The President is Our Daddy-King

Just got back from seeing Frost/Nixon. Overall, a very good film, I think that Frank Langella did a masterful job as Nixon. If I were him I'd really start making sure that the mantle above my fireplace had plenty of space and was adequately reinforced, there's gonna be some heavy hardware coming his way during award season. I mean, pretty much everything is lined up for him to win a Best Supporting Actor Oscar/Golden Globe/etc. He plays a larger than life figure, a disgraced former President who still captures the American imagination enough to warrant a film more than 30 years after his resignation. There's always danger in playing a famous person in a movie- but you're definitely well compensated for the risk if you play the part well. Then too, the film's director (Ron Howard) is well liked, and the movie was released in December, making it close enough to the ceremony where nominators will remember it, but far enough away that the Academy doesn't look like they're nominating it just because it's fresh in their minds. Like I said, Frank Langella should get some space on his mantle ready.

As I was watching the movie, what I thought about most though was not the acting or the storyline or even about how good a job the casting director did on picking the person who played the young Diane Sawyer, but frankly, about how quaint the entire movie seemed. I obviously was not alive during those fateful years, I had no clue what it feels like to have your naivete about how the federal government and the office of the president and all government worked smashed into a million tiny pieces-tiny saddened and betrayed pieces. It's not that the anger and betrayal that people felt wasn't justified; it was completely justified. It's just that, well, what did they expect out of a president?
I never really thought about how seminal a moment Watergate really was until the start of the movie. I'd studied Watergate to some degree, it had always permeated pop and political culture
I was talking to my girlfriend earlier, about how American society views the office of the President, as some kind of daddy-king figure, only better than a daddy-king because you get to participate in the process to choose him. (Think about how different your life would be if you got to choose your father?) I think that it was true back then and it's true today. Except, before Watergate, the American people at-large saw their daddy-king in the way that a child does. He was a protector, he always acted in our best interest, always on the straight and narrow. He was wise and carried the burden of representing the American people with grace and dignity and a strength that the world admired. As children, the American people may not have been privy to the conversations held in the Oval Office/master bedroom, but rest assured that the coversations our parents (daddy-king plus his trusted advisers) had were only in the best interests of the country. After Watergate, the American people as a collective saw the President the way a teenager would see his father. We recognize that our daddy-king isn't perfect or even particularly good- he might be a jerk, he might drink too much and wiretap his political enemies for his own personal gain. The cynicism the American people developed after Watergate prepared us to expect the worst (or at least the pretty bad) when it came to a presidential administration. What it did not prepare us for (since I still do not think the American people are politically adult yet) is to confront our very views of what a President is. We still see the daddy-king even if we do not use him as our moral North Star. Like a teenager trying and failing to rebel, we secretly still cower in front of him, so to speak. It still highlights the worst of our own Machiavellian impulses, we truly want someone to lie to us because we like the image. The image of Jack Bauer and "24", of our President making those tough decisions that may not be "ethical" or "humanitarian" or even really "legal," but that in the end keep us warm and safe in our beds and the terrorists at bay. Nixon may have been ridiculed when he said that "When the President does it, it's not illegal," but I think he ultimately got the last laugh. Only it was subsequent Presidents who benefited.

Nixon's specific crime that he resigned for was the cover-up of the scandal of Watergate, but he did a lot of other things too. Wiretaps of reporters, trying to destroy the careers of his political enemies, the escalation of the Vietnam War, going in to Cambodia, his strange relationships with mobsters and the Teamsters, the list could go on. But when I say that much of what he did seems quaint, I think it's because of everything that has happened during the Bush administration. The NSA's warrantless domestic wiretapping program that is much larger than Nixon's, the granting of immunity to all of the telecommunications companies that spied on us since before 9/11, the fabrication of evidence in making the case for the Iraq War, the abhorrent use and (more importantly) systemization of a torture regime that violates the Geneva Conventions and completely destroyed any moral authority the US had left, the political firings in the Justice Department, the mind bogglingly incompetent response to Hurrican Katrina, and his utter expansion of the power of the executive branch of our government. The systemization of a torture regime, under the incredibly Orwellian euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques," by itself is worse than anything the Nixon administration did. The fact that our populace has by and large has acquiesed to these actions, acted as if they were legitimate actions instead of the decay of our system of checks and balances; well, the office of the President really did get the last laugh. All them, Reagan, Bush I (who I think has been our most honorable president since Reagan, and he was a former CIA director!), Clinton, Bush, and now Obama should thank Nixon for the power he grabbed for them.

Update* Speaking of executive secrecy, Glenn Greenwald has an excellent (as usual) article on Matt Miller's (from the "liberal" Center for American Progress) bewildering assertion that Obama should have his aides sign confidentiality agreements so that they won't disclose the inner workings of the administration until well after Obama is out of office. What????? This ain't a some criminal enterprise, Obama's not runnin a dope and coke operation out of the Oval Office. He's an elected official, the highest elected official; him and all of his aides are putting taxpayer dollars in their direct deposit checking accounts. The man campaigned on change and one of those changes was a more transparent administration. Those aides damn well better disclose, that's one of the things we're paying them for. Basically Miller wants to run a Stop Snitchin campaign in the district- funny how once the Dems get back in power all the executive abuses suddenly become okay.