May 13, 2013

Short Takes: Our Nixon


Our Nixon

Our Nixon

DIPPER FILMS

One morning in 1972, Nixon chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman gave press secretary Ron Ziegler some big news: Nixon had just gone to meet with Mao Zedong, head of China’s Communist Party, marking the first thaw in a quarter century of US-China relations. In his shock, Ziegler bit into an unpeeled clementine without realizing it. This obscure clip is one of many you’ll experience in Our Nixon, a curated collage of 500 Super 8 film reels shot by Haldeman and Nixon aides Dwight Chapin and John Ehrlichman—ambitious men who obsessively documented their lives in the West Wing. The footage, seized by the FBI after Watergate, offers an intimate glimpse into a notoriously secretive administration. “It was a very unnatural kind of life,” Ehrlichman reveals. “You had the feeling you were in the middle of a great big, brilliantly lighted, badly run television show.”

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