Chapin's Late Hit

You may remember Sen. Howard Baker's 1973 question about Watergate: What did the president know and when did he know it? It'll be asked again when word gets around about operative Dwight Chapin's startling charge that Richard Nixon was present when chief of staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman ordered Chapin to set up a dirty tricks operation during Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign.

Nixon always denied being directly involved in setting up the dirty tricks. In 1973-74, congressional and federal investigators tried and failed to find evidence to the contrary.

Chapin made his news-making accusation in an interview with Tim Naftali, director of the Nixon library. Go here and listen to Chapin talk about being buzzed into Nixon's office to get the fateful order, deciding to hire his USC classmate Donald Segretti to run the unit, and lining up Nixon's personal attorney, Herb Kalmbach, to pay for it.

The three went to jail as a result of the Watergate scandal. In judging Chapin's late hit, remember that he was convicted in federal court of lying under oath.

The interview appears among the background materials for the Nixon library's upcoming Watergate exhibit, which was attacked by Chapin's White House friends last summer. It will be interesting to see if the interview will be aired by C-SPAN along with Naftali's other revealing chats with Nixon's men.

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?

37 Is 27th

In C-SPAN's ranking of Presidents, RN comes in a little below the middle, at #27. Jimmy Carter is ranked 25th, Gerald Ford 22nd, Calvin Coolidge 26th, Herbert Hoover 34th, and George W. Bush 36th. In foreign policy, President Nixon ranks 11th, with Woodrow Wilson ranking 10th and John F. Kennedy 13th.