(NIXON BY NIXON: IN HIS OWN WORDS, USA 2010) - This strange little documentary is engrossing despite itself. Timed to the 40th anniversary next Saturday of Richard M. Nixon’s resignation, it samples Nixon’s secret White House tapes to sketch the familiar portrait of the president as a closeted monster: paranoid, vicious, racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, with a casual disregard for anything besides his own standing. But “Nixon by Nixon” is also structured as a brief history of the Nixon presidency, and it alternates the darkness of the tapes with the brighter, tinnier tones of newscasts and interviews. As it moves through the Nixon era at a lightning pace — a few minutes on China, a few more on Vietnam, here the Moscow summit, there the Pentagon Papers and finally Watergate — it has a self-canceling quality, probably intentional but still odd. The public narrative elements (underscored by chipper, burbling music) are constantly undercut and exposed by the harsh truth of the tapes.
