Hollywood President

GEORGE W. BUSH joined a time-honored tradition when he had his Tom Cruise moment on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003. The distance between Pennsylvania Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard has for many years been shorter than we might care to think.

In a century of celebrity, it was inevitable that the most powerful man in the world and the most alluring medium of mass communication should find themselves frequently intertwined. William McKinley was the first president to be filmed. Woodrow Wilson gave "The Birth of a Nation" what remains the most memorable blurb any motion picture has ever received -- "It is like writing history with Lightning," he allegedly said.

Franklin Roosevelt, who earned a "story by" credit for a 1936 feature called "The President's Mystery," once told Orson Welles, "You and I are the two best actors in America." John F. Kennedy was the first candidate to explicitly utilize starpower, both his own and that of such friends as Frank Sinatra. Bill Clinton was so starstruck he sat through "Air Force One" twice. (Looking in the mirror the morning after, did he see Harrison Ford?) None of them, of course, surpasses Ronald Reagan as Hollywood president: an actual movie star who owed his political career to his Tinseltown associations.

What about Richard Nixon, though? On the face of it, the idea of Nixon as our leading Hollywood president makes no sense. When Jack Warner heard that Reagan, his former studio property, was going to run against California's chief executive, Pat Brown, he is said to have reacted with consternation. "No, no: Jimmy Stewart for governor -- Ronnie Reagan for best friend!" Hard as it is to imagine Nixon as anyone's best friend (including his own), it's even harder to imagine him as avatar of the intersection of Hollywood and Washington. The casting seems all wrong.

Yet no other political figure so well typifies what the Harvard philosopher Stanley Cavell has referred to as "America's special involvement in film, from the talent drawn to Hollywood in making them to the participation of society as a whole in viewing them." Too often we forget that the movies have as much to do with those who watch the screen as with those who adorn it.

The moviegoer's fundamental yearning and loneliness -- why else sit for two hours in the dark if not in pursuit of yearning's fulfillment and loneliness' abolition? -- find an unmistakable embodiment in Richard Nixon. Growing up hard by Hollywood as Hollywood itself grew up, he added a particularly vivid strand to the pattern of outsiderdom that would define him all his life. Indeed, it was a pattern that helped elevate him to the White House and then remove him from it. The standard road to political success is to ape the lineaments of stardom: glamour, grace, assurance. However unwittingly, Nixon followed another route: representing the rest of us -- drab, clumsy, anxious -- the great silent majority of moviegoers who don't decorate the screen but stare at it.

"Nixon must always be thinking about who he is," Kennedy remarked once to John Kenneth Galbraith. "That is a strain. I can be myself." True enough: There were all those "new Nixons" so painfully emerging from a man who had to keep reinventing himself. Yet fatiguing though such an internal process must be, its searchful unease and attraction to novelty more nearly approximates the condition of the moviegoer, the eager fantasist for whom such questions as who am I? whom can I identify with? what lives might I lead? can be answered (for a couple of hours, anyway) by nothing more demanding than the purchase of a ticket.

Jack Kennedy was no stranger to such internal urges as he read John Buchan and Ian Fleming novels or David Cecil biographies, casting himself in his mind's eye as Richard Hannay or James Bond or Lord Melbourne. No, JFK didn't need movie fantasies (he'd had movie realities: sleeping with Gene Tierney, with Marilyn Monroe). Little wonder that, as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. reports, he "was not a great movie fan and tended, unless the film was unusually gripping, to walk out after the first twenty or thirty minutes." Such an act was unthinkable for Richard Nixon, who screened more than 500 movies at the White House, Camp David, and his vacation homes during his presidency. "Oh, we sat through some real lemons," Julie Nixon Eisenhower once remarked to William Safire. "Mother and Tricia would tiptoe out, but Daddy would stick with it."

No president has had a more charged relationship with the media than Nixon -- and none has had a more peculiar relationship with the most glamorous medium, motion pictures. Pat Nixon paid for college by working as an extra at Paramount. Nixon enjoyed one of his greatest political triumphs matched against Helen Gahagan Douglas, another woman who once worked as a Hollywood actress. Nixon drew upon entertainment executives for major financial backing and served on the House Committee on Un-American Activities at the time of the Hollywood Ten hearings. He demonstrated with the Hollywood-friendly provisions of the Revenue Act of 1971 that, as the MCA/Universal executive Taft Schreiber wrote him at the time, "no President before you has shown such concern for this industry."

Nixon's presidential moviegoing was eclectic and enthusiastic. His favorite director was John Ford, his favorite actor was John Wayne, and his favorite movie was "Around the World in 80 Days." Most people suppose it was "Patton," which he watched three times just prior to and during the invasion of Cambodia. Among other movies he saw more than once while president were "A Man for All Seasons," "Lawrence of Arabia," "Doctor Zhivago," "The Quiet Man," and the 1970 Western "Chisum."

Nixon's fascination with motion pictures has long been reciprocated. Well before Oliver Stone and Anthony Hopkins assayed him, Nixon (or Nixonlike characters) had been portrayed on screen by Cliff Robertson ("The Best Man"), Rip Torn ("Blind Ambition"), Jason Robards ("Washington: Behind Closed Doors"), Peter Riegert ("Concealed Enemies"), and even Glenda Jackson ("Nasty Habits"). He has fascinated filmmakers as diverse as Robert Altman, whose "Secret Honor" brought to the screen a one-man play about Nixon; and Jean-Luc Godard, who gives a killer the name "Richard Nixon" in his existentialist noir, "Made in U.S.A.," and later requested an interview with Nixon so that he and Norman Mailer might discuss the subject of power with him for a segment in the filmmaker's "King Lear." In what was surely art's loss, and just as surely Nixon's gain, the former president found that the demands of his schedule did not allow for such a meeting.

Nixon has figured in various ways in a surprising range of films: from "Shampoo," which takes place on Election Day 1968, to "The Ice Storm" (set in that autumn of the president, the fall of 1973), to the original "Star Wars" trilogy, whose evil emperor George Lucas has said he based on Nixon. More significant, his presence can be felt throughout the period of moviemaking that coincided with his presidency, Hollywood's Silver Age. The darkness, paranoia, and distrust of authority on display in such films as "Five Easy Pieces," "Klute," "The Candidate," the first two "Godfather" films, "Chinatown," "The Parallax View," "The Conversation," "Nashville," and "All the President's Men," to cite just the most obvious examples, are, in their way, as much monuments of the Nixon era as 18-minute gaps in presidential conversations.In the end, though, Nixon's influence on the movies matters less than the movies' influence on him. "The study of Richard Nixon," The New Republic's John Osborne once wrote, "requires a steadfast clinging to the fact that he is human." Looking at Nixon in terms of the movies helps us cling to that humanity, makes us better appreciate -- perhaps even feel some guilty affection for -- what Murray Kempton, the most acute of all Nixonologists, saw as the man's "insinuating ungainliness."

The movies may have made Reagan, but they helped sustain Nixon. He connects with Hollywood at a single, compelling point: where a man trapped in loneliness enjoys an experience that assumes it. Sitting in the dark and staring straight ahead was a perfectly natural thing for Richard Nixon to do, for he was a man who loved screens: those that conceal as well as those that show.

Mark Feeney is a member of the Globe staff. This article is adapted from his "Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief," which will be published later this month by University of Chicago Press.