'Tricky Dick' Review: The Sound and the Fury
By Dorothy Rabinowitz
In one of the countless memorable moments of this four-part portrait of Richard Nixon (begins Sunday, 9 p.m. (Eastern), CNN), the president is off on his historic 1972 visit to China. He’s left behind the roars of the antiwar demonstrations directed at him in increasing intensity—he’d run for the presidency on a promise to end the war and had acted only to escalate it—and now appears in pictures shown around the world, smiling radiantly as he beholds the Great Wall and expressing his hope that the American people, especially the young ones who like to travel so much, “will have the opportunity to see this wall and know the Chinese people better.”
As the images of the visit roll on, a message appears at the bottom of the screen like a subtitle, only there is a voice-over too—the president relating his view of Americans going to China: “The American people are suckers. Getting to know you, all that bullshit. The gray middle-Americans…they’re suckers.”
It’s a pronouncement from the treasure trove of Nixon comments on the White House taping system that would be his final undoing—one of the many quotes similarly deployed in this documentary. And for all that we already know about those tapes, which revealed a president in the grip of pathological fears and hatred, obsessed by thoughts of his enemies—the nation’s press ranked at the very top of this list—none of it is any preparation for the raw power of those quotes as they emerge in this series, a work very far from a standard compendium of Nixon lore. Here are filmed scenes, footage that captures this president and his men at their most revealing—which happens as often in chit-chat as in policy discussions or one of the president’s obscenity-laden rages caught on tape.
(snip)
Here are the ’60s, decade of the assassinations—John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr.—the campus bombings, student riots. And the ’70s, by which time Nixon was president. He had, during these years of turbulence, in which he rose to the highest office, learned a few things. And one of them was the importance of publicly embracing a special sector of Americans and impressing on them the idea that they were victims—victims of the elites, the press, demonstrators, and those who sympathized with lawlessness. In the course of this cynical outreach to them, those in this population learned from their president that they were the ignored, the forgotten Americans.
The Silent Majority he called them—people who say nothing but know what’s right, and American. He would not be the last to recognize the effectiveness of this appeal to one favored audience, many of whom were doubtless gratified to learn of their specialness. You can feel the power of discovery in Nixon when he makes his first speech directed to the Silent Majority. A moment characteristic of these four spellbinding hours.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tricky-dick-review-the-sound-and-the-fury-11552411529
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