Trick or Treat with Tricky Dick

I ain't superstitious. But as I write, it is the night before Halloween 1989. And I swear that Richard Nixon keeps crossing my path.

First there was the much ballyhooed October 29 broadcast of the ABC docu-drama The Final Days. That was nice. Fifteen years down the line, the thrill of wallowing in Watergate is far from gone. But then there was this freak sighting of Nixon in China that has me shaking in my boots.

For a pre-Halloween production, The Final Days was a bit skimpy when it came to Nixon's more ghoulish behaviors. We heard First Son-in-Law Ed Cox describing that famous close encounter in which he caught the commander in chief wandering the White House hallways, talking to the portraits of his predecessors. But the network filmmakers chickened out and failed to re-enact that key historic episode. We hear references to the president's latter-day drunkenness, but only once do we get dramatic images of Nixon wobbling at the helm like the commander of an Exxon tanker.

But in that one scene posterity is served. It's the famous "Pray with me, Henry" incident, during which the lapsed Quaker president forces the Jewish secretary of state to his knees. No one will ever top the rendition of that scene performed by Dan Aykroyd (as Nixon) and John Belushi (as Kissinger) on the old Saturday Night Live. But The Final Days gave it a fresh twist by focusing not on Nixon's monomaniacal self-pity, but on Kissinger's mortified reaction.

Theo Bikel's face, portraying the Great Man, was a road map of half-hidden disgust and terrified embarrassment. By the end Kissinger was so walleyed and stiff that the scene took on an (I think unintended) hilarity. He looked, for all the world, like a parody of a man walking past a graveyard at midnight on Halloween.

But aside from fun stuff like that, watching The Final Days in this post-Contragate era was also an unexpectedly sad experience. The pundits say Watergate was where America lost its innocence. So be it, and good riddance. But the real loss came sometime in the 15 intervening years when, quietly, without noticing, we lost our capacity for outrage.

After a near-decade of the Reagan mob, the atmosphere in that shark pool which was the Nixon White House seemed almost idealistic. If nothing else, ABC performed a public service by reminding post-Watergate generations that, contrary to currently fashionable dogma, the president does not rule by divine right.

So there Nixon was for three prime-time hours, in the person of actor Lane Smith, reliving the climactic chapter of America's favorite non-sexual political scandal. The show started on the day the prez ditched the "Katzenjammer Kids" (Haldeman and Ehrlichman) and carried us right on through the psychotic reaction that was his farewell speech to the White House staff.

Then, promptly at 11 p.m., a nation retired to sleep, knowing that the Trickster, after a decade of failed comeback attempts, was somewhere in New Jersey nursing his phlebitis and cursing the media for old time's sake.

BUT NO. OCTOBER 30, 1989: I'm cooking supper and listening to the public radio news show. There are a lot of jokey Halloween items about goblins and such. But then, like a stake through the heart, comes this for-real, no-joke transmission direct from some Transylvania of the mind. It seems that the night before, while we were savoring our petty little Nixon-hating jollies, Nixon was in China. Yes, China, the scene of his greatest triumph. In fact while The Final Days was on, Nixon was at a state dinner in his honor, if I've got my time zones right.

You might guess that Nixon went East to give the Beijing octogenarians a few pointers from his years of experience in handling student protest. And you might be right. But at this public occasion, the wizard of San Clemente was striking a more statesman-like tone, giving the Chinese a friendly little lecture on the dangers they face if they fall back into Maoist isolation.

Since his fall, Nixon has been a frequent visitor to China. They still love him there. So maybe Nixon was just escaping televised humiliation with the comfort of old friends several thousand media markets away. But maybe not. In point of fact, Nixon sounded for all the world like an elder statesman who had been dispatched by someone at the highest levels of the American elite to smooth out this little post-Tiananmen rough patch in U.S.-China relations.

We can't miss Nixon, because he won't go away. The world he made is the one we live in. Let the record show that Nixon invented the GOP's racist Southern Strategy; counterinsurgency by proxy; and the private, customized, off-the-shelf covert operations unit. He also discovered Roger Ailes (Nixon's media consultant in '68 and Bush's in '88) and founded modern principles of presidential media management and information control. Nixon, not our recently departed celluloid hero, was the first president whose closest policy adviser (Haldeman) was a career PR man. And this Halloween, just like Michael Meyers, Nixon was back.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.