May, 1977: Three years after the fall of the most fascinating and reviled presidencies most people felt, at the time, they would ever live through, there was David Frost trying to get Richard Nixon to admit once and for all his guilt in the Watergate scandal. He told Nixon that the word "mistakes," which Nixon had used so far in the interview, wasn't enough for the American people.
After a pause, the fallen president smiled and bounced the question back. "What word would you express?" It immediately put the celebrity British interviewer on the spot.
"It was the most heart-stopping moment I've ever had in an interview," Frost says more than three decades later on the phone from London. "I never expected him to put the question [to me] He was, I felt, the most vulnerable he had ever been in his life. And then when he put it back to me, I knew that this was the one moment, the one real opportunity, and I jolly well had to get the points I made right."
Today, the youthful softness has disappeared from Frost's voice, traded for the rat-a-tat diction of an elder newsman.
Long gone, too, is the egoism and clash of personalities, which inevitably surrounded the interview and is played up in Frost/Nixon, director Ron Howard's dramatic film about the meeting, based on Peter Morgan's acclaimed play.
Reflecting on the interview after all these years, Frost has lost none of his enthusiasm, even if it's apparent he has spent the past three decades regaling listeners about his Nixon experience: the years of negotiations it took to secure the interview, in part through legendary talent agent Swifty Lazar; the promise he made to give Nixon six hours of broadcast time rather than the two NBC News was offering; and the effort it took to keep Nixon away from other journalists to prevent other news organizations from scooping him. Another condition of the interview was that Nixon could stop the taping to have any sweat on his upper lip patted away, a concession to his first televised debate against John F. Kennedy in 1960, the first of its kind in history, in which Nixon shunned makeup and looked terrible on camera.
All of these factors were negotiated for the Frost interviews. It's a testament to the gravity of Watergate that, in today's obsession with the medium more than the message, the story behind the interview hasn't overshadowed the interview itself.
Nevertheless, for Frost, the nearly 29 hours of videotaped questioning stands on par with such career highlights as his in-depth interviews with Robert Kennedy or Nelson Mandela.
"The anger about Watergate was still very prevalent, and people needed to see him tested on the subject in a forum that he was palpably not in control of. A number of people wrote afterwards that this experience of watching the Watergate program was the catharsis that the American people needed. That was their quote. And I think it was that catharsis that was the constructive part of the whole thing."
Abiding by the ground rules that Nixon would have no knowledge of the questions beforehand or would have any say in the editing, the videotapes were reduced to four 90-minute specials, famously covering everything from Nixon in China to Watergate and airing over consecutive weeks that May. The 1977 specials received the highest rating for a news interview.
(Historical completists will note that an additional 90-minute special was culled from the interviews and aired in September, 1977, while additional Frost-Nixon specials also aired later. To coincide with the new Ron Howard film, a DVD of the Watergate portion of the original interviews is also now available. Although it doesn't contain all the best elements of the complete interview, it's the Watergate portion that obviously stood to make or break Frost's efforts.)
"After the first day's taping on Watergate, when he sort of stonewalled everything, he then came [the next day]prepared to admit something. And I had to push him and push him until, in fact, he went further in his mea culpa than even we had hoped really," Frost says.
This is the part of the interview when Nixon goes into detail about firing his close aides, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, who later served jail time for obstruction of justice and other Watergate-related charges. Although he kept denying charges that he engaged in major wrongdoing, including accusations that he knew about the burglary of Democratic National Committee at the Watergate building complex in Washington, D.C., or provided clemency for those involved, Nixon nevertheless became remarkably contrite. Or at least it's the kind of contrition in which Nixon sees partisan enemies all around him, even as he places the blame on himself.
"I brought myself down. I gave them the sword, and they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I'd been in their position, I'd have done the same thing," he says, his eyes watery pools, glistening below the dark overhang of his brow.
Nixon later adds that he came to the edge with the scandal of what was legally permissible. Then he looks off, his face scowling at the bitterness of his words: "Yup, I let the American people down. And I have to carry that burden for the rest of my life. ... And I can only say that in answer to your question, that while technically I did not commit a crime, an impeachable offence - these are legalisms - as far as the handling of this matter is concerned, it was so botched up. I made so many bad judgments. The worst ones: Mistakes of the heart rather than the head, as I pointed out. But let me say, the man in that top job has got to have a heart, but his head must always rule his heart."
It's that kind of statement that added another level to the reams of stunning journalism already produced about Nixon's downfall. What the Frost interview provided, which hadn't been done before, was that "in this case, somebody was testing Nixon's account as he gave it," Frost says. "He was never ever questioned by anybody else on the subject of Watergate in this totally free way in which I had sole control over editorial content and so on."
In the end, the point wasn't Frost's coup in securing the interviews or Nixon's mea culpa. It was ultimately about satisfying the public's cathartic need. Thirty years later, it could also be about which lessons were learned and which were forgotten.