On Monday night, I attended a screening of Frost/Nixon, the new film directed by Ron Howard and written by British dramatist Peter Morgan. It's an excellent and highly entertaining tale recounting and recreating the 1977 interview of the resigned and disgraced president conducted by British talk show host (and man about town) David Frost. Though Morgan said after the screening that he had not intended the film to be a statement on the current occupant of the White House, the film does raises questions about Bush. In a key moment during the interview, Nixon (played astutely by Frank Langella) responds to a question from Frost (placed wickedly by Michael Sheen) about a White House plan for the systematic use of wiretappings, burglaries, mail openings and infiltration against antiwar groups and others. Nixon says (as he did during the actual interview), "When the president does it that means that it is not illegal." In the film, Nixon goes on to add, "But I realize no one else shares that view." (That quote does not appear in the transcript I found of that portion of the interview.)

How can this not conjure up recent history, when the Bush administration essentially argued the same point to justify its use of Gitmo, torture, unlimited detentions, extraordinary renditions and the like? Bush, however, has not noted that only he buys this argument. In fact, the White House counsel's office and Bush's Justice Department went to great lengths to come up with legal opinions supporting this view of the all-powerful chief executive. In the real Frost interview, Frost pushed Nixon on this point, asking, "Is there anything in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights that suggests the president is that far of a sovereign, that far above the law." Nixon answered: "No, there isn't. There's nothing specific that the Constitution contemplates in that respect."

At the screening, Morgan noted that he "never" wanted the film "to become a springboard for talking about George Bush." Though he has written a wonderfully engaging movie--that both nails Nixon and depicts him somewhat sympathetically--Morgan, alas, did fail in that regard. I wonder if Bush will watch it. The film opens this weekend, and Bush does seem to have time on his hands these days.

You know that old joke: there are two types of people in the world--those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don't. Well, in previous weeks, I've been dividing Republicans and conservatives I know between two types: those willing to acknowledge (even if only privately) that Sarah Palin was not--shall we say--the best pick John McCain could have made, and those who claim she is indeed qualified and will be a fine veep and a capable (should it come to that) president. My rough survey of the Rs and conservatives I have encountered on the street, at political events, and in green rooms at TV studios is that about one half to two-thirds will admit they believe is that Palin is either a misguided error on McCain's part that can be overcome or an act of blatant misjudgment that has led to a freakin' disaster.

When McCain announced her selection it did seem possible the choice would help his campaign. And his campaign did not appear to mind all the attention she drew. But in my recollection, I cannot recall a veep candidate who has so dominated the post-convention story of the election. Not even Dan Quayle. And in Palin's case, the news keeps getting worse. A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds that 55 percent of registered voters believe she's not qualified to serve as president. That's up 5 percent from its last poll--suggesting that the more people see of Palin the less they are impressed. And her negative approval rating for the first time exceeds her positive approval rating, 47 percent versus 38 percent. Moreover, voters told these pollsters that McCain's selection of Palin was their top concern about McCain's candidacy.

With Barack Obama still on his grand tour overseas, John McCain's campaign took a potshot at the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee for supposedly violating an agreed-upon rule of U.S. politics. It did so by sending out an email to reporters highlighting a statement pundit David Gergen uttered on CNN:

Barack Obama made the first mistake of his trip, in my judgment, in releasing a statement in which he said exactly what [Iraqi Prime Minister] Maliki had said in those conversations [with Obama]. We have a long tradition in this country that we only have one president at a time. He's the commander in chief and the negotiator in chief. I cannot remember a campaign which a rival seeking the presidency has been in a position negotiating a war that's under way with another party outside the country.

Gergen, counselor to presidents of both parties, was overstating the case. After all, it was Maliki who had told Der Spiegel days before he chatted with Obama that he fancied Obama's call for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Obama was not giving away any big secret by sharing the basics of what he and Maliki had discussed. But Gergen was truly hyping this episode by asserting no presidential contender had ever dared to interfere in wartime policy-making. There was a time when a presidential candidate truly did undermine a president while a war was under way--and Gergen worked for this candidate once he became president: Richard Nixon.

In a 1991 letter to The New York Times, William Bundy, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs during the Lyndon Johnson administration, described the "covert operation" mounted during the 1968 presidential candidate by Nixon, the GOP nominee, John Mitchell, his campaign manager, and Anna Chennault, a Republican activist. Bundy noted, as others have, that Chennault became Nixon's secret channel to President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnamese through South Vietnamese Ambassador Bui Diem. (Diem, Mitchell and Chennault met together in Nixon's New York apartment sometime in the summer of 1968). And in the fall of 1968, the Johnson administration learned (via intercepted South Vietnam embassy cables) that Chennault had been conveying "Republican" messages to Thieu, urging him to abort or cripple the peace talks then proceeding between President Johnson and Hanoi. The Nixon camp did not want the Democrats to score a political victory by negotiating a peace agreement right before the election. And the implied or explicit message to Thieu was that Thieu would get a better deal if Nixon were elected president. As Bundy noted, Thieu took actions that impeded the peace talks.

Bundy wrote:

On Nov. 3, two days before the election, Mr. Johnson taxed Mr. Nixon with Mrs. Chennault's activities, and Mr. Nixon categorically denied any connection or knowledge -- almost certainly a lie in light of later disclosures. In the circumstances, Mr. Johnson and Mr. Humphrey decided, separately, not to raise what would surely have been a highly divisive issue so late in a campaign. A year later, Theodore White, describing the episode in his book on the 1968 campaign, rightly called Mr. Humphrey's decision one of the most decent actions ever taken by an American political figure.

What the Nixon crew did was truly unprecedented messing around--actively and secretly undercutting ongoing peace talks to gain political advantage. And Gergen worked in the White House of the fellow whose campaign did this. Before Gergen again claims Obama has broken precedent, he might want to review this ugly episode.