Budding Library

C-SPAN has begun airing Nixon library director Tim Naftali's interviews with Richard Nixon's ex-staffers, beginning with Bud Krogh (shown here), most famous for organizing Elvis Presley's 1970 White House visit and running the leaker-hunting Plumbers unit that burglarized the office of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Lewis Fielding, in September 1971. Krogh did federal time for violating Fielding's civil rights.

While Krogh's Wikipedia entry puts all the blame on him, some kind of surreptitious effort to find out what Fielding knew about Ellsberg's public activities was approved by top Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, who later tried to pin it all on the president. Proving Nixon's foreknowledge (which he credibly denied) of the Fielding break-in is Watergate's mother lode. Scholars from Stanley Kutler to Rick Perlstein have tried and failed.

Naftali did 126 interviews, including with Dwight Chapin, who used the opportunity to accuse Nixon of having been present when chief of staff H. R. "Bob" Haldeman ordered him to set up a dirty tricks unit for Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign. The allegation would've been big news to federal prosecutors and the House Judiciary Committee. It's important to remember that Chapin was jailed for lying under oath.

Does C-SPAN plan to air the Chapin interview? And will we ever see it in the new Nixon library Watergate exhibit, which has been strenuously opposed by Nixon's ex-aides?

"The New Nixon" Improves "Nixonland"

In an interview (actually, an exchange of e-mails) with the editor of the History News Network, Nixonland author Rick Perlstein tips his hat to "The New Nixon," the blog I launched in February 2008 at the Nixon Foundation:

I actually quite appreciated most of what was said at the New Nixon blog. New Nixon blogger Jack Pitney made several useful corrections in particular I was able to incorporate into six subsequent printings.

Less popular with the distinguished author was the revelation by your (still on hiatus) Episconixonian correspondent last July that Perlstein had altered the meaning of a quotation from another book to make it appear as though President Nixon had known in advance about a plan to break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist in September 1971. Perlstein told HNN:

[Dr. Taylor's] right on the narrow point, but I think more broadly the preponderance of the evidence suggests that Nixon probably knew what was going on.

Which prompted me to reply to Perlstein:

I appreciate that you think the preponderance of evidence suggests RN [knew] about the Fielding job in advance, but there's actually no evidence that he did. My lack of historical training and a Ph.D notwithstanding (although your describing me as Dr. Taylor was a mighty buzz), I don't think your gut call on Nixon's complicity is a justification for making a secondary source sound like he's saying what he actually didn't say.

The Canon According To David Greenberg

Jeremy Young gently disputes the idea, proffered by historian David Greenberg, that those who take issue with certain Watergate verities are akin to global warming deniers. Here's how New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt put it on Sunday as he repudiated the work of his colleague Patricia Cohen:

David Greenberg, a Rutgers historian and the author of “Nixon’s Shadow,” argued that the tale did not involve a significant dispute and was more like the Watergate version of global warming, with most historians long ago coming to a consensus and only a few outliers arguing against it. “Professional scholarly consensus is not sacrosanct, but it should count for a lot,” he said.

Hoyt's article may need a review of its own. The positioning of the Greenberg quotation suggests the historian was saying that there's a nearly sacrosanct scholarly consensus about Stanley Kutler's Watergate transcripts as published in his book Abuse Of Power. There's obviously no such thing. Kutler freely admits that he prepared his transcripts quickly and that they contain errors. Several scholars have pointed some of them out, and another is evidently poised to do so. What was at issue in the original Times story was whether Kutler edited the transcripts deceptively, with an eye to telling the story he wanted to tell. If there's a consensus about anything in this controversy, it's that having careful, authoritative transcripts of Watergate conversations would be a boon to historians and history.

My guess is that Greenberg was talking to Hoyt not about the transcripts controversy but about writers such as Len Colodny, James Hougan, Russ Baker, Joan Hoff, Jonathan Aitken, and James Rosen, all of whom look at Watergate differently than most. Several claim that White House counsel John Dean was not only more involved in the cover-up than commonly thought but also an originator of the Watergate break-ins themselves. Are these the writers whom Hoyt, and by implication Greenberg, call outliers, the moral equivalent of global warning deniers? If so, Hoyt should have made that more clear, especially since the upshot of his critique is that his colleague Cohen was careless about such nuances in her original article.

As for Greenberg and others in the Hoyt article who evidently are now to be understood as defenders of the one true faith of Watergate, few are entirely blameless themselves. Without evidence, Greenberg accused the authors of the now-removed Watergate gallery at the private Nixon Library of being liars, either for saying the 18.5-minute gap might have been accidental or for pointing out that some Democratic members of the House hoped to maneuver Speaker Carl Albert into the Presidency. In his book Nixonland, Rick Perlstein, whom Hoyt also quotes as denouncing Kutler's critics, misconstrued a secondary source to make it appear as though President Nixon had authorized the September 1971 Lewis Fielding burglary in advance. And Kutler has yet to explain why he edited his transcript of a July 1972 conversation to obscure its true subject matter and later incorrectly claimed to an Orange County Register reporter that the tape proved that Nixon had known about the Fielding job earlier than he'd always claimed.

That's two historians trying to pin a crime on the late President that he didn't commit and another unfairly attacking the former administrators of his library because they had the gall to present inconvenient nuances to museumgoers. With these supposedly dispassionate professionals trying so hard to prove their points even when the record says otherwise, perhaps we may conclude that the Watergate canon isn't quite as fixed as Hoyt and others would have us believe.

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

Kutler, Nixon, And The Ellsberg Break-In

Chuck Colson (right) with President Nixon and John O'Neill

In the wake of Sunday's New York Times article, critics and defenders of historian Stanley Kutler (below) have focused on his transcripts of Watergate conversations from March 1973. His 1997 book, Abuse of Power, also included an apparent attempt to edit a transcript to make it appear that by June 1972, the month of the Watergate break-in, President Nixon had become aware of the White House Plumbers' September 1971 break-in at the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Lewis Fielding.

Mr. Nixon always maintained that he didn't learn about the Ellsberg caper until the spring of 1973. If he'd known about it during the first days and weeks of the Watergate coverup, it would put his statements and actions in a much darker light.

Nixon critics have been understandably eager to find evidence that he knew in advance about either break-in as well as that he was was mindful of the Plumbers' illegal activity as the Watergate coverup got underway in June 1972. Rick Perlstein joined the counterfeit smoking gun club with 2008's Nixonland when he misconstrued the meaning of a secondary source to make the President look guilty of foreknowledge of an illegal burglary.

Kutler's sleight of hand occurs in his transcript of a July 19, 1972 conversation between the President and political aide Chuck Colson. In an editor's setup, Kutler wrote:

Colson is full of praise for his friend [E. Howard Hunt, arrested at the Watergate], knowing that he had broken into Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. "They weren't stealing anything,' Colson rationalized. 'They had broken and entered with an intent not to steal, [only] with an intent to obtain information."

Having gotten the reader thinking about the Ellsberg break-in, Kutler alters the rest of the conversation to remove any explicit reference to its real subject, the June 1972 break-in. His transcript begins with the President and Colson discussing Hunt's background and effort to compile a reliable psychological profile of Ellsberg. They ponder whether this entirely legal work might be drawn into the Watergate investigation. According to Kutler, the conversation proceeds as follows:

President Nixon: You've got to say that's irrelevant in a criminal case.

Colson: It clearly will be irrelevant in the civil case, because it had nothing to do with the invasion of privacy. I'm not sure in a criminal case whether it is a sign that will be relevant or not. Of course, before a grand jury there's no relevance...

They weren't stealing anything. Really, they trespassed. They had broken and entered with an intent not to steal, with an intent to obtain information.

The conversation has just jumped from Ellsberg to the Watergate break-in. Bet you didn't notice. Kutler has invited those who question his transcripts to go to the National Archives and listen themselves. Back in 1998, we did. Here's what the tape really says. Pay special attention to what Colson and the President say after Kutler's ellipses:

President Nixon: You've got to say that it's irrelevant in a criminal [unintelligible].

Colson: Clearly-- the civil case has to do with the invasion of privacy, for information. I'm not sure in the criminal case whether these assignments [for the Plumbers] will be criminal [Kutler has "relevant"; tape is unclear] or not. Of course, before a grand jury, those would be irrelevant. I wouldn't worry about it.

President Nixon: It's none of his [the prosecutor's] damn business.

Colson: He knows it has nothing to do with Watergate. [Pause] Magruder obviously would-- [12-second deletion for personal privacy]. They weren't stealing. Really, they trespassed.

This transcript of a small portion of a conversation reveals three things about Abuse of Power.

First, Kutler's transcripts are sloppy -- "it is a sign" instead of "these assignments," for instance. In the settlement we negotiated of his successful lawsuit against the National Archives to free up this cache of tapes, he won a few months of exclusive access to them. He brought in court reporters and rushed his book out, but he didn't have to do it that way. If he had taken his time and published accurate, complete transcripts, he might not be under fire today.

Second, it does appear that Kutler wanted his readers to conclude that when President Nixon was talking to Colson, he already knew about the illegal Fielding break-in in September 1971. One indication is his deletion of the reference to Jeb Magruder, who was centrally involved with the June 1972 break-in but had nothing to do with the Fielding adventure. Also questionable is Kutler's decision to skip a response by the President in order to elide two of Colson's comments.

Kutler himself lent credence to the appearance that he manipulated the record. When I first wrote about Abuse of Power in the March 1998 issue of the "American Spectator," a reporter from the Orange County Register, a seasoned pro named Ann Pepper, called Kutler and asked him what he thought about my charge that he was misleading readers about the timing of RN's knowledge of the Fielding job. Kutler couldn't have been more definitive in his own defense:

Richard Nixon knew, and the tapes I discuss in my book prove it. If (Taylor) wants to say Richard Nixon never said (expletive) or called the Jews (derogatory names), he's a liar. There is always a possibility for error, but I never changed the transcripts intentionally and I didn't do it at all as far as I know. At this point, to say that Richard Nixon didn't do these things is ludicrous.

Still, when the paperback edition of Abuse of Power came out, Kutler made a telling change in his setup of the July 19 conversation. It now reads,

"They weren't stealing anything," Colson rationalized the Watergate break-in [emphasis added by me; phrase added by Kutler]

If I had a hand in that, I didn't get a footnote -- just an e-knuckle sandwich from our brawler of a scholar Stanley, who said on an historians' blog in 2005:

[I]n a scarcely-noted review of my book in an obscure right-wing magazine, Taylor accused me of distorting and inventing tapes. For himself, he managed to find things in the tapes that just were not there, anxious as he was to fulfill Nixon’s constant refrain that the tapes would exonerate him.

The third and perhaps biggest problem with Kutler's amended account of this moment in history is that it obscures the conversation's essentially exculpatory nature. Remember that the conventional wisdom is that President Nixon acquiesced in the John Dean-approved plan for limiting the Watergate investigation to keep the FBI and prosecutors from learning about the the Plumbers' other illegal activity. And yet here are two lawyers talking desultorily about Hunt's situation. Is this what they'd say if they were afraid the public was about to learn about the White House horrors? There's no talk of covering up, no reference to hush money, and no suggestion of guilt -- just Messrs. Nixon and Colson agreeing that Hunt's prior work had nothing to do with Watergate.

All along, President Nixon's Watergate defense was based on national security, specifically his rock-ribbed belief that the Plumbers' legitimate work investigating Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg during wartime shouldn't be drawn into the investigation of the purely political Watergate break-in. Though he doesn't call special attention to them, Kutler's book contains many conversations from the second half of 1972 in which the President makes the national security vs. Watergate distinction and urges aides to own up about involvement in illegal political activity.

Fred Graboske and his team of tape reviewers at the Nixon Project at the National Archives deserve great credit for identifying tape segments that would help as well as hurt RN. Kutler deserves credit for including some of the helpful conversations in his book. Of course in another of Kutler's spin-zone editor's notes about another exculpatory conversation in which RN says, on October 16, 1972, that he doesn't want Dwight Chapin and others to lie about Watergate, Kutler just accuses President Nixon of speaking for the tape recorder to make himself look good later.

Since Sunday's article, it's been all about Kutler, his friends, and his detractors. Better when the tapes themselves speak. All hail young Luke Nichter at nixontapes.org, for going where no scholar or government agency has gone before in making these peerless records available to the public.