NIXON WAS THE ONE

THE NEWLY RELEASED WHITE HOUSE TAPES REVEAL THAT THE PRESIDENT WAS NO INNOCENT BYSTANDER

Author: By David Kaiser

Date: SUNDAY, December 21, 1997

Page: E1

Section: Books

No one who remembers Nixon is neutral about him, and this reviewer is no exception. The Watergate years are indelibly etched in my memory, and I lived through them surrounded by academic liberals like myself. However, neither I nor any of my friends ever imagined anything that remotely resembled the truth. Stanley Kutler's work shows just how much American perceptions differed from American reality in the early 1970s.

President Nixon, to begin with, was deeply involved in his administration's criminal acts from the beginning -- not marginally, but centrally. When the Pentagon Papers were published, in 1971, he ordered a campaign against Daniel Ellsberg. ``Convict the son of a bitch in the press. That's the way it's done,'' Nixon declared on July 1. Meanwhile, he pushed his aides to find and declassify damaging material on crises in earlier administrations, citing Vietnam, Cuba, and even Pearl Harbor. He was already complaining that neither FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover nor Attorney General John Mitchell was tough enough on enemies. Aides H. R. Haldeman and Charles Colson consulted him regarding the hiring of retired CIA man E. Howard Hunt to head the ``plumbers'' unit to deal with leaks. When Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, aide John D. Ehrlichman told Nixon about ``one little operation'' that had been ``aborted out in Los Angeles which, I think, is better that you don't know about.'' And Nixon discussed several plans to divide the Democratic Party by financing dissenting candidates in the 1972 campaign; he also asked for surveillance of his most feared potential opponent, US Senator Edward M. Kennedy. And while no tape indicates he had specific prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in, Nixon had continually pressed his staff for intelligence on important Democrats, including Lawrence O'Brien, the national chairman whose Watergate office the burglars had tried to bug.

As soon as the Watergate burglars were apprehended, Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman plunged into the coverup, assessing the liability of key figures, trying to limit exposure, and -- crucially, from a very early date -- acknowledging and approving payments to the Watergate defendants to ensure their silence. ``Hunt is happy,'' Haldeman told Nixon on Aug. 1, 1972.

``At considerable cost, I guess?'' the president replied.

``Yes,'' said Haldeman.

``It's worth it,'' said the president.

Much later, Nixon agreed to retain the American ambassador in Greece in exchange for hush-money payments from Greek-American Thomas Pappas. While Nixon frequently cited the danger of a coverup, he continually plunged deeper and deeper into one -- and, weirdly, could not resist bizarre impulses to return to the scene of the crime. In the month after Watergate, he discussed both faking a break-in at Republican headquarters and using the Secret Service to spy on his opponent in the November election, US Senator George McGovern.

Beginning in March 1973, when the coverup began to unravel, the remaining four months of tapes provide an astonishing record of denial -- in every sense. Within days of having approved more money for Hunt on March 21, Nixon had convinced himself -- and everyone around him -- that he had only heard of the payments to defendants on that day. (Oddly, in shortening the transcript for publication, Kutler has edited the famous March 21 conversation in ways that make it less incriminating than it actually was.) Nixon's entourage became a classically dysfunctional family dedicated to a basic myth: the president's innocence. First Haldeman and Ehrlichman -- and then Alexander Haig, Ron Ziegler, J. Fred Buzhardt, and Henry Kissinger -- loyally kept this idea alive, week after week, month after month, as revelations mounted and the president's language became more and more desperate and profane. The last recording was made on July 12, 1973, just before the taping system's existence was revealed to the public, and the reader closes the book in astonishment that Nixon, Haig, and the rest would maintain their defense for an entire year more before bowing to the inevitable. (The president's men, meanwhile, show no illusions about one another's innocence. ``Whether it's Mitchell, Chuck, you, Ehrlichman, Dean, Magruder,'' Nixon once remarked to Haldeman, ``the tendency . . . is for people to say: `Well, I didn't, but he did.' '' The tapes are littered with examples of this tendency, which the president fully shared.)

A deeply unhappy man, Richard Nixon lived in a world of struggle, surrounded by enemies who never gave him a moment's peace. Like many of us, he was ruled by some primal emotional reflexes, some of which -- such as his instinctive fear of Jews -- are quite frightening. Shockingly, neither he nor his men ever show any understanding of any higher principle of procedure or justice, much less any belief that others' motives might differ from their own. Living in an emotional jungle, they created a world in their own image.

And Nixon remained his own worst enemy to the end. Had he approved the release of his tapes en bloc, these would have been evaluated in the context of the work that his administration actually did. Instead, he forced historian Stanley Kutler to file yet another lawsuit, and the court insisted that tapes dealing with his abuse of power be released first. As always, Nixon's unwillingness to admit any error highlighted his mistakes. The tapes are a unique record and a unique challenge to historians as they try to understand the significance of the man and the tumultuous era in which he figured so critically.