Nixon: politics as quiz-show
Fifty years since Nixon’s resignation, revisit this RT column just weeks before the president left office
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- Aaron Latham
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Richard Nixon, as America’s first television president, has a lot in common with the quiz-show. The TV question-and-answer programmes grew with television, learned to manipulate, television and were finally engulfed in a scandal which television magnified and broadcast to the entire nation. The current president of the United States (the subject of Panorama on Nixon) seems to be following the same route. His show faces premature cancellation.
In 1952, when both the politician and the medium were young, Nixon, then a vice-presidential candidate, saved his political career by going before the TV cameras to defend himself against charges of taking money from supporters. He told America that the only gift he had ever accepted was his cocker spaniel, Checkers.
In a sense, the format of his speech was not altogether unlike an early quiz-show. It was broadcast live. Nor did Nixon, the contestant, know as he was doing the show what the outcome would be.
Richard Nixon gives his well-known two-armed victory salute during a campaign stop in El Paso. Getty
In 1960, when Richard Nixon ran against John Kennedy, he was evidently over-confident about his ability to use TV. In the Kennedy-Nixon debates, Nixon discovered that people disliked his five o’clock shadow. Also Kennedy had a better slogan: "Let’s get America moving again."
Most people who listened on radio thought Nixon won - most people who watched on television thought Kennedy won.
In 1968, when Richard Nixon ran for president again, he proved that he had learned from his past defeat: his campaign was pure cosmetics and slogans. Nixon held televised question-and-answer sessions which were a little like the old rigged quiz-shows.
Rather than telling the contestant the answers, Nixon’s shows were fixed only in that the questioners were carefully screened and their questions predictable. He couldn’t lose.
Television had created a Frankenstein's monster, which it now felt obliged to destroy
All through his years as president, Nixon has skilfully used television to address the nation. He and only he can demand prime evening time whenever he wants it. His 1972 campaign was kicked off with another great media gimmick: his televised trip to China.
And then came Watergate. The American public did not seem to pay attention to the charges against him printed in newspapers, but when the Watergate hearings began on television his approval rating plummeted to 30 per cent. Meanwhile, the ratings of the hearings themselves were staggeringly high. They were the top-rated daytime show in the country. It was as though television had created a Frankenstein's monster (Nixon), which it now felt obliged to destroy.
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Alger Hiss, whom Nixon sent to prison for perjury, said that he knew his period of disgrace was lifting when a man asked him if he was Charles Van Doren, the most famous of rigged quiz-show contestants. Perhaps some day someone will come up to Van Doren and ask, "Aren’t you Richard Nixon?"
Authors
Aaron Latham
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