The Gift of Richard Nixon – The Man, the Movies, and the Tapes that keep on giving

December 2, 6:17 PMPop Culture ExaminerDominic Patten

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For more of the Best of the Best of Holiday Pop Culture, check out Dominic Patten's Gift Guide here

Today the Nixon Library released more than 198 hours of Nixon's infamous and damning White House tapes and 30 cubic feet of documents. The tapes, which once again reveal the brooding politician was one chatty Cathy, cover the period of Nixon's landslide reelection in November 1972 and the bomb-dropping end of the Vietnam War the next month.

For more information about the Nixon Library tapes and text, click here

Of course if you like your history real, direct and with a movie tie-in, you can also pick up the new Frost/Nixon: The Original Watergate Interviews DVD, which also came out today.

Check out the DVD on Amazon hereand watch some of the original interviews on YouTube here

On Friday, the blast from the past will continue with the release of Frost/Nixon the movie

The semi-factual Ron Howard directed film is based on the award winning play of the same name by Peter Morgan, who also wrote The Queen, starring Helen Mirren. Featuring Michael Sheen and Frank Langella, who also played the leads on stage, Frost/Nixon is one of the first round of Oscar contenders. Serious films on serious topics that seek to raise serious issues of truth, justice, accountability and wide ties and win serious awards ... all on the back of the 31-year TV encounter between interviewer David Frost as he tried to give Richard Nixon the trial the pardoned President never had for the scandal and sins of Watergate

Check out the Frost/Nixon trailer and official site here


Not that Frost/Nixon will be the former President's only cinematic appearance in the next year. Nixon will show up in one form or another in The Watchman when the film adaptation of the famed graphic novel comes out in March 2009. In the superhero world of The Watchman, it's 1985 and Nixon, who actually left office in 1974, is still President as America lurches towards a nuclear confrontation with the USSR.

 

Not that this is anything new - Richard Nixon has been a Pop Culture icon for decades. He didn’t just meet Elvis and ask the cast of Laugh-In to "sock it to me," Nixon was on the cover of TIME, in a time when being on the cover of TIME really meant something, more times than anyone else before or since. If those 55 covers weren't enough, Nixon has been the subject of Robert Altman's Secret Honor, on all those Shepard Fairley posters, a regular on Matt Groening's Futurama, the subject of an Oliver Stone film, one of the true tawdry signs you've really made it in our pop culture. He's had an opera written about him and enough biographies, histories, novels and memoirs and memoirs that really should have been called novels to repopulate the rain forest if all that paper was returned to the trees it came from.

Check out Dominic Patten's Top 5 Pop Culture Icons of all time here
Nixon’s aura of corruption even still pervades, for a giggle and a grimace. From the teenage gang bangers in The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller’s resurrecting 1986 Batman graphic novel series, to the surfer thieves in 1991’s underrated Point Break, to the 2001 bank robbing cheerleader flick Sugar & Spice, to name just a few, the disguise worn by a bad guy that’s guaranteed to get a laugh and a knowing smirk from audiences is still a cheap Nixon mask

Name checked over the years in song by everyone from Neil Young to Elton John and back again, the legacy of the 37th President make an appearance on the international charts in the fall of 2004, when the Manic Street Preachers released the single “The Love of Richard Nixon.” The sardonic homage had at its heart a revisionist assessment of the man from Whittier, California, struck most arrestingly by the chorus, “People forget China.”

In this song, history you can pump your fist too, the iconoclastic Welsh band get so much right, as they so often do, but the Manics are wrong - when it comes to Richard Nixon, as this week's bonanza displays, no one forgets.
The legacy and mystery of the man doesn't let you.