Today’s London Independent features another article about Frost/Nixon with some notable quotes from Sir David Frost, including his reflections on the pivotal moment in his videotaped interviews with RN:
Under constant probing from Frost, the former president, giving his first interview since his resignation over the Watergate scandal in 1974, had started to crumble. And when Frost told him “mistakes” did not seem an adequate enough description of the former president’s wrongdoing, Nixon asked him: “Well, what word would you express?”
“I sensed he was more vulnerable than he might ever be again,” says Sir David. “I thought I better really lay this out fully. So I threw my clipboard aside to indicate we were going into territory that neither of us had necessarily planned.”
A notable contrast to the film, which, as I recall, features Michael Sheen as Frost brandishing, like Beowulf or St. George wielding their shields, a legal pad on which are scrawled notes on White House tape transcripts scribbled by the broadcaster the night before, in such convoluted fashion that even Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Forbes Nash, the subject of Ron Howard’s previous film A Beautiful Mind, might be hard pressed to decipher them.