'Frost/Nixon' at the Ritz 5.

Richard Nixon will, I believe, go down as the most consequential president of the second half of the 20th Century, and his legacy has been more alive in the regime of George W. Bush than ever. It was Nixon, after all, who said immortally that if the president does it, it's legal, and what other descriptor do you need for the Bush presidency?

Nixon blurted out these words— the essence of the imperial credo— during his 1977 interview with David Frost, the celebrity presenter who pulled off the journalistic coup of the age by persuading Nixon to sit down with him for his first post-Watergate interviews. The pointy-faced Brit and the ski-nosed ex-prez just materialized on our TV screens, and we couldn't take our eyes off them, any more than we could from Watergate itself.

If we hadn't known it before then, we realized it at that moment: Richard Nixon was the national train wreck we were destined to play over and over in our heads. Unlike the 18 and a half minutes erased from the White House tapes, this was a feedback loop that would play on forever.

Made for each other

It was more than bizarre. David Frost was the last person likely to land Richard Nixon, and Nixon the last person to unbend to a minor entertainer. Yet in a sense these connivers were made for each other. Frost sweated ambition; Nixon craved redemption. Only a tabloid type would have sought Nixon out, and Nixon himself never would have given a member of the hated liberal media the chance to kick him around again, as he put it at his first retirement in 1962.

Money helped, too. Since Ronald Reagan, it has been de rigueur for former presidents to prostitute themselves for cash. Nixon had the same craving, but not the same opportunities. Frost's checkbook was a big convincer.

Redoing the Frost/Nixon interviews as a stage piece was as quirky an idea as the original interviews themselves, but it, too, was an unexpected hit. Director Ron Howard has now adapted it for the screen, with Frank Langella and Michael Sheen reprising their West End and Broadway roles as Nixon and Frost. Howard keeps the film busy, for the premise of two schemers trying to one-up each other with a product that no commercial advertiser wants to buy isn't exactly the stuff of high drama. No matter, though: The opportunity to see one of our great actors depict the only Shakespearean villain our democratic culture has bequeathed us is reason enough for it.

A predator who sizes up the jugular

Langella's large frame slouches itself easily into Nixon's shambling physicality, and his resonant voice takes on the latter's reedy baritone. There's a vulpine force in his presence; this Nixon— slate-eyed and sharp-clawed, survivor of a thousand chicken dinners and three articles of impeachment— is a predator who sizes up the jugular at first glance.

At the same time, though, he is disarmingly needy, a man who has never permitted himself a moment of pleasure in his life. This makes for a deeply dangerous persona; one never knows whether it will pounce or plead.

Michael Sheen's ferrety Frost is a far less complex character, with an altogether more straightforward motivation: He is a man on the make, with the world's most famously disgraced man as his quarry. His task is not to unmask Nixon, but to get him to unmask himself.

For his part, Nixon, anxious to reinvent himself as an elder statesman, saw in Frost an ideal foil: an intellectual lightweight, ill-versed in American politics and wholly out of his depth with the world champ of evasion and persuasion. In the Langella version, he challenges Frost to a duel and, in a drunken phone call in the dead of night, essentially dares Frost to play Ahab to his Moby Dick.

Nixon's patsy problem

Only slowly does Sheen's Frost, preoccupied with keeping his broadcast deal alive and berated by his American handlers, begin to understand the magnitude of his undertaking. Nixon, though, can't afford a patsy either, for a boring product will seal his final irrelevance to the world he is so desperate to reenter. He must provoke the interlocutor whose job it is to provoke him, and in doing so risk the personal exposure he has dared and feared all his life.

Who won the Frost/Nixon "debate," as Nixon himself posed it and as it really came to be? Perhaps the answer closest to the truth is that each man both won and lost it. It attracted 45 million viewers and made Frost's career, as he'd hoped and gambled it would; but that career would be forever defined by its Nixon moment, as Nixon himself doubtless understood.

As for Tricky Dick, baited at last into showing some skin, the encounter was meant to fire the first salvo in a long campaign of rehabilitation. He went further than he'd intended to; on the other hand, he could never go far enough. Yet Nixon did finally achieve a measure of what he sought, and Clinton's attendance at his funeral restored his presidential seal of respectability (at least until Clinton was impeached for having oral sex in the White House with an intern).

About those dead Cambodians…

You have to handle material like this as a black comedy; even so, there's a feeling of impropriety about it. At one point, Sheen's Frost asks Langella's Nixon about the destruction of Cambodia, and Nixon bats the question away. The death of two million Cambodians shouldn't be disposed of so easily, and we'll have to see how some latter-day Frost handles the death of a million Iraqis with George W. Bush— assuming so indelicate a question might ever be asked.

But Bush will never be the subject of an opera, as Nixon was (John Adams's Nixon in China), or of a novel (Philip Roth's), or a Goyaesque cycle of paintings (Philip Guston's). In the field of rogue presidents, Richard M. Nixon is still in a league by himself.





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