No word yet if Al Gore was nearby when Frost assumed room temperature. Here’s the New York Times’ obit:
David Frost, the iconoclastic British broadcaster best known for interviewing former President Richard M. Nixon after he resigned from office in disgrace, died on Saturday night. He was 74.
His death, which was announced in a statement by the Frost family to the BBC, was confirmed by a spokesman for Al Jazeera English, where Mr. Frost hosted an interview program. The statement said Mr. Frost died, possibly of a heart attack, while aboard the Queen Elizabeth cruise ship, where he was scheduled to give a speech.
Mr. Frost had just moved to a home close to Oxford, according to Richard Brock, his executive producer at Al Jazeera English. He also had a home in London.
Known for incisive interviews of leading public figures, Mr. Frost spent more than 50 years in television. Since 2006, he has conducted newsmaker interviews for Al Jazeera English, one of the BBC’s main competitors overseas.
“His conversations with his guests elicited both news lines and a unique insight into their lives,” said Al Anstey, the managing director of Al Jazeera English.
Among his guests on Al Jazeera were President George Bush, George Clooney and the tennis star Martina Navratilova. One of his first interviews for Al Jazeera made headlines when his guest Tony Blair agreed with Mr. Frost’s assessment that the Iraq war had, up until that point in 2006, “been pretty much of a disaster.” More recently, in 2011, Mr. Frost sat with Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary.
Amazing: Five years after he left office, the Gray Lady’s Bush Derangement Syndrome still appears even in David Frost’s obit, even before they get to their Nixon Derangement Syndrome:
In his penetrating interviews with President Nixon in 1977, which were later immortalized in a play and a film both named “Frost/Nixon,” Mr. Frost asked about Mr. Nixon’s abuses of presidential power, prompting this answer: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Sorry, you don’t get to mock that quote after you’ve published an op-ed titled, “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution,” then advised Mr. Obama to “Bomb Syria, Even if It Is Illegal.”
On the other hand, Monty Python, many of whom served as writer’s for Frost earlier in their careers had lots of fun mocking Frost in their hilarious “Timmy Williams Coffee Time” sketch, which was “entirely written by Timmy Williams — along with…”
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