David Frost (Alan Cox) and Tricky Dick (Stacy Keach) square off in Frost/Nixon. Photo: Carol Rosegg.

At his Election-Eve chat at the Birchmere, Henry Rollins considered the post-presidential role of one George W. Bush. In Rollins’s speculative, Bergman-movie vision of the Bushes’ Golden years, they occupy a swank Houston condo, their suites situated on opposite sides of the long dining room where they take their silent meals together, the air so thick with tension it scares the help. Of course, pundits with loftier credentials than those of a punk singer-turned-storyteller will probably weigh in on this topic. Who is Hank Rollins to say what will happen to our sad president, whose nature and motives have already been examined by some of the sharpest journalistic minds of our generation? In such matters, Rollins is, as he freely admits, a lightweight.

I mention it only because that’s more or less what the world was saying 30 years ago about David Frost, the down-on-his-luck British chat-show host who in 1977 achieved what elected officials and hard-news journalists before him couldn’t: He got Richard Milhous Nixon, who shared W.’s decidedly un-conservative view of presidential authority, to repent his crimes in office (more or less) before a television audience of 400 million. “I let down the country,” came the tortured admission. “I let down our system of government, and the dreams of all those young people who ought to get into government but who now will think it’s all too corrupt and the rest.”