History in the Making.(Frost/Nixon and Australia)(Movie review)

In 1969, just after Richard Nixon was elected President, he gave a press conference in which he addressed the question of Soviet-American relations. His remarks were an entirely cogent and candid summing up of the state of affairs, and, among the cadre of Nixon haters, of whom, even though young, I was a veteran, the shock was considerable. Some of us had made the mistake of not noticing that Nixon was extremely intelligent. Later on, of course, during the Watergate crisis, Nixon's brilliance was overcome by pathologies of various kinds. One of the virtues of "Frost/Nixon," Ron Howard's adaptation of Peter Morgan's hit play, is that it brings the intelligence back to the ...