ABSTRACT
Mark Feeney published a fascinating and curious book entitled Nixon at the Movies. The book was fascinating with its intense and focused excavation of the many ways in which Richard Nixon's political career intersected with and responded to the shifting currents of the film industry over the middle decades of the twentieth century. Nixon's distinctive and powerful standing in American cinema and American cinema's distinctive and powerful contributions to the development of his political career seem to have depended upon the impossibility of ever separating Nixon the man from his screens. His televisual manipulations put enormous pressure on the democratic system in which his particular forms of staged mastery were supposed to be maximally reassuring. Portraying him, Hollywood effectively portrays its role in administrative democracy itself, a constitutional order that nuclear weapons, and Richard Nixon, would threaten and illuminate in equal measure in the decades after World War II.
