A confrontation and a concession
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Before Monica dished to Barbara, before Mel parried with Diane, before Paris spilled to Larry, Richard Nixon faced off against David Frost.
The encounter between the disgraced former president and the British talk show host who landed Nixon's first post-Watergate interview may not loom large for modern-day viewers jaded by claims of television exclusives. But when the five-part interview series aired in 1977, the medium was in its golden age and Frost's exhaustive questioning of Nixon marked the rise of a now-familiar genre: the television confessional.
The story behind the interviews -- a tale of fierce competition for one of the biggest "gets" of all time and the skepticism that faced the man who landed the sit-down -- inspired a treatment by writer Peter Morgan, whose play "Frost/Nixon" is enjoying a successful run on Broadway. Later this month, production is set to begin on a film version directed by Ron Howard, with Frank Langella and Michael Sheen reprising their stage roles as the politician and the journalist.
The dramatic reenactments are bringing the Nixon interviews "back into people's consciousness," said author James Reston Jr., who worked as one of Frost's researchers and wrote a book about the experience that came out last month. "I think it had been very underplayed by historians of the period. I viewed it as part of the reconciliation process in America after Vietnam and Watergate, a major piece of binding up the wounds of the nation."
In Morgan's semi-fictionalized version, the interviews take the form of a contest between Frost's facile charm and Nixon's wiles, from which Frost emerges as the victor when he extracts Nixon's admission that he "let the American people down." In fact, the former president's aides -- conscious that he needed to show remorse to rebuild his public image -- had also been pressing him to admit his failings on Watergate.
"We understood the notion that if he was to have some other role in national life, other than have to explain this nonstop, it was pretty important to do something like this," said Ken Khachigian, a former White House speechwriter who helped Nixon prepare for the interviews.
