Week of June 4, 2007

Scientists believe history began 13.7 billion years ago. Proprietors of the newly opened Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., believe history began 6,000 years ago. Apologists for Arab terrorism and tyranny believe history began a short 40 years ago.

The only larger point I want to draw right now is that all privileged people, particularly journalists, should be arrested at least once, preferably with handcuffs. It's just amazing to me how powerful police can be and how powerless you can be in the split second it takes an officer to make the decision that you have broken a law. This point does not reflect on how I was treated at the police station, which was with the utmost courtesy and politeness, but the fact that I was there at all is still amazing to me, given the circumstances.

George W. Bush did four good things last week. He strengthened sanctions on Sudanese companies and officials in response to the ongoing massacres in Darfur. He called on Congress to double the funding for global AIDS programs, to thirty billion dollars. He directed his envoy in Baghdad, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, to sit down with his Iranian counterpart and discuss ways of stabilizing Iraq—the most high-profile meeting between top officials of the two countries in years. And he attacked the demagoguery of right-wing critics of the bipartisan immigration bill. Each case has its caveats, flaws, and what-took-so-longs. But it should be noted that the three hundred and thirty-second week of the Bush Presidency was one of the best. Nobody will remember it.

Bush’s legacy will be the war in Iraq and, secondarily, the array of decisions on prisoners, alliances, treaties, and preventive war which revolutionized American foreign policy after September 11th.

A few weeks ago I did something I never expected to do in my life. I shed a tear for Richard Milhous Nixon. That’s in no small measure a tribute to Frank Langella, who should win a Tony Award for his star Broadway turn in “Frost/Nixon” next Sunday while everyone else is paying final respects to Tony Soprano. “Frost/Nixon,” a fictionalized treatment of the disgraced former president’s 1977 television interviews with David Frost, does not whitewash Nixon’s record. But Mr. Langella unearths humanity and pathos in the old scoundrel eking out his exile in San Clemente. For anyone who ever hated Nixon, this achievement is so shocking that it’s hard to resist a thought experiment the moment you’ve left the theater: will it someday be possible to feel a pang of sympathy for George W. Bush?

Perhaps not. It’s hard to pity someone who, to me anyway, is too slight to hate. Unlike Nixon, President Bush is less an overreaching Machiavelli than an epic blunderer surrounded by Machiavellis. He lacks the crucial element of acute self-awareness that gave Nixon his tragic depth. Nixon came from nothing, loathed himself and was all too keenly aware when he was up to dirty tricks. Mr. Bush has a charmed biography, is full of himself and is far too blinded by self-righteousness to even fleetingly recognize the havoc he’s inflicted at home and abroad. Though historians may judge him a worse president than Nixon — some already have — at the personal level his is not a grand Shakespearean failure. It would be a waste of Frank Langella’s talent to play George W. Bush (though not, necessarily, of Matthew McConaughey’s).