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'Nixon at the Movies': All the President's Films

NIXON AT THE MOVIES A Book About Belief. By Mark Feeney. Illustrated. 422 pp. The University of Chicago Press. $27.50.

THE title of Mark Feeney's "Nixon at the Movies: A Book About Belief" is odd, even mystifying. But it's accurate. This is an odd, mystifying book. You turn the last page and find yourself wondering, What the hell was that?

Feeney, a writer and editor at The Boston Globe, offers up formidably intelligent analyses of some key episodes and themes from Richard Nixon's life. His choices are willfully idiosyncratic; he is on the lookout for topics with aura, with resonance, so Nixon's predawn visit to the Lincoln Memorial at the height of the Vietnam War receives more attention than the Alger Hiss case. Yet what's most idiosyncratic here is the way Feeney wraps everything in celluloid. Almost all the chapters take their titles from the names of movies -- "Dark Victory," "Sweet Smell of Success" -- and these movies serve as symbols, springboards or simply excuses for Feeney's ruminations.

The chapter called "All the President's Men" allows him to explain how Watergate helped give rise to paranoid thrillers like "Chinatown" and "Three Days of the Condor," and ultimately to a kind of "populist nihilism" in which Hollywood viewed government officials as being capable of doing just about anything. The John Ford western "Two Rode Together" lends its name to an examination of the fraught Nixon-Kissinger relationship (of course), but also to a discussion of John Ford movies in general. Feeney is not one to linger long over a single subject. His instincts dictate his direction, and the reader can only follow helplessly behind, never knowing what twist or turn is going to come next. "Double Indemnity" begins with a lengthy comparison of Nixon's character to that of Walter Neff, the protagonist-murderer of the Billy Wilder movie ("Neff is Nixon as he might have been"), moves on to a consideration of Gore Vidal's play "The Best Man," then to a description of Henry Fonda, "the screen's pluperfect anti-Nixon," before coming to rest with a riff on Raymond Chandler and Southern California.

"Nixon at the Movies" is not a book to be judged by the coherence or originality of its argument but by the quality of its performance. (Feeney's approach resembles that of two other ruminators on popular culture -- Ethan Mordden, who is cited several times in the text, and David Thomson, who, Feeney says, urged him to write this book -- and animating all three are the gun-moll gesticulations of Pauline Kael, for whom responsiveness was everything.) There are brilliant star turns here, as when Feeney likens Nixon to the director Frank Capra. Both were Southern Californians from the wrong side of the tracks, desperate strivers driven by fear and resentment and sharing a sensibility that mixed idealism, sentimentality and opportunism. Each needed the spur of crisis -- Capra in his plots, Nixon in his life.

One of the few chapters without a movie title is "Suspicious Minds," drawn from the Elvis Presley hit. It deals with the famous meeting between Presley and Nixon. Feeney couldn't ask for a more resonant moment (the photograph memorializing the meeting became the most requested item in the history of the National Archives), and he makes the most of it. In one sense the two men couldn't have been more different: "Absolute id crashed into absolute superego," Feeney writes. "The uptightest man in America shook hands with just about the loosest." In another sense, each welcomed -- even needed -- the other. Presley had been overshadowed by the Beatles and the 60's counterculture; Nixon, a clueless Mr. Jones, embodied everything the counterculture wasn't. "Elvis and Nixon stood far closer together than anyone might have reasonably imagined in 1970," Feeney says. "It's just that they were standing back to back rather than side by side."

Still, Feeney enjoys showing off too much. He has a fondness for strained one-liners like "Two no longer rode together -- Nixon had fallen off his horse." And self-indulgence frequently overwhelms him. In his deconstruction of the "I'm not a crook" statement, he compares the informality of the original with the way it is commonly misremembered ("I am not a crook"), and writes, "The rhythm is staccato, calling attention to the gathering consonantal harshness of the t, cr and k." It's usually a mistake when an author seems to be having more fun than his readers.

In truth, almost everything Feeney has to say about Nixon has been said before in one way or another by historians, journalists and other Nixon watchers. But the piece of territory he can claim as his own is Nixon's movie-viewing habits. By Feeney's count, Nixon, an unabashed film buff, watched more than 500 movies during the 67 months of his presidency, all carefully listed in an appendix titled "What the President Saw and When He Saw It." Nixon concentrated intently on whatever was on the screen; he refused to leave even if the picture was a dud and everyone around him was restless. He was omnivorous, would watch anything, though he did have his preferences. These are not surprising. The president who reputedly favored meatloaf for his meals favored meatloaf for his movies, too. His favorite film was the overripe clinker "Around the World in 80 Days." Only rarely did he watch R-rated or foreign films. He liked happy endings. Movies were obviously a means of escape for him, and as the Watergate noose tightened, he spent ever more time in the screening room.

Yet Feeney warns us not to leap too quickly to any conclusions. As with all matters Nixonian, the moviegoing was more complicated than it at first appears. For one thing, Nixon was not without taste. John Ford was his favorite director, and among the several classics he viewed were "Vertigo," "The Maltese Falcon," "Rio Bravo" and "Citizen Kane." (Is there anyone who would be more interesting to talk to about Charles Foster Kane than Richard Nixon?) He watched filmed treatments of "Hamlet," "The Sea Gull" and "War and Peace," pictures, Feeney suggests, that John Kennedy, the James Bond enthusiast, would probably have walked out on. And that's a crucial point. Of all the modern presidents, Nixon is surely the most complex, the most layered, which is the reason for his enduring fascination, the reason for books like this one. He was more cultivated than Kennedy, more cosmopolitan than Johnson, more intelligent than Reagan, more disciplined than Clinton, more self-aware than either Bush and more sensitive than all of them. Pessimistic, joyless, deracinated, trapped in his own charmlessness and isolation, with a yearning vulnerability, a brooding self-hatred and an eye that could cut through any hint of phoniness or complacency, Nixon possessed the psychological acuity of an artist -- or a sociopath. It could be said that he knew more, understood more, than any other recent occupant of the White House. It could also be said that he couldn't handle what he knew. So he hid inside the most visible office in the world, torturing himself along with everyone else. And he went to the movies.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 7, Page 20 of the National edition with the headline: All the President's Movies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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