
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, April 28, 1994                   TAG: 9404280187
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Tom Shales
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

NIXON GAVE TV MEMORABLE MOMENTS

Television and Richard Nixon were always irresistibly drawn to one another, not like a moth and a flame but like one flame and another flame. From the beginning of his life as a national figure, Nixon was on TV, and all over TV, and throughout his very public career, he was never off it for very long.

On TV he could be mesmerizing, exasperating, galling, campy and immensely entertaining. Curiously enough, he never quite mastered the medium, but it never really mastered him, either. It was kind of a draw.

Nixon was never what one could reasonably call a brilliant communicator in a class with Ronald Reagan, or a media-savvy smoothie a la Bill Clinton. He would try to tailor himself for TV and to be tailored for it by the perceptologists and the vidiot savants, but in the end it was always Richard Nixon, not some synthetic composite, who came seeping through.

``Tenacious'' is the word most often being used to eulogize Richard Nixon. I prefer ``defiant.'' His defiance was one of his saving graces, part of his makeup as a tragic hero, and it was at the heart of his first major national TV appearance, the Checkers speech of 1952, undertaken in defiance of Republican Party bosses and even of beloved national grandfather figure Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In the decades ahead, Nixon would try to use television and television would try to use him, and the relationship remained a fascinating tug-of-war virtually until the end. He served up a bounty of memorable TV. His famous kitchen debate with Nikita S. Khrushchev was one of his outright television triumphs. His later debate against fellow presidential candidate John F. Kennedy signaled a seminal shift from substance to style in American political life and began the era of telepolitics in earnest. Suddenly, how a candidate came across on TV was all that really mattered.

For me, one of the most unforgettable pieces of veritably Shakespearean political theater ever seen on television was Nixon's Watergate-era farewell to his troops in the East Room, a rambling and nakedly emotional autobiography in which the president called his mother ``a saint'' and told the crowd: ``Always remember: Others may hate you, but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.'' The irony!

His last visible act that day was that broad wave to the crowd before boarding the helicopter that took him into retirement. It was, yes, a defiant wave.

In his post-presidential TV appearances, Nixon surrendered some of whatever dignity remained. At times he came across like a baggy-pants Willy Loman out peddling yet another new revised version of himself and trying to salvage his place in history. He appeared never, however, to mellow on his dislike of the press; nor, apparently, did it of him.

Men and women of my generation all used to say that we would love to have met John F. Kennedy. I would love to have met him, too, and was bowled over when he came to my staunchly Republican Midwestern hometown to campaign against Nixon in 1960. But I always wanted to meet the maddeningly enigmatic Richard Nixon, too, and wanted to meet him more and more as the years went on, and as he continued his struggle to remain in the public eye.

I know one thing that I would have said to him: ``Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you for all the great TV.''

Washington Post Writers Group

by CNB