Truth can also be funnier than fiction.
Friday marks the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon's resignation speech. But in the minutes before that fateful address on August 8th, 1974, the embattled non-crook was in better spirits than you might think.
Harry Shearer -- he of The Simpsons fame -- released the above re-creation of those final six minutes on Friday. It's an excerpt from Shearer's TV series Nixon's The One, which aired earlier this year on Sky Arts in the U.K. and will launch in the U.S. this fall.
Shearer and Nixon historian Stanley Kutler, his co-writer, combed through thousands of hours of Nixon audio tapes, using advanced audio restoration techniques to piece together the dialogue between Nixon and the CBS camera crew before and after he went to air.
He then meticulously recreated the scene. How'd he do? Compare it to the original here: