I Fell for Tricky Dick

Of course, nothing is certain. One predicts the future with trepidation, but on Dec. 1 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., I can predict (I'm writing this in late November) that I will be anxious. Because at that time there will be a screening of "Frost/Nixon," the movie that director Ron Howard and I have made of my stage play about the interviews David Frost conducted with Richard Nixon in 1977. In attendance will be scores of the most prominent journalists in Washington, politicians from Capitol Hill and many major figures from the great old days of Watergate. An august and formidable crowd. Shocks of white hair, tortoiseshell glasses and many bow ties. They will come to weigh what I've done with a man they of course know far better, have thought about far more deeply and have studied far longer than I've ever done, and no doubt there'll be no pleasing of everyone.

A lot of people in the Dick Nixon industry might wonder how an Englishman barely old enough to remember Watergate would dare to visit this material. How someone untouched and unscarred by the agonies that Nixon visited upon the American people could possibly have the credentials or the necessary emotional investment to write about it. And, of course, they'd be right.

As a European from a different, younger generation, I wasn't really gripped by the trauma that was Nixon's presidency. For one thing, I never voted for him. Was never invested in him. I voted for Anthony Charles Lynton Blair three times, so his betrayals distress me far more. The horrors and betrayals that Nixon visited upon his electorate left me comparatively unscathed, though I have clear memories of my late father's anger and sense of disappointment as the Watergate scandal began to unfold. (He died in December 1972, close to two years before Nixon resigned from office.)

Nor did I set out to write "Frost/Nixon" as a metaphor for the failed imperial presidency and abuses of power of George W. Bush—the idea to write it first came to me in 1993, while I was watching a biography of Frost on British television—although the endless and disconcerting parallels unfolding before our eyes continue to make this claim look ridiculous, and quite possibly, for our film's marketing purposes, ill advised.

For me, "Frost/Nixon" was always about the responsibility of the creative process. About the subjectivity of memory, the twilight differences between fact and fiction, truth and accuracy. About the power of editorial control, and journalistic ethics.

I saw in the Frost/Nixon interviews a series of challenges and provocative questions. Moral dilemmas. Could paying a subject $600,000 for a series of news interviews ever be morally justified? (Today's equivalent would be to pay George W. Bush $3 million.) Should profit participation for a disgraced president ever be condoned? How legitimate can any claim of a victory be when only one side has the editorial control? Could such a notion as "history" ever really exist when all the participants united by time and place in the mid-'70s would, 30 years later, have such conflicting views about what actually happened? Never, it seemed to me, had historical record seemed more like a series of other people's fictions.