A series of essays on the 1970s sounded best when talking about Richard Nixon’s demise (5 April, 1:45pm). I never tire of hearing about the spiritual cost of Watergate: it puts me in a pleasant Seventies fug, peopled by Jason Robards with his hands mockingly on his hips. Eighty-three-year-old political writer Elizabeth Drew, unsparing chronicler of American politics since the Johnson administration, narrated.
What a name – suggesting eyes almost permanently narrowed (someone once asked Drew how she’d like to be introduced at an awards, and she said she’d like them to say “that I’m really not the pain in the ass that everybody thinks”). And the voice: pointedly undramatic, reporter-ish, with a very vague hint of Kentucky in its vowels. The Nixon White House, Drew tells us, sheltered “a combination of thugs and crackpots” and a president who “didn’t much like people and was odd around them”. Frequently Nixon seemed “out of control”, and once gave a “strange rambling speech” in which he spoke of his mother
(“a saint”).
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