Harry Shearer Inhabits Nixon On 40th Anniversary Of Resignation

In a new video just posted online, Harry Shearer inhabits Richard Nixon in a verbatim comedic re-creation of Nixon's poignant last 6 minutes before he resigned the Presidency, forty years ago today.

This excerpt, from Shearer's TV series "Nixon's The One," includes Nixon's previously little known - and surprising - words to the CBS camera crew, which Shearer uncovered using advanced audio restoration techniques.

Watch the video here:

For the rest of "Nixon's The One," Shearer and his co-writer Nixon historian Stanley Kutler combed through thousands of hours of the legendary Nixon audio tapes, and re-enacted word for word the best moments as if filmed by a hidden camera.

"Nixon was one of the great comic characters of the 20th century," Shearer says. "When I first began listening to his secret tapes, the revelation to me was the crazy conversations that went on in this place on the public dime. Stanley and I aimed to be as accurate as humanly possible in the way these lines are spoken, in the intonations, in the pauses, in the way people interact. Our job was to be faithful transmitters of this incredible record of craziness."

Stay tuned for more news on the US launch of the series in fall 2014, which aired earlier this year on Sky Arts in the UK.