Broadcaster says George Bush Snr opened up in a way never before seen on television in 1989 interview
His showdown with Richard Nixon became a hit play, an Oscar-nominated film and was voted the greatest broadcast interview of all time. But Sir David Frost has said he is most proud of a less well-remembered interview with a different US president – George Bush Snr.
Frost scooped the first broadcast interview with Bush following his inauguration into the White House in 1989 in a wood cabin on his home estate in Maine.
"It's when you get something from a person who everybody told you would not give at all," Frost told the Radio Times when asked about his proudest interview moment.
"A man I greatly respect, the first President Bush – well, everybody had said that he never relaxed on television and when we did the first interview with him up at Kennebunkport, a little village in Maine … Although we'd never met before, within 10 or 15 minutes he was talking just so frankly about his family and the daughter he lost through leukaemia," said Frost. "He was direct and everything that he is in real life, but he'd never been seen that way on television."
The story of how Frost persuaded Nixon to speak on camera in the 1977 series of interviews in which the disgraced former president admitted he "let down the country" became the basis of Peter Morgan's play Frost/Nixon. It was later made into a film starring Michael Sheen and Frank Langella.
With Frost/Bush an unlikely project for either stage or screen, Frost said he did not mind the perception that the Nixon interview had eclipsed his other work. "No, one wouldn't worry about it eclipsing anything," he told the magazine. "It was such a great experience that I wouldn't have wanted to be without that in my life."
Frost, who currently presents the talkshow Frost Over The World on al-Jazeera, will front a new series about the art of the televised interview, Frost on Interviews, on BBC4. It will feature interviews with Michael Parkinson, Lord Bragg, Joan Bakewell and Graham Norton.
Frost's own softly, softly approach to interviewing was once described by the late Labour leader John Smith (to Frost himself) as a "way of asking beguiling questions with potentially lethal consequences".
"If you don't have the smoking gun then it's pointless to hector interviewees," Frost has previously said. "Because you just shut people up instead of opening them up."
Asked whether any questions should ever be off-limits because of their personal nature, Frost told the Radio Times: "It's an interesting point. With the Nixon interview, for instance, I had insisted on sole control – that he wouldn't know any of the questions in advance and so there was absolutely no legal barrier to me asking him whatever I wanted."