Remembering "Nixon vs. Kennedy"

As I have had many an occasion to remark I found the praise for Mad Men wildly exaggerated--not unlike the Saturday Night Live parody of the critical raves for The Sopranos (for which Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner had previously been a writer). However, this is not to say that the show did not have its points of interest, and I have recently found myself recalling a major scene at the end of the first season (in the episode "Nixon vs. Kennedy") in which the scheming Pete Campbell has discovered the truth about Don Draper's past--that Don, actually born Dick Whitman, was an Army deserter who stole the name, identity, life of an officer named Don Draper--and, after failing to blackmail Don into giving him a promotion with that information, goes to their ad agency's senior partner Bert Cooper with the information.

Bert's response is "Who cares?" Even if true, a thing Bert did not necessarily concede (indeed, he refers to Campbell as having "imagined" the story he tells), the fact would have made no difference to him. Japanophile that he is, he cites the saying that "A man is whatever room he is in"--and as he goes on to say, it is Don Draper who is in the room with them. At any rate, "This country was built and run by men with worse stories than whatever you've imagined here." And that is essentially that.

Dramatically it is rather a damp squib--the plot about Campbell's struggle with Draper simply fizzling anti-climactically, as was so often the case in what I saw of the show. Still, the more I think about the scene the more I find myself liking Bert--not least because of the unflappability, and wisdom, he displayed in the situation.

"Who cares?" indeed.

Alas, today the sensibility seems very different--enough so that it would probably take a good deal of courage to handle the situation the same way in any current production.