Hey kids, what time is it? It's Richard Nixon time!

I If I could have not voted in '68, it would have been for Hubert H. Humphry that I would have not cast a vote. Not that ideology would have had anything to do with it. (Though, to be sure, ideologies had very little to do with the election in question.) No, if I'd been forced to the choice. I'd sure as hell have made sure that the weight of my vote would have gone to the man who begged to be treated with laughter and scorn.

And Humphrey was just too dim-wittedly good-humored to get a crack at the part. Not with a pro like Richard Milhous Nixon to contend with. For when it comes to being a stand-up-sit-down-fall-out comedian Mr. Nixon always was, still is, and always will be, as they say in the trade, a natural.

Fortunately, Emile De Antonio's Millhouse is as funny a documentary as its subject matter warrants. Beginning with The Last Press Conference of 1962. De Antonio weaves back and forth through the checkered career of the unsinkable Richard M. in an indefatigable attempt to discover what makes this public man run. There is the 1964 congressional campaign in which the Bank of America quietly assists young Richard in his smear attacks on Congressman Jerry Voorhis: Nixon's prosecution of Alger Hiss, along with his clever use of closed congressional hearings ("I am holding in my hand a microfilm of very highly classified secret documents."); the 1950 Senatorial campaign with its "pink sheet" attacks on Helen Gahagan Douglas; the side-splitting Checkers speech in which every cheap rhetorical device which Nixon would later use in his Presidential addresses is foreshadowed; and the whole roster of "crises" around which Nixon himself has shaped the melodrama of his life.

De Antonio relies on the generally available newsreel footage and television kinescopes to tell his story (and also material not so generally available, to judge by bits like a series of commercial out-takes Nixon made in '68). The result is a kind of modern-day equivalent of Citizen Kane. For Millhouse takes one step further Pauline Kael's argument that Kane's News of the World search for the meaning of "Rosebud" is a conscious parody on the Henry Luce operation that had supplanted Hearst's more idiosyncratic satrapy: in Millhouse, electronic journalism has become the dominant mouthpiece for the promulgation of bogus truth. Sonorous, unseen voices intone the latest espionage finds; hydra-headed clumps of radio and TV microphones become the pulpits from which bulletins and statements issue forth: ubiquitous, invisible cameras whisk us from the streets of Whittier to the airports of Latin America to the state rooms of the White House. the confusion is over-whelming, despite the feverish order De Antonio imposes on his snark hunt. Boyish Richard Nixons jostle elbows with thuggish images of President Nixons. But nowhere is the mystery of the man penetrated. He remains a totally unreal figure, a substance as shadowy as his own infamous five o'clock stubble.

All we glimpse are moments (the bulk of them appalling) in the life of the Public Nixon. There is an early victory celebration in which Pat actually kisses her beaming husband (you don't see that anymore). There is a White House performance of a Bob Hope Christmas tour with a bevy of gyrating girls singing the President's praises just as if he were old Charlie Kane throwing for himself a stag party. (The ends to which men must resort to hear their praises sung in an ostensible democracy!) And there is that unforgettable moment at the '68 Republican Convention in which Dick exhorts the following to "win this one for (the dying) Ike," which De Antonio intercuts with Pat O'Brian appealing to the Notre Dame football team to "win this one for the Gipper," the Gipper being played by young man Ronald Reagan. Nowhere a hint of Nixon's own private rosebud, although I think the statement by an old friend of the Nixon family to the effect that, as a boy. Nixon worked eighteen hours a day and thus could never come to feel any sympathy for his fellow countrymen who work only eight, comes closest to the truth. A truly hollow man, Nixon is one who is simply driven. His presidency becomes his chance to wreak vegeance on a country that infused him ineradicably with its prevailing brand of spiritual emptiness.

With that realization Millhouse rightly drops any further attempts to "understand" Nixon, focusing instead on the destructive obtuseness of his style. A Thanksgiving celebration at the White House is shown as Richard blithely asks Julie to invoke a doggerel grace for a captive audience of the aged and poor. Their faces watch the proceedings with a resigned air of confusion and incomprehension. Nixon then proceeds to lie about improvements in the economy.

Its laughter aside, the chief virtue of Millhouse lies in the hatred it so provokes. For, unlike De Antonio's other documentaries (Point of Order. Year of the Pig), Millhouse eschews an analytic framework except for its constant reminders of the temptations that media politics possess for the political candidate (for although Nixon is its top banana, other national pols also appear in the film to stand similarly condemned). And yet, I would not be prepared to admit that Millhouse is a film that speaks only to those already converted to a hatred of President Nixon. Numerous though they may be, I fear there are all too few such true believers. How else do you explain the case with which most of us have learned to stop worrying about, if not quite to love, the Nixon Administration? Well, take heart, for Millhouse restores to you a pristine sense of hatred and is a chilling reminder that there can ultimately be no compromise with a political system that produces such a creature as Richard Nixon as its logical son and heir.

Which is not to say that Millhouse isn't at times also quite compassionate. It does tend to laugh at the prune faced conventioneers and D.A.R.'s who applaud Nixon's jeremiads against dope peddlers, his paeons to private enterprise, and his assurances that the only thing "worse than atomic war would be surrender." But, by film's end, it also sees such unsympathetic figures--as well as the urban poor at the Thanksgiving Dinner and even the Nixons themselves--as victims of a culture and a government that no man would want to wish on even his worst of neighbors.

One final cultural note: Millhouse is being shown in Boston at Allston's Video Theatre, a closed-circuit TV operation. Now true, what better way to wander down memory lane with the Nixon of our collective past than by means of the very medium which long ago salvaged his career. Still. I'm not all that happy with the proposition. Ninety-three minutes of uninterrupted TV can be a wearing experience, ultimately making De Antonio's film appear longer and less well constructed than it is. And, while I'm prepared to accept the current wisdom that video is indeed the wave on which the future will be found a coming in. I still get the uneasy feeling that to watch Millhouse by a television screen's blue light is to give the real enemy its final, ironic victory. Go anyway though, for the folks at Video Theatre hope to be showing Millhouse there for a good long while and, who knows, by making a pilgrimage to the place you just might also find your way back into the streets.

II. There is, though, one problem you find yourself facing when you deal with a man like Richard Nixon, an unctious, 'umble Uriah Heep, a 24-hour-a-day self-parody: he himself is so funny he pre-empts all other forms of comic abuse. Now Philip Roth is not a writer to be shaken off when there's a laugh to be trailed, shadowed and nabbed. But in reading Our Gang, you get the sense that Richard Nixon did indeed give Roth a run for his money.

Our Gang: (Starring Tricky and His Friends) is a pleasantly ad hominem attack on the President and his Administration that finds itself just about midway between college humor parody and morally outraged satire. In terms of Roth's previous work, it most closely resembles "On the Air" (New American Review No. 10), a fevered collage of oldtime-radio-programs-as-later-day-confidence-men as they invade the life of a threatened Jewish father. It's Roth's particular talent (or, to be more exact, one of Roth's particular talents) to be able to extract what's most nightmarish in the onslaught of our national life and to try to exorcise the terror by blowing it up beyond all tenable proportions.

However, the particular comic premises that Roth employs to launch aloft Our Gang are almost embarrassingly weak. Beginning with Nixon's April 3 condemnation of abortion ("I cannot square (abortion) with my personal belief in the sanctity of human life--including the life of the yet unborn. For, surely, the unborn have rights also, recognized in law, recognized even in principles expounded by the United Nations."). Our Gang goes on to fantasize an in-the-streets revolt by the nation's Boy Scouts in the mistaken belief that their President has come out in favor of sexual intercourse, an Administration maneuver to blame the popular unrest on a defected baseball player, a military invasion of Denmark, the liberation of "Hamlet's Castle," the destruction of Copenhagen. Richard Nixon's assasination (he's found naked in a giant, water-filled baggy in Walter Reed Hospital where he's gone to have the sweat glands in his upper lip removed), and Nixon's subsequent attempts to reestablish a constituency in Hell. If it occasionally sounds strained, it is. Mr. Roth's fury would seem to have gotten the better of him.

No matter, though, for to recount its plot is only to suggest the text that provides the scaffolding from which Our Gang goes on to mount an angry attack on the corruption that language must suffer in American politics. The book's events are told through press conferences. White House strategy sessions, Presidential addresses and network news analyses. In his best two pieces here, "Tricky Has Another Crisis: or, The Skull Session" and "The Assasination of Tricky." Roth has constructed frenzied fugues of political inanities.

In a moment that even Lewis Carroll could be proud of. Nixon's Legal Coach blusters: "But we haven't even decided yet upon the exact nature of the charge--so how can they be innocent? Where is your evidence? Where is your proof?" Meanwhile Vice President What's-his-name is off on an endless tirade--"the psychotics, the sob sisters, the skin merchants, the saboteurs, the self-styled Sapphos, the self-styled Swinburnes, the swine, the satyrs, the schizos, the sodomists, the sissies, the screamers, the screwy, the scum"--against the enemies of the nation. When J. Edgar Heehaw is questioned on the details of the Presidential assasination he modestly replies. "Look, as we say here at the Bureau, ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies." And to bring matters into a clearer focus, there are always those boys with the national news:

"Good evening. This is Erect Severehead with a cogent news analysis from the nation's capitol...A hushed hush pervades the corridors of power. Great men whisper whispers while a stunned capitol awaits. Even the cherry blossoms along the Potomac seem to sense the magnitude. And magnitude there is. Yet magnitude there has been before, and the nation has survived. A mood of cautious optimism surged forward just at dusk. Then set the age-old sun behind these edifices of reason, and gloom once more descended. Yet gloom there has been, and in the end the nation has survived...Still, in this worried capitol tonight, men watch and men wait. So too do women and children in this worried capitol tonight watch and wait. This is Erect Severehead from Washington. D.C."

In fact, only Trick E. Dixon himself proves tedious in such company. Always making one thing perfectly clear. Nixonian parodies are inevitably too pat, always threatening to become mere one-joke affairs.

There will be those, I suspect, who'll deery Roth--as they've already decried De Antonio--for the simplicity of his attack. To do so is to miss his point. Millhouse and Our Gang are simple, direct attacks because the object of their fury himself chooses to take so simple-minded a tack in his relationship with the American people. In burlesqueing such simplicity. Roth and De Antonio can only hope to force some concern over the degenerate state into which political language has fallen. Our Gang is hardly a partisan effort. Although there is a curiously inconsistent logic beneath the book--refusing, for example, to parody Martin Luther King or Lee Harvey Oswald while socking it to Jacqueline Charisma Colossus--as with Millhouse, the enemy is not so much one particular man in power as it is those forces which permitted him to find his way there in the first place.

Our Gang is hardly a major addition to Roth's literary output--although I'm sure the House of Random will do its damnedest to make us think otherwise--but it is a most valuable one. For there should be room on the shelves for minor works from major authors. Despite what Mailer would have us believe, to be engage need not be a full time occupation. It's also nice that, in this case, Roth should be the particular example at hand. Those who care to pretend that the seventies are nothing more but the dreadful fifties warmed over need only chart the distance between Goodbye, Columbus and Our Gang to learn otherwise. We may not have come a long way, baby, but we've come aways. Even Richard Nixon would have to drink to that.