Nixon’s Nixon Writers’ Theatre
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So it’s not much of a leap to the fantasy offered in Russell Lees’s 1995 play Nixon’s Nixon, set on the night before Nixon will become the first U.S. president to resign. The “smoking gun” White House tape revealing Nixon’s efforts to get the FBI to stop the Watergate investigation has made impeachment a certainty. (Of course, had Hubert Humphrey decided to tell what he knew about Nixon’s back-channel attempt as a private citizen to impede Vietnam peace talks before the 1968 election—a blatant violation of the Logan Act—he could’ve been impeached a whole lot sooner.) His career in collapse, Nixon summons his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, whose own career is nearly at its zenith. Kissinger walks into the Lincoln sitting room to find Nixon giddily conducting an invisible orchestra as Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony blares on the stereo.
Lees takes an important turn away from the historical record, though, with regard to the timing of Nixon’s decision to resign. Nixon had informed Kissinger earlier that evening that he intended to step down, but in the play the president vacillates between surrendering and fighting to the bitter end. This departure should heighten the drama. With the fate of the presidency still up in the air, both men would have secret agendas. Nixon might be staging elaborate snares to test Kissinger’s loyalty, a crucial factor in determining whether he’ll give up his office. Kissinger, whose career will survive only if he can distance himself from the ruined president, must simultaneously coax Nixon out of office and secure an assurance that Nixon will urge his successor to keep him on as secretary of state—camouflaging his power grab as an effort to burnish Nixon’s legacy.
Lees ultimately has little to say about Nixon and Kissinger beyond the obvious—that they were ambitious, paranoid, opportunistic, and brilliant—and so offers slight food for thought. But his speculations ultimately move from the innocuous to the troubling. In the play’s most explicitly surreal scene, Lees’s characters dream up a cynical plan to use military action to give Nixon the kind of domestic clout that might keep his presidency alive. This, of course, was precisely the strategy the real Nixon and Kissinger used repeatedly during the Vietnam war—not to mention their efforts to prevent a settlement to the war until it was politically expedient. To paint this kind of scheme as wild fantasy is a dangerous whitewash of some of America’s darkest hours.v
