he's, he's ready to blow.

Another question from the audience. Yes. Um, do you think Nixon knew that what he was doing was illegal? Well, as he says in the play, it's a very good question. As he says in the play, that when the president does something, it's not illegal. He really believed that he was above the law, and that's one of his tragic flaws. I think. And the thing about motive, and that motive requires a specific corrupt, that motive is something that has to be corrupt in order to be illegal. And that what he was doing was, in his mind, as he says, in the interests of political containment. But in the transcript from that period shows that he knew exactly what was going on. Right. He knows this breaking and entering is a felony, and he knows that, uh, it's a conspiracy to cover that up. He knew that. But he went beyond that, using his executive privilege in his mind as president to say, no, it wasn't illegal. But it is illegal by any standard in the United States. Hmm.

One more question. The American people had a right to know. Absolutely transparent. Knows it. Absolutely transparent government. Do you think the American people have a right to know that as an absolute transparent government? Yes, I do. I think, I think this is a democracy. So I think the American people, we are the people. We, it's our government. They, the government should do exactly what we want them to do. That's the way it was set up by our forefathers. That we are the ones who determine what should happen. Transparency is like oxygen to fire in a democracy. It's absolutely necessary to have transparency. And in fact, if you look at the history of the United States, the history of this period, ultimately, it is transparent. Ultimately, there are no secrets. Ultimately, it comes out. And so I think it's absolutely essential in our democracy, in the British democracy, to have transparency. We still have an official sequence. I know you do, and we don't. And we have many more things that are that are out in the public. However, presidents try to keep it closed sometimes. I'm afraid we're out of time. I would love for this to go on. Three fascinating. Thanks so much to Stacy Keach and Alan Cox and Dr. Thurber for being with us today. And I'd also like to thank the students in the audience. Thanks to the viewing audience from across the country for tuning into the program. Goodbye.

Meet the artists after the show. You and your students can ask questions of the artists after each broadcast by emailing us at Caseyperfarts@aol.com. Don't forget to visit us online. There you'll find dozens of archived programs from previous seasons that feature artists such as members of the National Symphony Orchestra, Ballet Hispanico, the Billy Taylor Trio, lyricist Stephen Schwartz, cast members from Mame, and many more. Prepare for each program by downloading the study guide. Each guide includes background information about the artists, instructional activities, and additional resources to use in the classroom. The Kennedy Center Performing Arts Series, bringing the arts to your classroom.

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