Nixon Film Quotes

Bush’s campaign manager, former Nixon operative Lee Atwater, and media advisor Roger Ailes, who had promoted Nixon in 1968, produced the infamous Willie Horton ad, laying the groundwork for a new kind of right-wing television in which ideological propaganda would be filmed as if it were a news story, making it hard for viewers to tell the difference.

When President Nixon was reelected in a landslide in 1972, film critic Pauline Kael famously said in disbelief, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”14 Her statement has come to symbolize the insulation of the liberal elite, living in a bubble and hearing only the opinions of fellow liberals. It has become known as “Pauline Kael Syndrome” and its most virulent strain has been discovered in late 2016, complete with paranoid delusions of Russian hacking. Liberals

In 1934, with the country nowhere near able to climb out of the Great Depression, Upton Sinclair, famous for his muckraking novel The Jungle and his socialistic solutions for the ailing economy, had swept the Democratic primary for governor of California. (He was hardly alone in turning to socialism at such a dire time.) Mayer, fearful Sinclair would tax the movie studios to pay for his socialist programs, warned that MGM and other studios would move back east if Sinclair won—not anything he was prepared to let happen. Calling in Irving Thalberg, head of production, Mayer told him to create a fake newsreel showing the disasters that would follow such an election outcome. Movie theaters were forced to show the film when they booked an MGM movie, and William Randolph Hearst would see to its distribution to all other theaters in the state. And indeed, as soon as the fake exposé hit the screens, Sinclair’s huge lead vanished, and Frank Merriam became governor. The dirty politics and stealth tactics of Richard Nixon? As you can see, just a rerun.

Nixon became tense and agitated, had trouble sleeping, drank heavily in the evenings, and wrote himself notes to keep his courage up—“Need for Self-Discipline in all areas. Polls v. right decision. Dare to do it right—alone.” He repeatedly watched the film Patton, in which George C. Scott, playing the World War II hero and standing before a giant American flag, intoned lines he especially liked: “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war…because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.

A guy in the audience raised his hand and said, ‘I saw you on Politically Incorrect, and you got real mad at some black lady because of something about some film director,’ ” he told The Onion in a rare (for them) serious interview that same year. “I said, ‘Yeah, it was [Elia] Kazan, and the subject was how he had been denied an award from a film critics’ group because he had been a rat for the House Un-American Activities Committee.’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘HUAC! You know, HUAC?’ And he said, ‘What?’ So I had to spend half an hour explaining J. Parnell Thomas and the Hollywood Ten, and The Red Menace, and how High Noon was a protest film against the people who had ratted out others to the Committee and how On the Waterfront was Kazan’s apologia for being a narc and also how that had nothing to do with the McCarthy hearings seven years later. And this guy wasn’t an isolated case in that large gathering! They didn’t know who Elia Kazan was or what he had done that made him a pariah or who Strom Thurmond is or what a Hooverville was or why we were fighting in Korea or Wounded Knee or … hell, they barely knew Nixon. They knew McCarthy’s name but not what it was he’d done. Someone asked if he hadn’t done a good job ferreting out communists, and I said, ‘No! He never ferreted out anygoddambody! All he ever ferreted out was every bottle of booze in Congress!’ So when you’re dealing with people who know nothing, you find yourself suddenly turning into a fucking pedant instead of a storyteller. I have to educate them before I can use a trope or a reference.”224