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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

‘Checkers’ Maybe, But Please, Not ‘Nixon’

Frank Rich New York Times

Now let me get this straight. A festive American family has just finished decorating the tree or lighting the menorah and wonders what it might do to round out the evening’s holiday fun.

A yuletide feast? A glass of eggnog? A little caroling while chestnuts roast on the open fire?

“No, I’ve got it!” says dad. “Let’s all go out and see ‘Nixon’!”

Such, incredibly enough, is the scenario that Hollywood has cooked up for Christmas 1995. Disney is pushing Oliver Stone’s three-hour-plus “Nixon” as aggressively as if it were the Radio City Christmas show: Nixon for the holidays!

And that’s only one of the Richard M. Nixon entertainments available for our delectation.

On cable, you still can catch the made-for-TV “Kissinger and Nixon” in which Nixon’s first line is the surely immortal “My Jewboy! Haldeman, where the hell’s my Jewboy?” Or come to New York, where the talk of off-Broadway is the play “Nixon’s Nixon.”

Will Rose Mary Woods and John Mitchell action figures soon be joining “Toy Story” tchotchkes on the Disney store shelf? Or how about an Andrew Lloyd Webber spectacular about the Watergate White House - “Rats,” perhaps?

Forgive me for seeming dense, but I thought that only yesterday Richard Nixon had been laid to rest as our most impeachable president. Even his diehard fans, even his revisionist boosters had conceded that he was the most awkward politician ever to have appeared before a camera, the antithesis of John F. Kennedy’s sexiness.

But now, apparently, 5 o’clock shadow is in - it’s time to short that Gillette stock - and Nixon is a star. It’s as if Mel Brooks’ old gag - an imaginary Broadway musical titled “Springtime for Hitler” - finally has come true, giving us (if I may paraphrase Brooks) the Nixon we knew, the Nixon we loved, the Nixon with a song in his heart.

Or, as Sidney Blumenthal wrote in The New Yorker, “At last, Nixon will acquire the quality he sought in vain throughout his career: charisma.”

I haven’t seen “Nixon” yet, but is it possible that Anthony Hopkins could do for Nixon what he did for his last anti-hero, the cannibal Hannibal Lecter - make him dashing? Could “Nixon” - which must draw large crowds to pay off its $43 million production cost - be a dating movie? An aphrodisiac?

Last weekend, I was at a dinner party in Washington - it was, truth be told, a Washington dinner party - and though no one there had yet seen “Nixon,” everyone already had a condemnatory opinion. Oliver Stone was going to misrepresent American history to the nation’s impressionable young just as he had done in “JFK” and would convince our children that Nixon and Howard Hunt were in a conspiracy to assassinate Fidel Castro, if not in a love triangle with Bebe Rebozo.

Now, given that a U.S. Department of Education survey released last month showed that only 40 percent of this country’s schoolchildren know why the Pilgrims came to America, perhaps we should not make a high priority of worrying about Stone. If “Nixon” succeeds only in teaching our children that its title character was a U.S. president, rather than a town in Bosnia, we may be ahead of the game.

But even if Stone is playing fast and loose, the debate over his historical drama’s accuracy seems beside the point. The real issue raised by our Nixon revival is: Why?

Why do Americans have such short memories? Why do we always sentimentalize our scoundrels, from Billy the Kid to Frank Sinatra?

In the case of Nixon, he now is “a giant of a tragic figure in the classical Greek or Shakespearean tradition” - as Stone puts it in the published edition of the “Nixon” screenplay. In fact, the word “Shakespearean” turns up in every single advance review of “Nixon,” with movie critics (depending on your weekly magazine) variously invoking Richard III, Lear and Macbeth (though not the more apropos Titus Andronicus).

It’s even safe for our politicians to start embracing Nixon again. There was a time when Kansas Sen. Bob Dole described Presidents Carter, Ford and Nixon as “see no evil, hear no evil and evil.” But last year, Dole weepingly eulogized Nixon as “the largest figure of our time.”

Now, Bill Clinton has taken to fending off Whitewater subpoenas with Watergate protestations of “executive privilege.”

No choice for the rest of us, I guess, but to get in the Nixon spirit.

Deck the halls with Tricky Dick!