The Press: Frost's Big Deal

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No Experience. The networks may well wonder whether Frost, who is not really a newsman, is truly up to his task. Frost does not, of course, lack experience with public figures: he has held forth with the likes of Indira Gandhi and the Shah of Iran. The problem, however, lies in his interview style. Rather than chip away at his subject with a series of jolting questions, Frost prefers to rock along with him gently and let his character emerge. "My aim in any interview," says Frost, "is to make someone come over as he really is."

It seems likely that Nixon will come across as he really has been, spinning out the elaborate, self-serving defenses he erected throughout the Watergate period. Indeed, could any interviewer induce the ex-President to make a clean breast of things? Can David Frost succeed where John Sirica, Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski failed?

The cool Briton seems to think so. "The Richard Nixon of today is a different man from the Richard Nixon of even a few weeks ago," says Frost. "As time passes and he has more and more recovered his health, he has begun to analyze the past, and is ready to be really reflective or retrospective." Frost is confident that if his tapes are meaty enough, all the networks' reservations will go by the boards. "In my experience, the networks are in the business of disseminating information rather than suppressing it," he says. But if, as expected, CBS, NBC and ABC all shun Frost, he could still sell his programs to independent and local broadcasters or public television. He could assemble a makeshift network and perhaps turn a fatter profit than he might by dealing with the big three. In the end, Frost may find foreign broadcasters most receptive.

The issue remains whether the Frost shows deserve to be aired anywhere. Even if Nixon is moved to more candor than before, many Americans will still find distasteful the spectacle of an ex-President demanding and receiving a fee to tell the truth that he should have told them long ago as a matter of duty. If there is money to be made in acquiring the Nixon-Frost programs, broadcasters may well conclude that this is not the time to make it.