Behind the Statesman, A Reel Nixon Endures

In the final years of his life, long after his presidency ended in disgrace and on the brink of impeachment, Richard M. Nixon amazed former allies and enemies with the success he had rehabilitating his reputation.

A series of well-received memoirs, foreign policy pronouncements and carefully scripted appearances did much to confer on the former president the status of elder statesman, putting the dark pall of the Watergate scandal ever further behind him.

But today, on the 25th anniversary of the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, Nixon remains bedeviled by his own words, captured on more than 200 hours of White House tapes made public recently after years of litigation.

Former senator George S. McGovern (D-S.D.) sought to make peace with his old political opponent, beginning with a visit in 1984 to help celebrate Nixons 71st birthday. But disclosures in the Nixon tapes have since caused him to regret the effort. "I went to see him to heal the wounds," McGovern said in an interview. "[But] I wonder from these tapes why I ever bothered to reconcile with him. Its hard to keep him on a pedestal with all these tapes speaking from the grave."

The newly available tapes, all 201 hours of them, deal exclusively, as the law requiring their preservation puts it, with "abuses of governmental power popularly identified under the generic term, Watergate." Other portions, far more lengthy, are to be made public in the next few years, perhaps demonstrating Nixons brilliance in foreign policy and his grasp of domestic issues. The "abuse of governmental power segments," as they are labeled at the National Archives, show the old Nixon, but at the same time a much fuller, understandable and compelling Nixon.

It is this Nixon history will remember.

"These 201 hours are a story, not isolated sound bites," says University of Wisconsin historian Stanley Kutler, whose lawsuit forced the public disclosure of the tapes. "A far richer and more interesting portrait of Nixon emerges from these tapes. Its not one that excuses or exonerates him in any way. But this is a real, live human being, not a cardboard figure."

On the tapes, Nixon is profane, demanding, delighted, sad, insightful, angry, exultant, calculating and bitter. Some people, familiar with the scattered recordings obtained by Watergate prosecutors in the 1970s, have suggested that it is his paranoia that stands out, but there is much more than that. Richard Nixon had very real enemies and he knew it. They were out to get him, and he was out to get them, from carping newspaper reporters and television correspondents to liberal think tanks and "big Jewish . . . [expletive deleted]" who bankrolled Democratic candidates.

If there is one guiding principle about Nixon that stands out on these tapes, it is this: Do unto others what you think they have done unto you.

Take, for example, a phone conversation Nixon had with his top hatchet man, White House special counsel Charles W. Colson, on the night of May 15, 1972. A few hours earlier, Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, then the top vote-getter among Democratic presidential candidates, had been shot at a rally in Maryland by an addled, would-be assassin named Arthur Bremer.

"Is he [Bremer] a left-winger or a right-winger?" Nixon asked.

"Well, hes going to be a left-winger by the time we get through, I think," Colson replied.