Frost/Nixon

I have mixed feelings about the current buzz on this film:  on one hand I see it as a small step towards a measured historical judgement about Nixon, yet the tone in which this work is presented to the public makes me shake my head that there are still those out there who even 30 years later simply cannot move on.

Understand that I am not a Nixon fan.  I don't think I could write down what I thought, let alone said when the news broke that President Ford had pardoned Nixon (I have since changed my mind and now see Ford's act as probably one of the most noblest, courageous political decisions I have known, and one which probably cost Ford a term of his own).  And I do wonder why Nixon did what he did, for he did not have to.  After the Democrats nominated McGovern as their candidate, Nixon I think,  could have made a couple of speeches from the White House Rose garden and still have won his reelection handily.

So we have a man, to me is very much like the Churchillian, "A enigma, wrapped in a riddle, surrounded by mystery'  He was divisive, yet one thing in particular, his steps to unfreeze  relations with China, was to me, the very first step towards the end of the Evil Empire. And yet a man who perhaps out of years of frustration, when he had it all, put a painfully stupid plan into action, which cost him and those around him all.

As I have said, to me there are those, particularly within the Washington Beltway, who still exhibit blood lust for the man and I ask, given the disgrace he went through and that his name bears, what would have been sated this?  Putting him on a tumbrel and carted out of the White House along Pennsylvania Ave, to a guillotine erected at the base of the west face of the Capital? A long prison sentence and a cell where he could have intimate time with his cellily?  Banishment to the remotest part of Antarctica?  exhume his corpse and put it on trial (as was done in the 14th century). Just what would have been/ is enough 'fit the crime'?  The man has passed on into whatever historical judgement awaits. The Nixon haters should truly get a life.

The film? Haven't seen it and I wonder what its value, besides stoking passions that should have been put away years ago, is.  A new fresh look at Nixon?  I don't know as the conversations were in the 1970's, in a still very emotionally charged atmosphere, which I suspect is a reason this film may still blur what the true picture should be.