MOVIE REVIEW : Spotlight Falls on Bland Nixon

Villains are more interesting than heroes--anyone who’s read “Paradise Lost” or seen “Dick Tracy” knows that. And that’s why Richard M. Nixon, unindicted co-conspirator and former President, remains so intriguing 16 years after he left the White House.

Sure, some might argue that Ronald Reagan committed greater crimes in office, that an angry nation drove Lyndon B. Johnson from the presidency and that John F. Kennedy had his share of personal indiscretions.

But Central Casting itself couldn’t come up with a more malevolent screen presence than the grinning Orange County lawyer who became America’s 37th President. Many politicians have shared Nixon’s right-wing politics; what made him special was his persona--the bloodless, scheming, sometimes sinister aura he projected even among his supporters. There are Republicans who respect Nixon to this day, but in American politics, one thing is undeniable: No man hated by so many for so long ever rose so high.

Unfortunately, this fascinating Nixon all but disappears in the latest film to depict his career, “Never Give Up: Richard Nixon in the Arena.”

Playing daily at Yorba Linda’s newly opened Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace, the 29-minute film does the seemingly impossible: It makes Nixon boring.

Missing from the screen is the Nixon of yore: the young-but-not-youthful congressman gleefully baiting Reds; the stuffy vice president fleeing enraged crowds of Latin Americans; the sweaty, heavily browed TV antagonist of JFK; the paranoid, imperial President running secret wars overseas and persecuting perceived enemies at home; the profanity-spewing desperado clinging to power; the self-righteous, often bitter man finding blame everywhere but in himself.

Instead, we are treated to Nixon as Winston Churchill--minus the wit, the accent and the Battle of Britain. Consider the implied parallels:

Young Churchill, at the Admiralty, helped guide his nation through World War I; Nixon heroically fought what the narrator calls “the insidious threat of communism at home.”

Churchill’s early promise was chastened by political exile in the 1930s; Nixon, defeated by Kennedy in 1960 and by Gov. Edmund G. Brown Sr. in 1962, called the ensuing period his “wilderness years.” A desperate Britain summoned Churchill to counter the German threat spawned under Chamberlain’s bumbling; the film shows America unanimously calling on Nixon to end the domestic chaos and Vietnam War blamed on Kennedy and Johnson. Churchill saw the British through “their finest hour.” Nixon, “Never Give Up” tells us, achieved “peace with honor.”

And just as Churchill was tossed out of office immediately following victory in 1945, the Nixon-library Nixon suffered similarly undeserved humiliation after ensuring the eventual defeat of communism.

His helicopter departure from the White House, underscored by weeping violins, seems so poignant; after all, the selfless Nixon of “Never Give Up” had not only won the Vietnam War, he also had fathered the environmental movement, launched the first war on drugs, given the vote to 18-year-olds and put a man on the moon.

In a voice-over, Nixon struggles to be contemplative; he quotes Sophocles and recalls that on that last airlift to San Clemente, no one made a sound “until I heard Pat say, ‘It’s so sad. It’s so sad.’ ”

Yet Churchill’s voice was not stilled by forced retirement; neither was Nixon’s. This cinematic Nixon goes on to win the respect of debaters at Oxford, to counsel succeeding Presidents, to inspire the sick and infirm and, as a measure of his boundless popularity, to write “best-seller after best-seller.”

Parenthetically, one might note that nowhere does history suggest that Sir Winston ever had anything to do with a criminal conspiracy to sabotage the democratic process, disrupt the opposition party and destroy his political opponents; in “Never Give Up,” of course, neither does Nixon.

Regarding that Watergate business, the narrator explains, “The President knew nothing about it.” Period.

This, then, is Nixon as he would have us remember him; the question is, if he was really this bland, why bother?

“Never Give Up: Richard Nixon in the Arena,” playing indefinitely at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace, 18001 Yorba Linda Blvd., Yorba Linda. Information: (714) 993-3393. Tickets: $3.95 (includes admission to the entire complex).