Conan O’Brien has millions of fans all across the world, at least one of whom may have pushed Jay Leno down that Pennsylvania hill as payback for the Tonight Show fiasco. Weirdly, it turns out that, for a very brief moment, the Conan fanbase also included disgraced president Richard Milhous Nixon.
During a recent episode of the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast, the host spoke with Tom Holland (not the Spider-Man guy) and Dominic Sandbrook from the podcast The Rest Is History. During their discussion of history, Nixon’s name came up, prompting O’Brien to share a story from the early days of his Late Night run.
“My show, here in the States, began in September of 1993,” O’Brien recalled. “And a reporter asked me, ‘Who would your favorite comedy guest be?’ And I said, ‘Richard Nixon,’ because Richard Nixon was still alive.”
O’Brien wasn’t joking, he was legitimately interested in Nixon’s unwitting role in the history of modern comedy. “He was the face of comedy for about a good 12 years in our comedy,” the host explained. “Comedians were obsessed with him. He was a very fun guy to have sport with, and he obsessed every comedy writer for a huge chunk of modern American history.”
“So I wanted to talk to Richard Nixon,” he continued. “And then he passed away. I started in September, I think he died in maybe March” — it was actually April — “and I thought, ‘There goes my chance.’”
O’Brien even shared his desire to interview Nixon while slowly dying during his famous Hot Ones appearance.
But the big shocker here is that O’Brien’s interest in Nixon was something of a two-way street. “I’m going to brag here for a moment,” he said to his podcast guests. “One of Nixon’s biographers who knew him is a woman named Monica Crowley, who has written a lot about Nixon in (the book Nixon in Winter) late in his career. She told me that Nixon, at the very end of his life, was flipping around — he was interested in television. He liked to watch television. And I premiered, and he watched our first episode. And then she said that he liked it, and told her, ‘I like it, it’s madcap. It’s madcap!’”
Now O’Brien wants “Monica Crowley to write that down so that it’s part of the official record.”
Who knows, maybe one day we’ll get a special edition of All the President’s Men with a new epilogue all about Nixon’s post-Watergate late-night TV viewing habits.
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