Believe it or not, there was a time, in another America, where, with a few words, a network TV anchor could trigger a seismic shift in public opinion.
On February 27, 1968, Walter Cronkite, anchoring the CBS Evening News, turned straight to camera and, for the final three minutes of the broadcast, broke from a career of neutrality as a reporter and delivered a deeply felt editorial on the state of the Vietnam War. It had, he said, reached a point of deadly stalemate and the only way out was not a military victory but an honorably negotiated peace.
One month later President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he would not be seeking a second term. Cronkite had spoken truth to power, and Johnson, knowing and feeling as deeply about the falsehoods told about the war as Cronkite was exhausted by the burden of presiding over it, knew the truth was far worse than had so far been revealed.
In September 1969, Cronkite was interviewed on television by David Frost, a newcomer to American broadcasting who had been brought from London by Westinghouse to host a daily talk show taped in New York. Frost had made a reputation in London for a new style of rigorously researched, often news-making interviews. But by some in the hallowed halls of American television journalism, he was regarded as an upstart outsider, while Cronkite comfortably wore the mantle of “the most trusted man in America.”
Cronkite did not patronize Frost, and Frost was clearly in awe of him. Talking of how journalism had finally exposed the falsehoods of the war, Frost asked Cronkite, “Is it possible for huge things to be concealed?”
“Yes, I think it is,” said Cronkite. “But this is the job of the press—I mean that generically: television, radio, the newspapers—to uncover as much of it as we possibly can, to be sure that those things are not concealed. I don’t think they can be concealed forever. I think they will come out. The truth will come out.”
That encounter was the beginning of Frost’s personal passage covering some of America’s most contentious political events that would eventually lead to his historic “confessional” interview with Richard Nixon in 1977, a key moment in a new documentary series airing on MSNBC, David Frost Vs, created by his son Wilfred Frost. I asked Wilfred, who is an anchor on Sky News in London, about that moment when Cronkite seemed, in a sense, to be steering his father toward a clear sense of where he should be headed. “That interview,” he said, “is like a 101 for a broadcast journalist. It’s so rare for me to see dad playing the role of the apprentice.”
Cronkite was a seasoned war reporter. His impassioned editorial followed a trip to the battlefields of Vietnam that had, he told Frost in a masterpiece of understatement, left him “quite upset.” But it was not until 1971 that it was revealed that a succession of presidents had concealed from the public (and Congress) how badly the war had been directed, with the publication of a portion of the Pentagon Papers, a vast and damning archive of documents disclosed by the anti-war activist Daniel Ellsberg. In June 1972, Frost interviewed Ellsberg, who said that underlying the whole scandal was an attitude, embedded in both the Pentagon and the White House, to think of “the American public…as an adversary to be tricked, to be manipulated, to be lied to.” This remained true, he said, of the current president, Richard Nixon: “We have an unelected monarch at this point.”
At the time, Frost did not know that his show was being monitored by the FBI, which had on at least one occasion planted an agent in the studio audience, according to the New York Post. In the White House, Nixon taped many of the shows as part of his habit of tracking any of his many perceived enemies who appeared as guests. (That was also true of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI.) This turned out to be lucky for Wilfred Frost. A cache of episodes that were otherwise missing from the Frost archives were found in the Nixon library in California, including a key segment in the documentaries featuring Jane Fonda and the activist Huey Newton.
By 1970, Nixon recognized Frost as a rising force in television journalism and invited him to host the White House Christmas party. Watching that event in the documentary, now knowing that Frost would eventually extract from Nixon a tortured apology to the American people, it’s hard to tell who is actually manipulating whom.
But I knew just how keenly Frost was studying the complex psychodrama that was the life of Richard Nixon. We had worked closely together for some time. Frost achieved almost overnight fame in the UK as the anchor of That Was the Week That Was, a now legendary Saturday night satirical gig on the BBC (and spiritual precursor to Saturday Night Live). When I first met him he was restless, looking for a more serious role. He had followed my work as an investigative journalist, and thought it had lessons for television journalism. Others were discouraging him from dropping the work that had made him a star. How could a satirist suddenly become a serious journalist? I thought otherwise.
In 1966, Frost moved from the BBC to commercial television to anchor a new hour-long live prime-time show five nights a week, The Frost Programme, with a risky new format: interviewing news-making figures in front of a studio audience who were invited to join in. Frost’s acuity made him a challenging interviewer. Backed by a team of skilled researchers, his forensic method broke new ground when one of his guests, an insurance swindler, faced an audience that included some of his victims, and he was later jailed for fraud. Some newspaper critics disparaged the program as “trial by television.” In fact, we had drawn on dossiers from investigative reporters whose published stories had had no result, whereas one interrogation on TV by Frost saw justice finally move.
The culmination of that technique came a decade later in 1977 with the historic Nixon confrontation. Frost recorded their interview near Nixon’s California home and swung between softball conversation and the pursuit of a carefully calibrated evidential trail of Nixon’s culpability in the cover-up of Watergate. For all his trappings of power, Nixon was strangely susceptible to Frost’s jet-set glamour. He was, however, maladroit in his small talk: After a weekend break in the filming he asked Frost, “Did you do any fornicating?”
That mood soon changed. Nixon was warned by his advisers where Frost was headed: “Don’t give him an inch because a mile will be taken.” With a deliberately theatrical gesture, Frost threw aside the clipboard containing his notes that he always had. Leaning forward and looking grave he asked if Nixon was now ready to apologize for his actions, leading to the cathartic moment when Nixon agreed. “I let down the American people,” he said. “I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life. My political life is over.”
For me, that clipboard had long been at the heart of Frost’s method. In London I was usually the last person to brief him before he went out to the cameras. By then the clipboard had several pages of notes, but in a format legible only to him, with some individual words circled, others underlined, others starred. There was no visible chronology. Frost had the capacity, like someone prepping for a crucial examination, for absorbing detailed packets of information (and, after a program, for wiping it all like a disposable tape). He was instinctively tactical in the clipboard’s use, depending on the way an interview developed. His greatest asset, something few of his rivals managed, was the ability to listen carefully to answers and, suddenly and comfortably, drop everything on the clipboard and pursue an unexpected opening presented by his subject. With this came a similarly improvised skill in engaging an audience.
The documentaries convey a sense of watching epic historical moments as people experienced them, unfiltered by historians. It was something new to American television. On a set where the furnishings looked like cast-offs from a Reno bordello, in a converted theater on West 44th Street, Frost wrangled a cockpit of debate and conflict with consummate balance. The David Frost Show was canceled in 1972, after some 750 performances involving around 5,000 guests.
Frost Vs premieres on MSNBC April 27 at 9 p.m. ET.
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