Heated Debate About 'Cool' Cut

The cast's reservations turned out to be well-founded, Hunt says, when the White House called a second time. "All of a sudden they came back and asked if we would make some cuts in the show," Hunt says. Hunt, librettist Peter Stone and the cast all felt it was no coincidence that the Nixon White House wanted to cut "Cool, Cool, Considerate Men," a Broadway-style minuet sung by conservatives intent on steering the country, as Sherman Edwards' lyric goes, "never to the left ... forever to the right." Nixon staffers also requested excision of the song "Momma Look Sharp," a dialogue between a dying soldier and his mother.

According to Daniels, the production stood its ground: "The producers told them no, absolutely not." And Hunt adds, "We told them it was a kind of censorship." Nixon's staff dropped the request for cuts, and the cast decided that the show should play the White House.

Besides, for some of the more political cast members, this was as an opportunity. On the Sunday in early 1970 when President Nixon watched the unexpurgated "1776," he got a little something extra during "Cool, Cool, Considerate Men." As Hunt recalls: "Let's just say the cast performed with additional verve. I was sitting right next to Nixon, and even I was getting nervous."

Hecht, who led the number, reports that he delivered it "with a kind of Brechtian vigor, a vehemence--dare I say venom?" Hunt recalls that the end of the song left an icy moment of uncertainty in the air, which was broken by Nixon, who suddenly stood, shouting bravos.

"I think he had to do that, it was so tense," Hunt says.

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In 1971, when Hunt and Stone signed on as director and screenwriter, respectively, for the film version of their musical, they could not have known that they would once again hear "Considerate Men" and Richard Nixon's name spoken in the same breath, this time by the film's producer, Jack Warner.

Warner had been a big Nixon fan and campaign supporter, and the two had become friends over the years. (By this time in his career, Warner had retired as studio chief at Warner Bros. and had become an independent producer.) Also, when Warner was summoned before HUAC back in '47, he readily named a dozen screenwriters as Communists. ("Ideological termites," he called them.) Finally, like the Nixon White House, Warner wanted cuts in "1776."