Nixon's Echoes

The outing of "Deep Throat" rousted some of the Nixon era's best haters from their crepuscular calm and set them off in Full Throat to denounce Mark Felt as a traitor. But what about the Hater in Chief? What would Richard M. Nixon have made of this orgy of pent-up sound and fury?

Would he have mouthed the same fulminations coming from Pat Buchanan and other embittered acolytes set on fire by the news that an FBI official was The Post's prize source?

I talked with Nixon only once, a year before his death in 1994, so I don't want to guess. Instead, I called Bill Safire, the writer who once worked for Nixon and who channeled the former president's voice from the grave so effectively in op-ed columns.

Hearing anything on that frequency, Bill?

Pause. Sound of throat clearing. And then in a gravelly baritone comes a pitch-perfect recreation of that self-pitying, self-justifying rumble of the man who divided my nation and even my family with his paranoia and ambitions.

"Well, of course I suspected it right from the start, didn't I, Bill?" said the ghost speaking into Safire's telephone. Felt "just wanted to keep J. Edgar Hoover's domination of the White House and Capitol Hill intact, while I was determined to reassert executive authority over that nest of power.

"All these hypocritical liberals forget how they felt about what the FBI was up to then. The right thing for him to do, of course, would have been to come to me and tell me what he had discovered. Or he could have gone to Congress. But not to The Washington Post, Bill. Harrumph. Mumble."

Safire, a conservative, libertarian, contrarian colleague whose retirement earlier this year left the New York Times op-ed page a less literate, less surprising and less newsy arena of enlightenment, chafed at the idea of Nixon as Hater in Chief.

"I was on his side. So make that Counter-Hater in Chief," Safire argued, suggesting subliminally that Nixon believed in persecuting only his persecutors.

"Nixon didn't hate Hoover. But he probably didn't fear him, either. They were both vigorous anti-communists, so Nixon could hold his own against Hoover. But he couldn't fire him in that first term," said Safire.

The Nixon who went to China couldn't fire

J. Edgar Hoover?