Richard Nixon promoted his own image makeover by addressing the Oxford Union in 1978. Current Union president Paul Kenward, a 22-year-old modern-history student, cited the Nixon precedent in announcing that Simpson was scheduled to speak next week. He said he was “honored” to invite O.J., which he did at the suggestion of the ex-athlete’s London PR man. “The only debate about this took place in my own head,” said Kenward.
Now the argument is spreading fast. Simpson was little known in Britain before his “trial of the century” and controversial acquittal. Many of Kenward’s elders, and some of his contemporaries, are appalled by what they see as a pointless and tasteless invitation. “If you wanted an analysis of the racial dynamics of our time, O.J.’s not the guy you would ask,” complains Byron Shafer, professor of American government at Oxford’s Nuffield College. “So what are we recognizing? This is a severe misuse of celebrity.” The differences between Simpson and Nixon, from their alleged crimes to their place in history, are too obvious to detail. Here’s one that’s subtler. It was at Oxford that Nixon called Watergate “a blunder” for which he took responsibility.
If the past is any guide, O.J.’s tone will be more self-serving than confessional. On May 13, he’ll help to launch a new TV show called “Tonight” on Britain’s ITN network. ITN is paying $25,000 in airline and hotel bills for Simpson and a bodyguard. “Tonight” editor Mark Gorton insists the questions during O.J.’s live 15-minute segment on the cozy chat show will be hardballs he hasn’t seen in advance. Critics are skeptical. Daily Star columnist Peter Hill predicts the experience for O.J. will be “like being bathed in warm blancmange.”
The next evening, it’s off to Oxford. Behind doors closed to the TV cameras, O.J. will talk about his life, then take spontaneous questions from the students. Max Clifford, the London PR man putting the still fluid itinerary together, thinks both stops should begin a process of public redemption for Simpson. “It starts here because it can’t start in America,” says Clifford. “Mediawise, this is just about the best place on the planet to get your words across.”
The trip could turn out to be just a bad joke. Some critics of the Union think the debating society has already gone too far downmarket, with recent guests like model Jerry Hall and puppet Kermit the Frog. Camping it up and rattling the elders are proud Union traditions. But Oriel College historian Mark Almond calls the O.J. invitation “a joke with bloodstains on the carpet. . . . What they’re doing is having a great wheeze. O.J.’s really there to provide a grotesque entertainment.” If so, the trip could produce more backlash than redemption, and the joke would be on O.J.
