Secret Honor: Altman's Brilliant Take on a Paranoid Presidency

Secret Honor (1984)

Directed and produced by Robert Altman

Cinecom/Criterion Collection, 90 minutes, NR (strong language)

★★★★

 

With the election bearing down upon us, a new revelation has surfaced that when Donald Trump was a young man, he corresponded with his political hero: Richard Nixon. Quite coincidentally, a few days earlier Secret Honor surfaced in my Netflix queue.

 

Secret Honor was a one-man show before Robert Altman filmed it in 1984. Altman and playwrights Donald Freed and Arnold Stone were careful to call the show a political myth, but anyone familiar with the White House tapes from the Watergate scandal will recognize there is considerable truth amidst the imagined. Although actor Philip Baker Hall didn’t always resemble Nixon, he had his mannerisms down so well that after a while we forget we are watching a play and begin to feel like voyeurs to a total mental collapse.

 

In 1964, historian Richard Hofstader published The Paranoid Style in American Politics. His target wasn’t Nixon, rather Hofstader sought to explain why Republican voters chose Barry Goldwater over the statesman-like Nelson Rockefeller. Goldwater was trounced in the general election, but Hofstader worried about an emergent type of political personality driven by rightwing conspiracy theorists and fearmongers, and was at heart anti-intellectual and demagogic.

 

Secret Honor is set in Nixon’s New Jersey study sometime after 1976, as he mentions Gerald Ford’s loss to Jimmy Carter in that year. Even before Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974, there was discussion as to whether he was clinically paranoid. Altman takes this as a given. We see the disgraced ex-president hunched over a tape recorder, pacing around the room, obsessively checking video monitors, sweating, swearing, and drunkenly ranting. A loaded revolver appears from a drawer and lies on the desk. Nixon eyes it repeatedly but, as we know, he did not use it.

 

Those drawing upon the paranoid style of politics run the risk of becoming their own creation, which is what happened to Nixon. He infamously compiled an enemies list that began with 20 names and swelled to 576. It’s one thing for a conservative to believe that labor leaders, political opponents, and liberal journalists are enemies, but when a list includes Barbara Streisand, Joe Namath, Hugh Hefner, trumpeter Herb Albert, Paul Newman, and a host of retired military officers, it invites speculation that the president has lost his marbles.

 

Secret Honor will make you believe that Nixon was indeed mentally ill. He is ostensibly making a tape for an imaginary court hearing in which he justifies everything he has ever done. Instead, he rages against President Eisenhower, Henry Kissinger, the Kennedys, Jews, African Americans, Latinos, and especially the Committee of 100, an elite that emerged from yearly Bohemian Grove encampments in California. Nixon believed the Committee of 100 created him against his will and conspired to shape America for its own benefit. Bohemian Grove is a real thing where the power elite does indeed hobnob, though in theory it’s a retreat from power and politics. Make up your own mind whether Nixon was paranoid about that one, but its very clear (in the film at least) that Nixon was unhinged. He couldn’t even make his tape, as he interrupted himself with profane tirades, talked with his long-deceased mother, poured more whiskey, and launched rambling attacks that blamed everyone he could think of for his failings. He even claimed that he engineered his own resignation to save the nation from the conspirators. (This is the “secret honor” of the film’s title.)

 

Hall’s performance was astounding. The energy he put forth was such that one can scarcely imagine how he could have summoned it on a nightly basis for the stage. Altman makes the performance more palpable by mixing mid-range shots with closeups that make us see Nixon’s raw anger, stumbling speech, wildness, slumped body language, and furrowed brow. We both hate and pity the figure we see on the screen.

 

I wish to reiterate that Altman never claimed what we view was 100 percent historical; it is an imagining of a monologue that we have no record actually took place. Nonetheless, to circle back to Hofstader, Secret Honor is a portrait of the paranoid style of politics. What else can we call a person who can’t get along with anyone, dislikes his own military leaders, is an Anti-Semite, a racist, takes no responsibility for his actions, and blames failure on others? Right now, we call him the 45^th president of the United States. It’s interesting that George Soros was on Nixon’s list. How sad that today’s purveyors of paranoia continue to beat a tired horse. (Soros is 90!)

 

Robert Altman blew red hot and icy cold as director. Secret Honor is one of his well-made films. How utterly sad that Secret Honor remains relevant. Nixon begat Trump. One can only hope there is no third act.

 

Rob Weir