April 15, 1968, Boston

By David Silver

I was trapped. Trapped in an elevator. Having been pushed and thrown into that elevator by Fred, my director.

“I don’t wanna go in there, Fred,” I said quietly.

“You’re goin’ in, babe….”

“Fred, that’s no place for me, please, pl-ee-ee-ze!”

“No, Dave, you must go in and….”

And then he pushed me with such Zen perfection that I landed in the elevator and the gate slid shut like butter. I was in and the carved iron lift trestle of the Boston State House closed a millimeter from my nose. And I was in with Nelson Rockefeller and John Volpe - me and two U.S. governors. No security stopped me, though I expected with gloomy resignation to be shot as soon as the gate opened again.

The governors paid no attention to me as they gabbled about how excited they were to see him again and whether they were late. Volpe asked Rockefeller about the appropriateness of his tie, humble in his thin-lipped way, duly obviously awed by Nelson’s pedigree, size, voice and suit.

The elevator opened and I walked as calmly as possible into a small room where Governors John and Nelson proceeded to vigorously shake hands with Richard M. Nixon. There was a quick babble of Republican bonhomie and then they sat down. My invisibility started to frighten me – maybe I had been shot – on the quiet – and I was now dead.

But no. Another person stepped into the room and immediately headed for me. This man, a Mr. Frank Shakespeare, soon became the least worthy person I had ever met to have that surname.

“Who the hell are you?” Frank bellowed at me, and I honestly wished I were dead.

“I’m from WGBH, David.”

“How in God’s name did you get in here?“

“Richard Wright arranged it.”

“Who? Never heard of him. What do you want?”

“I was led to believe that Mr. Nixon would answer questions about the youth issues and what he’ll do about them if he gets elected.”

“If, if?”

“Well, when he gets elected?”

“He’s answering no questions and I don’t know why in fuck’s name you are in this room with us.”

With that, he pushed the elevator button and I was beginning to feel better. Soon, I would be back with my friends and I could deny the whole thing.

But at that moment a famous voice boomed from the leather settee across the room.

“What’s the problem, Frank?”

Before Frank could even turn around I blurted out (I had become possessed by some wandering suicidal spirit): “Sir, I’m from TV and we wanted to ask you some questions about the voting age and the draft and….”

Shakespeare interrupted the not-yet leader of the free world – “Sir, he’s not going to get an interview, certainly not for that lousy elitist NET channel.”

Nixon asked me “Where are you from, do I detect an English accent?”

Before I could answer, he glared at Shakespeare and said, “Oh, it’s all right, I always love being questioned by the BBC – they’re usually quite fair, you know.”

Richard Milhouse Nixon came over and warmly shook my hand. By this time John and Nelson had moved to another room for some unknown reason. Nixon invited me to join him on the couch and have a cup of tea or something.

Frank Shakespeare was visibly enraged and made a very unlovely face at me, implying all kinds of future torture, if not murder. But I moved on to the couch and decided to go with it. Some part of my consciousness was screaming and had long knives at the ready … years of Nixon hatred seethed but was not allowed to surface. The chance for this surreal camaraderie was just too enticing.

Once again, I had the strange realization that even though my life was very interesting, it basically happened to me, as if I had no volition whatsoever in the process. I was a pathetic picaresque figure desperately fighting to maintain my cool in these unsought-after situations I found myself in all the time.

For the next couple of hours I spent some one-on-one time there in the State House; then everybody went in cars to the Boston Globe for a breakfast. I happened to arrive at exactly the same time as Nixon’s limo and we literally bumped into each other outside the cars.

“Come on in David,” he said, as if I had known him as a trusted aide for decades. I could not help but know inside my head, only a trillionth of an inch from the surface was the fact that I had grown up in a totally socialist English household and if there was anyone on the planet that my dad always detested with a cold venom it was Richard Nixon.

I ambled in with him, some Zelig type guy. There were periods of several minutes at a time when I wasn’t in his company, but he kept coming back to me, putting his arm around my shoulders and urging me to continue the tour of the Globe with him. It was the weirdest thing that had ever happened to me. Out-of-body waves surged in and out of me.

There was some joy in it.

And yet the harsh, exciting voices of my Tufts radical student SDS and Progressive Labor friends were in my head as I sat there Mr. grinning buddy buddy with the number one undisputed champion evilest carbon based upright biped right winger on Earth.

I knew I was going to be interrogated and excoriated by my mates, Van and Robie. SDS was always too soft for them, they were Progressive Labor guys – extreme, pure late ’60s edge radical, uncompromising in their hatred of capitalism.

They were students in my Creative Writing class and we had become an illegally bonded faculty-student mini-gang in 1968. These two were a rock-hard, unsentimental, hippie-suspecting little karass. They owned an amazing, bright tangerine Bultaco racing bike and they loved it more than anything in the known universe. They both took a lot of acid and were constantly in a state of fast evolution. They were 20 years old but analyzed what was going on around them with the eagle eyes of long practiced historians or polemicists. Their grasp of political philosophy was always astonishing to me.

Robie wrote. Beautiful, ridiculously precocious image laden poems – a mix of Charles Olson and Roger McGuinn. His hair fell on his face and no-one ever saw it unframed – he was as shy as a human can be, but he radiated recondite intelligence. His mood, simply his mood, had a prophetic feel to it. This was a real ’60s human – indefinable, not necessarily anything you think it should be – but individuated from the very depths of being. An old soul smashing its way out of a young body, Juno in jeans.

Van rarely spoke. His thick glasses magnified his antic, warm-beyond-words eyes ice blue but full of love, like the infinite emotion coming out of the eyes of a faithful collie hound. His politics were extreme left, even further than socialist anarchist, but still full of love. His attitude toward Richard Nixon was one that only manifested as deep, repetitive laughter, almost Santa ho ho ho. Van was knocked out by the fact that a Nixon was actually on the planet. His dislike of him was just too much to articulate. As far as Van – and Robie too – goes, Nixon was a total Nazi and he was only the latest in the line of American Nazis which started with Truman and his Japanese genocide and had been carried on nicely by the maniac Johnson and his cold gang. Robert McNamara was considered by my two intense pals to actually be the devil, almost cool with the little glasses and the horrible anti-’60s hairstyle, slick and efficient.

So all of this was flying though my mind, causing me to be seeing Nixon’s face very close to mine and hearing Van’s St. Nicholas laugh, like the Laughing Policeman in a Brighton fairground, heaving and shaking.

Nixon was compelled to talk to me and seemed anxious to speak to an Englishman. He leaned back and crossed his legs. His black socks were too short and one hairy calf manifested. I started to call him Mr. Nixon, fearing that I should still be calling him Mr. Vice President. He quickly insisted I call him Dick and would it be all right if he addressed me as David. There was a courtly swing to all of this exchange. It felt like he wanted to be English for a moment, just to get out of his skin, like a bored actor.

“I always liked England. I looked forward to going there. I found the people there very … affectionate … yes, that’s the word. They were always smiling at me, when I mingled, you know, not like those maniacs in South America. Caracas was, well, bad – very bad, you know, but London, oh no! Very civilized. I felt at home there, David. Quite at peace.”

At this point I tried to explain to him that I was not with the BBC but with WGBH in Boston. He didn’t care about any of that. He just wanted to talk.

“Yes, I remember that guy Dimbleby … now there was a substantial journalist … he was always very tough with me but I knew he respected me. Which was more than I can say for the majority of the press there … so, yes, yes … I like your country … but why did the press hate me so much?”

It was a real question from the soon-to-be President and I responded with ridiculous rapidity:

“Well, sir, if you think about it, England was the first nation with an Industrial Revolution, so mass labor has existed the longest there. Longer than Germany or France. The working class was invented there. And therefore the growth of the Labour Party and British watered down socialism. By the 1950s, this group of socialists had been around for more than a century. It was a continuous struggle to survive early rampant capitalism. And then you turn up and become immediately recognized as America’s leading anti-Communist. You automatically then became the ogre of the working class over there. The newspapers catered to this class and so they gave you a hard time.”

He actually stroked his chin. Then he smiled and said: “That’s a brilliant analysis, David … you know, it eases my feelings … er, thanks.”

He shook my hands vigorously and then was moved away to greet the two Governors.

I started to leave and quietly walked across the thick carpet. Nixon called out to me – “Hey, we are going to The Globe … why don’t you come too?”

I nodded.

An hour later I was at the Boston Globe building. Frank Shakespeare had given up on keeping me away from Nixon and sure enough Nixon asked me to accompany him on his rounds of the plant before he had an executive editors lunch in a conference room.

As we entered the large main room of the plant, a very old man, a linotype setter, was brought over to our party. He introduced himself to Nixon like this: “I am honored to meet you, sir,” and held out his ink-stained hand. Nixon asked him his name and the ancient newspaperman said, “Richard M. Nixon!” with great enthusiasm. There was laughter from all and we moved on.

Lunch was about to happen. Nixon came up to me and said: “In about 18 months, when Pat and I have settled in, you know … well, I’d like you to be my guest at the White House. Have to go now.”

I felt a twinge as the blue-suited Quaker madman turned and left.

I never took him up on his offer because the war just got too bad and I didn’t want to see him again.

David Silver has made hundreds of films and videos for PBS, ABC, NBC, VH1, Warner Brothers, Island Films, Columbia Records, BMG, Mercury Records, Fox, ESPN, A&E, etc.