Many Americans remember the telecast during which Richard Nixon announced his resignation from the Presidency, forty years ago today, as a dark moment in the nation’s history. Watching the Leader of the Free World crumple in disgrace induced a mordant glee in certain quarters, but it was still a grim spectacle. The comedian Harry Shearer has another word for the events of that night: “goofy.”
In the clip below, you can watch Shearer (who is perhaps best known as the bassist in “This Is Spinal Tap” and as the voice of Mr. Burns and several other characters on “The Simpsons”) play Nixon in a verbatim reënactment of what happened in the Oval Office in the minutes directly before and after the resignation. Shearer strides in, as Nixon did that night, a man seemingly unperturbed by the fact that he is now probably the most widely despised American political villain of the twentieth century. (Jeffrey Frank recently wrote about Leonard Garment, who served as White House counsel from 1973 to 1974; Garment had viewed the original footage and was struck by "how relaxed" the President appeared.) Shearer's Nixon joshes inanely with the TV crew, who respond with shuffling embarrassment. There are only a few moments—like when Nixon snaps at a photographer for taking too many pictures—that he acts like he’s about to deliver anything more serious than the annual turkey pardon.
When you watch the actual footage from that evening, recorded by one of the TV cameras in the room, Nixon’s swaggering tone-deafness will make you squirm. Shearer’s reënactment magnifies that effect, both because the use of multiple cameras provides detail and depth, and because presenting the episode as a dramatic scene underlines the strangeness of the President’s behavior.
The clip is part of “Nixon’s the One,” a television series created by Shearer and the Nixon scholar Stanley Kutler. It was first broadcast in Britain earlier this year—a savvy choice for a show whose humor depends upon a taut sense of discomfort—and is slated to début in the United States this fall. The script is taken entirely from the Nixon tapes—the audio captured by the voice-activated recorders that Nixon had installed in the White House—and from notes from Nixon’s associates. The selected scenes are reproduced as faithfully as possible—“every word, every pause, to the best of our ability, every inflection,” Shearer told me. It’s hard to think of a more apt way to revisit the tenure of a President whose rise and fall was bound, at every juncture, to recordings of one kind or another.
Shearer says that the show sprang out of a longstanding obsession with Nixon, beginning during the Nixon-Kennedy debates, when he observed a “bizarre and remarkable unintentional humor” in the politician. Later, during the 1968 race, “as I watched him campaign and become President, it became obvious that this was a man who, fairly uniquely, spent about eighty-five per cent of his waking energy suppressing his genuine emotional responses to anything, and the other fifteen per cent blurting them out in the most untoward circumstances,” Shearer said. He wants to bring that inadvertent humor “back to the public consciousness.”
Along with Kutler, Shearer (who is a font of Nixon anecdotes) listened to hundreds of hours of the Nixon tapes, many of which have not been transcribed, to select scenes to feature on the show. Shearer has spent so much time listening to and analyzing Nixon that he very tentatively admits that he might be in better touch with Nixon’s emotions that Nixon himself was. (“I’d be pretentious and arrogant to say yes, but I’d be lying to say no.”)
The recording of the minutes before the resignation is one that Shearer has always found confounding. It is so clear that the camera crew is unmoved by Nixon’s small talk. “If you were a comic, you’d stop after two of your jokes bombed like that, but he just keeps going,” Shearer said. “For years, I was puzzled by that behavior. Why didn’t he just sit quietly until the time came to deliver the speech? What was going on there?” The answer that finally came to him, as he rehearsed the scene, is that Nixon already had an eye on rehabilitating his reputation. “Those people in that room were going to go out and say, ‘He wasn’t depressed, he wasn’t angry. My god! He was the nicest guy in the world.’ I think that’s exactly who he was. That’s how he got out of his depression, on fight. And the fight starts here.”
At the very end of Shearer’s reënactment there is a line that isn’t in the original recording and hadn’t been made public before the show; it was found in a staffer’s notes. It is the most straightforwardly funny moment in the scene, and it captures what, despite Nixon’s fighting spirit, must have been the chaos inside his head. He delivers his speech. He stacks his papers. Then he gets up, and—despite the fact that it’s a warm August night—he cheerfully says to the crew, “Have a Merry Christmas, fellas!”
