One of our number is an American screenplay writer, and I have been encouraging him to think about the following episode as a potential play of some sort. It is the eve of the election of a President of the United States. The polling booths have closed and the counting is getting underway. One of the two Presidential candidates, realising the long wait now ahead of him and aware also that if he wins he and his family will be surrounded by tight security and media interest for at least four years, decides to slip his leash. With the complicity of the local police, he picks up his wife and children and agent in his car and then throws off his media tail, turning down several side roads and hiding the car in an empty garage until the press have driven by. Once the coast is clear, he drives south, along the coast, stopping to swim in the ocean and eventually crossing the border into Mexico. They eat lunch together in a famous Mexican city – not incognito but certainly unexpected, and then drive back up the coast. He drops off his family in their hotel suite just as the first returns come in. Could this really have happened? And, if so, who was it? Goldwater in ’64? Humphrey in ’68? Mondale in ’84? Dukakis in ’88? Or maybe Al Gore in 2000? The answer, extraordinarily, was Richard Nixon in 1960, driving south from Los Angeles. The city they drove to was Tijuana. It’s all in his Six Crises which, I believe, is a potential treasure trove for scriptwriters. Of course, it probably couldn’t happen now, but it truly did happen, and not so long ago.
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