"RN Seemed Very Human To Me"

A moving observation by Maarja Krusten, historian and former Nixon tapes archivist at the National Archives:

As to why it took ["Frost/Nixon"'s Frank Langella] acting largely on intuition to present a Nixon to whom people could relate, rather than having a writer capture that in a book of popular history, I'm not the best person to explain why that was. I voted for RN and sent him a letter of support to his home in San Clemente when he resigned in 1974. Two years later, I joined the Archives as a NARA employee. I spent some time working with his White House documents. But mostly, my career at NARA centered on the tapes. I spent ten years working solely with his tapes, listening to thousands of hours of his conversations. Some I found sad and even wrenching to listen to. I felt a great deal of sympathy for him, even though he bore some responsibility for some of what happened. Obviously, RN long has seemed very human to me.