ABC Nixon Saga . . . Perfectly Clear It’s Not

It was noted after the resilient Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency in 1974 that the only way to stop him permanently was to drive a stake through his heart. That was probably true, for now, once again, like the man with the pointy teeth and black cape, he’s ba-a-a-a-ack.

This is the month for reviewing presidencies. First comes former First Lady Nancy Reagan, making the media rounds to advertise her newly published memoirs, basically a series of piranha bites into those she claims let her husband down while he was in the White House.

And now come three hours of “The Final Days,” based on the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein that purportedly recorded the agonizing clock ticks in the winding down of the Nixon Administration.

Unless it is preempted by a fifth game of the earthquake-interrupted World Series, “The Final Days” will air at 8 p.m. Sunday on ABC (Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42). If it is knocked out by baseball, the movie will be rescheduled for the following Sunday, Nov. 5.

Like Nixon’s record in the White House, the film’s bad points outnumber its good points.

Tautly directed by Richard Pearce, “The Final Days” captures the internal ordeal of Watergate--the well-publicized government crisis and desperate last steps of a deceitful President trying to save himself from almost certain impeachment. It doesn’t capture much else, however.

The appropriate footnotes, including disclosure of the particularly devastating June 23, 1972, tape that lethally implicated Nixon in an illegal cover-up, are in Hugh Whitmore’s script, as are the sufferings of Nixon’s family and closest associates.

What’s missing is Nixon.

He, not family or staff, is the guy you want to meet. Oh, he’s present, all right, in a figure so caricatured and stiffly played by Lane Smith that you’d bet Smith took Nixon lessons from Dan Aykroyd. Smith’s Nixon is a shell. He has the jowly looks, deep voice and mechanical moves, and the surface paranoia, self-pity and moral puzzlement in wondering “how all of this happened,” but there’s nothing inside the man.

Some of this is the actor’s fault, but a lot is the fault of a script that is closely tied to Woodward and Bernstein’s 1976 book--a work of journalism whose information is now stale because it’s 13 years old and which was critically underdeveloped in some areas. Being chroniclers of an episode of history and not Nixon biographers, they failed to strip back Nixon’s self-protective layers and penetrate his ambiguity. Their book was an intriguing, peekaboo mirror on the wall, but one mostly devoid of insights into the man’s character and apparent depth of inner turmoil that propelled him on a course of self-destruction.

In both the movie and the book, White House special counsel J. Fred Buzhardt does briefly mention Nixon’s taping of his private reflections--deep, dark, brooding commentaries on his passions and secret demons. But this light bulb is almost immediately switched off.

Much of Nixon’s behavior goes unexplained in the story’s shorthand. For example, after lamenting the Watergate-prompted resignations of aides H. R. (Bob) Haldeman and John Ehrlichman and praising them in a televised speech, he later emphatically rejects pardoning them for their Watergate sins. Never trying to resolve this apparent conflict, “The Final Days” merely reports it at face value.

If there is a moral voice in this White House scenario, it’s Buzhardt’s (nicely played by Richard Kiley), who, though intensely loyal to Nixon, implores him to “tell it like it is, lay it on the line.” Nixon’s chief of staff, Gen. Alexander Haig (played by a terribly miscast David Ogden Stiers), is the story’s chain-smoking pragmatist who keeps the White House going. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (Theodore Bikel) is stolid amid chaos. Pat Nixon (Susan Brown) is as wordless here as she was as First Lady.

What “The Final Days” does show is a Nixon so perilously diverted by Watergate that his presidency--and the nation’s business--are largely put on hold.

There, too (just as “Saturday Night Live” mocked it), is Nixon son-in-law Edward Cox (Patrick Massett) reporting seeing the President speaking to pictures on the White House walls, and a pathetic Nixon urging an incredulous Kissinger to join him in prayer on his knees, then losing control and collapsing on the floor in a sobbing heap. Regaining his composure, Nixon pleads: “Henry . . . please don’t ever tell anybody that I cried . . . or that I wasn’t strong.”

Even more bizarre is a sequence showing the outgoing First Family--at Nixon’s insistence--putting on a brave, happy face for history in front of the White House photographer shortly before the Nixons exit permanently.

Smith’s and the story’s best moments come late, during Nixon’s farewell speech to the White House staff--a rambling, maudlin, emotional goodby, at once self-pitying and defiant, and in many ways reminiscent of his teary “Checkers” speech that temporarily saved his political skin in 1952.

Then, his words echoing almost triumphantly on the sound track, Nixon and his wife mount the chopper that will start them homeward to California, as television’s “Final Days” takes it upon itself to soften history’s judgment by letting America’s most-disgraced President leave sympathetically and with dignity.