Nixon by Nixon: In His Own Words

Richard Nixon taped his private conversations in the White House in secret. He did it from 1971 to 1973. The documentary goes through what is on those tapes. The war in Vietnam takes up a large part of them. The leak of the Pentagon Papers is there too. So are his Supreme Court appointments. Everyday political calculation runs through all of it. There is other material as well. Nixon says harsh things about women. He says the same about black Americans and about Jews. His view of the press is in the same register, and the film plays those passages without softening them. The whole account runs in Nixon’s own voice, with archive footage laid over it. Peter W. Kunhardt directed the seventy two minute documentary, an American production finished in 2014.