Playing Nixon as a Man for All Political Seasons

The camera turns stage work into screen work for the performers (at the Kennedy Center, Alan Cox co-stars as Frost), which is familiar terrain for Keach. His latest feature-film role in a long screen career is as President Bush's evangelical adviser, a composite character in Oliver Stone's "W." The tone of his scenes with Josh Brolin's hyper-focused Bush grew less realistic as the takes progressed, Keach reports, raising the evergreen question of how much fidelity art owes to history.

Then again, Keach scored an early hit in the late 1960s with the unapologetically scathing "MacBird!," a highly stylized off-Broadway satire in which he played an LBJ character implicated in the assassination of JFK. At the same time, Keach saw Rip Torn playing Richard III, and doing it with shades of -- guess who? -- Richard Nixon.

The arts have taken a special shine to Nixon over the years, exploiting his singular blend of talent, ambition and paranoia in motion pictures, operas and plays. Reston, whose manuscript about the Frost-Nixon interviews (recently published as "The Conviction of Richard Nixon") was the basis for Morgan's drama, thinks this is partly due to the catharsis of the interview. President Gerald Ford might have declared that "Our long national nightmare is over" as Nixon left office, but Reston contends that the "Nixon hatred, the fear and loathing," were still at large. The Nixon-as-entertainment genre since then was enabled, he says, because post-Frost, "Nixon was rendered harmless."

Yet Nixon was always an intriguing figure and a ripe target. He was prone to crises (a word that made the title of his first memoir), was dubbed "Tricky Dick" very early in his career, of course, and groused that he wouldn't be around for universal kicking even prior to his rise and fall as president.

This iconic Nixon has proved widely durable: Keach is able to rapidly praise not just Torn's Nixonian Richard III in the 1960s, Langella's Nixon and Anthony Hopkins's Nixon in Stone's 1995 "Nixon," but also even Washington actor Ed Gero's Nixon in the play "Nixon's Nixon." As Keach says, dropping his voice to a deep, jowly register that's instantly recognizable as the man from San Clemente: "There are certain aspects of his character that are easy to do, you know?"

His own relationship with Nixon goes from being "dead against him" at first to finding him more complex and intriguing with the passage of time. "I think he had a lot more charm than Peter Morgan gives him in the play," Keach says.

That Richard Nixon's character is frequently analyzed as "Shakespearean" also appeals to Keach, who starred in the Goodman Theatre's recent Chicago production of "King Lear" that's coming in June to the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Perhaps the most discussed scene in "Frost/Nixon" is the only one Morgan entirely fictionalized, the one in which a tipsy Nixon makes a late-night phone call to a very surprised Frost. Keach says, "The theatrical nature of that event is better served by somebody who's had some taste of Shakespeare."

The reverse might be true, too. "It's going to be interesting," he muses, "to see if my Lear will have changed by virtue of having done Nixon."