Leak And Lies

Joseph C. Goulden, a Washington, D.C. attorney who says he still admires Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein for their Watergate reporting, says that according to Max Holland, they lied about their most important source:

In their first book on Watergate, All the President’s Men, published in 1974, [they] depicted Deep Throat (who they did not name) as a selfless, high–ranking official intent on exposing the lawlessness of the Nixon White House. Deep Throat, they wrote, “was trying to protect the office [of the presidency] to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost.” A secondary goal was to prevent the FBI from being corrupted by being drawn into a White House cover–up.

That statement turns out to be 100 percent false, according to Max Holland, whose exhaustively researched work is a must-read for any person interested in the tangled scandal that drove President Nixon from office....

As Holland authoritatively establishes, Felt (who died in 2008) turns out not to be an altruistic hero, but a scheming bureaucrat who yearned to replace J. Edgar Hoover as FBI director, and did so by staging a smear campaign in an attempt to discredit rivals for the job.

The Post Won't Plug This Leak

Tim Naftali, former director of the Nixon library, recently suggested that the Reagan library whitewashed the Iran-contra affair in the same way Pravda (the now-defunct USSR Communist Party newspaper) would have when covering some Soviet official's scandal.

In its coverage of the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, the Washington Post appears to be doing some airbrushing of its own. Today reporter Marc Fisher filed a long survey of the ways the Watergate narrative has changed or been challenged over the years. Bizarrely, he couldn't find room for a word about Max Holland's wide-praised Leak.

Holland argues persuasively that the Post's most famous source, Mark Felt, wanted to be FBI director and leaked investigators' secrets to the Post to undermine the acting director, Pat Gray. Every reporter's judgment is different. But Watergate was serious stuff, and a book that will have to be taken into account by all scholars of the scandal and era unquestionably deserved at least a paragraph in Fisher's article, which contained five about the movie "Dick."

Let's be clear. Holland doesn't absolve Nixon or his men of any of their crimes or errors. Much as Nixon's advocates may sometimes have hoped otherwise, criticizing Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's reporting won't change much if anything about Watergate. As Holland and others have shown, by and large they were just reporting what the FBI was learning.

But Holland has added vital dimension and subtlety to the story of the greatest political scandal in modern U.S. history. Without especially helping Nixon, he shows that a reporter's source -- no hero; just another cynical operator with wingtips of clay -- had tried to use ambitious, sometimes credulous journalists to get even and get ahead. It's a quintessential Washington story -- but not in the Washington Post. Not this week.

Forty Years Wars

Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein mark Watergate's 40th anniversary.

Neatening Things Up A Little

Ben and Bob at the Nixon, 2011

It turns out that the battle of Yorba Linda, joined by Bob Haldeman's loyalists against Tim Naftali and the Nixon library during 2009-11, wasn't the end of the war of Watergate. This time the reporters are absorbing fire.

The "Wilson Quarterly" editor's blog contains a survey of reactions to Max Holland's widely praised Leak, which reconsiders the motives of the Washington Post's most famous source, Mark Felt.

And now "New York" magazine has rocked greater Nixonwoodsteinland with a package of articles and sidebars by a former Bob Woodward researcher, Jeff Himmelman. His assertions: That Woodward and his reporting partner, Carl Bernstein, tried to cover up their use of information from a Watergate grand juror and that their editor, Ben Bradlee, has confessed to misgivings about relatively minor aspects of the account of their reporting contained in their first book, All the President's Men.

Woodstein issued a carefully worded response to the grand jury story (not quite a non-denial denial) and are obviously worried about the appearance of any daylight between them and their flamboyant editor. Himmelman, who at first thought he'd be writing a book with Bradlee instead of a biography featuring an expose about his reporters, provides this bit of dialog between himself and Bradlee (who seemed to to be getting along fine with Woodward when I saw them a year ago at the Nixon library):

“It’s inconceivable to me,” Ben said, “that in [Woodward's] preparation for all of this, to strengthen his case, he didn’t neaten things up a little—we all do that! … He thinks it is a critical and fatal attack on his integrity, and I don’t think it is.” Then, a moment later: “There’s nothing in it that attacks the verity of his research.”

“Zero.”

“It’s just a little … ”

“A few of the bells and whistles,” I said. “Were all the bells and whistles those exact bells and whistles?”

“Where he had 90 percent, he was going for 100 percent,” Ben said. “And it’s that last lunge that drubs you.”

Or, as Nixon used to say, it's the coverup that gets you.

Deep Throat, Shallow Footprint?

Defending his former reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, from charges that they were stenographers for an ambitious secret source, Barry Sussman, editor in charge of the Washington Post's Watergate investigation, says that Max Holland, author of Leak, overstates Mark Felt's importance to the story:

Deep Throat wasn’t an important source at all. He was nice to have around, helpful on occasion, especially in October, 1972, when he confirmed and added to a story in which the Post introduced Donald Segretti as a political saboteur against the Democrats. But that’s about it. Woodward and Bernstein have blown up Felt’s importance for almost four decades or nodded in assent when others did, and instead of pricking this big balloon, Holland pumps more air into it.

Holland states that for decades “the parlor game that would not die” – the search to uncover Deep Throat – had the effect of “elevating Deep Throat’s role as a source and cementing the myth about the Post reporters’ own role in uncovering Watergate.” Except Holland very much accepts the first part of that formulation.

More Wars Of Watergate

In the wake of the publication of Max Holland's Leak -- which argues that the Washington Post's legendary secret source, lately identified as Mark Felt, was parceling out FBI secrets in a bid to get the director's job -- Holland dukes it out with Woodward and Bernstein in The Daily Beast:

Woodward and Bernstein are most alarmed by Holland’s claims about the scope of their Watergate reporting. “The most interesting thing he says is that we were just following what the prosecutors had found, and that is factually wrong,” Woodward says, noting that at the 1973 trial of the first seven Watergate defendants, federal prosecutors identified former G-man Gordon Liddy as “the mastermind” of the operation. On the contrary, Woodward says, their Washington Post reporting uncovered a massive, long-running political espionage and sabotage campaign that went far beyond the mere wiretapping of the Democrats and was run directly out of the Nixon White House. “This guy Max Holland doesn’t understand Watergate,” he says.

Holland retorts: “I wasn’t writing about Watergate,” but instead focusing on a single key actor amid a complex moment in history. “Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting deserves every kudo it has ever gotten. But let’s appreciate it for what it was and not pretend it was something it wasn’t … I talked to everybody at the FBI, the prosecutors, the journalists—I talked to everybody who’s still alive. Don’t they have a side of the story? Watergate isn’t the exclusive history of Bob Woodward. He doesn’t own it. There are other points of view.”

You Can Always Count On The Nixon Guy

Pat Buchanan isn't pulling his punches since being fired by MSNBC. Writing about Max Holland's Leak, he says Mark Felt was a snake and Woodward and Bernstein his stenographers.

Watergate And Factional Journalism

At Salon, Jefferson Morley reviews Max Holland's Leak:

Portraying [Mark] Felt/Deep Throat as a factional power player, not a high-minded voice of truth, is a public service. But Holland goes too far in deprecating the accomplishments of Woodward and Carl Bernstein. He develops the argument first made by Edward Jay Epstein that the Post got too much credit for exposing the criminal conspiracy emanating from Nixon’s White House.

“Contrary to widely held perception that the Post uncovered Watergate,” Holland writes, “the newspaper essentially tracked the progress of the FBI’s investigation with a time delay ranging from weeks to days, and published elements of the prosecutor’s case well in advance of the trial.” From the leisurely perspective of a historian that may be convincing. For working journalists, the publication of a story days or weeks in advance of the government is the whole point.

Nevertheless, “All the President’s Men” embellished Woodward’s and Bernstein’s fine job to an act of moral heroism. The film reassured viewers that the good guys could win with the help of a wise man on the inside. Any young person who is inspired to do journalism by “All the President’s Men” should also read Leak. The romantic myth of journalism is dead and that’s a good thing.

Et Tu, Al?

John Mitchell biographer James Rosen (shown here) gives high marks to Leak, in which Max Holland argues that Bob Woodward's most famous secret source, Mark Felt, wanted Richard Nixon to make him FBI director so he would plug his own leaks. Rosen has two demurs:

[S]ome wobbly columns in the Deep Throat temple Leak inexplicably lets stand. “Felt was much too busy and prominent a man to circle page 20 of Woodward’s home-delivered New York Times . . . or monitor the movement of a red-flagged flower pot on the balcony of Woodward’s apartment,” Holland notes. Such chores, he shrugs, “were probably entrusted to reliable [FBI] agents.” Who, exactly — and why haven’t they been identified? Perhaps, alternatively, Holland is wrong to accept Woodward’s statements about this signaling system.

Likewise, Holland describes in detail Deep Throat’s “last great leak”: the accurate disclosure to Woodward, in November 1973, that the Nixon tapes contained a deliberate erasure. Felt had been forced out of the FBI five months earlier, in June 1973, and the existence of the “tape gap,” a rather recent development, was a secret held closely by President Nixon, his secretary Rose Woods and only a few White House intimates and attorneys; so how could Felt have been in a position to tell Woodward about it?

Holland ignores this problem. The only logical conclusion — especially since other Nixon-era officials, like Alexander Haig, Donald Santarelli, and Robert F. Bennett, are known to have served as sources for Woodward — is that “Deep Throat” was more than just Mark Felt. Holland’s unusual silence on this point suggests his otherwise indefatigable research turned up no other satisfactory answer.

Put another way, how many FBI agents does it actually take to overthrow an elected president, and who inside the White House may have helped them, and why? Rosen says that the records Bob Woodward and his reporting partner, Carl Bernstein, have opened so far don't add much to the picture. But as I wrote last April, when Woodward visited the Nixon library:

He said that when he and Bernstein open more reporting files from their second book, The Final Days, people will be surprised to find that one of Nixon's intimates was especially helpful, having concluded by late 1972 that he was doomed.

Naftali's Revenge

John Dean, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein met recently in the Nixon library's Watergate exhibit.

Nixon Library: Still Standing

If you've seen "The Last Waltz," the documentary about the Band's last concert, you remember the bit with Robbie Robertson and the fly. "Catch that fly," says his buddy, director Martin Scorsese, when the guitarist and songwriter is being bugged during one of their interviews about life on the road. Last night at the Nixon library, the irascible Ben Bradlee, 89-year-old former executive editor of The Washington Post, was listening to a colloquy between his superstar reporter, Bob Woodward, and Nixon library director Tim Naftali when he waved his hand in the air and interrupted them. "There's a goddamn fly here," Bradlee said.

"Hit it with your stick," Woodward said genially, nodding toward Bradlee's cane. Later, as Woodward referred in his measured cadences to Richard Nixon's emotional farewell to his White House staff on Aug. 8, 1974, Bradlee got a laugh from the audience by pretending to saw on a violin.

I thought to myself that, like the Band, they should take their show on the road, which, of course, they have, for most of the last 40 years. How often has Woodward told the story of finding E. Howard Hunt's name in a Watergate burglar's notebook next to the notation "W House"? "We realized that could only mean two things," he said, pausing expertly for 600 knowing laughs before applying the rim shot. "Carl Bernstein called the whorehouse, and I called the White House." And then: "Ben doesn't like this, but I'll say it anyway. All good work is done in defiance of management." Turning to his ex-boss Bradlee, he said, "Go ahead. Give me the finger." With practiced timing, Bradlee complied.

Comic turns by old colleagues and friends couldn't take all the sting out of the story of an administration and a nation in crisis. Woodward was especially moving as he described how, after 25 years, he'd come to the conclusion that Gerald Ford had done the right thing in pardoning Nixon. He said that when he and Bernstein open more reporting files from their second book, The Final Days, people will be surprised to find that one of Nixon's intimates was especially helpful, having concluded by late 1972 that he was doomed.

Now that we know the name of Woodward's most famous source, FBI official Mark Felt, the architecture of the Post's Watergate story is clearer than ever before. Woodward said last night that he first checked with Felt after learning within a few days of the Watergate break-in of the connection between Hunt and White House operative Chuck Colson. Felt replied that the Post would be on the right track with any negative story about Colson and Hunt -- another laugh line, but also a reminder that a powerful official was using his access to raw FBI files to undermine the president who had denied him the prize of the FBI directorship.

Woodward is shown above with Kathy O'Connor, Nixon's last chief of staff, who organized the campaign to build the $13.5 million wing where Woodward and Bradlee spoke and where the Nixon White House and Bob Haldeman operatives now controlling Nixon's foundation, although absent last night, keep their offices.

During the question period, I asked Woodward to remind his audience when he'd first met Mark Felt. In the Nixon White House, he replied, when Woodward was still a naval officer. I'm skeptical about the theory that the reporter was part of a "Seven Days In May"-style conspiracy hatched by the Pentagon and proto-neocons against a president who was making peace with the Soviets and Chinese and in Vietnam (although Woodward retains exceptionally good sources among the brass). Still, Felt's resentment of Nixon and revelations of his own illegal activities have muddied the Watergate. Woodward said in passing that Felt "had some glimpse" of intelligence community abuses. That's for sure. At the same time he was waxing pious with the Post about Nixon administration abuses, he was ordering illegal black bag jobs against the anti-Vietnam war Weathermen.

When Kathy and I greeted Woodward after the event, with characteristic solicitousness he asked for our impressions of his comments. I told him that I had always experienced him as a bit of a Watergate puritan, so offended by Nixon's lapses that he had trouble taking a balanced view of Nixon's legacy. But last night, he ended on a hopeful note, beginning with what President George W. Bush had said about how history would view the Iraq war. In an Oval Office interview with Woodward, Bush shrugged and said he didn't much care, "because we'll all be dead." Same with Nixon legacy, he said. It's not for us in our time to decide whether Nixon's foreign policy achievements will ultimately outweigh his failures.

Perhaps something about being welcomed to the Nixon library, with its new Watergate exhibit finally open to the taxpaying public, enabled a mellower Woodward. As for the library, last night was a boon because it proved the roof wouldn't cave in when Nixon was criticized, not because we were going to hear a fully nuanced story of modern politics' greatest scandal, no matter how integral our speakers' roles in uncovering it. Researchers in the bowels of the Nixon library may have some work to do even on that seemingly settled but complicated subject. After their talk, as I photographed Bradlee, Naftali, and Woodward, I told them that in profile, they looked like Mount Rushmore. Woodward responded, "Let history decide!"

Stanley Schemer

Making a careful study of hardening, harsher, and sometimes more paranoid attitudes among conservatives compared with those of a generation or two ago, historian Maarja Krusten writes that she's disappointed conservative pundit Stanley Kurtz really thinks he has to conceal his true identity lest perfidious (in his view) liberal archivists withhold the juicy stuff. She also finds it ironic that Kurtz complained about this to my Nixon buddy Hugh Hewitt:

That Kurtz chose to describe his research as if he saw a need to skulk about and disguise who he was baffled me. Especially since he was speaking to Hewitt, who once served as director of the private Nixon library. Hewitt stated in 1990 that he would bar Bob Woodward from doing research at the Nixon library (then controlled by the Nixon foundation) “because he is an irresponsible journalist.” John Taylor, who succeeded Hewitt as director, announced in 1990 while Hewitt still was in charge that Nixon didn’t want that and researchers would be admitted “without regard to their opinions on any subject.” Why Kurtz presented himself to Hewitt, of all people, as someone who might be interfered with in his research due to his ideology or goals comes across to me as comical as well as mind boggling.

When writing about this incident a week ago, I'd forgotten that as Nixon's chief of staff I'd publicly repudiated Hewitt's Woodward ban. Thinking back, I'm pretty sure that I warned Hewitt about it and that he said he understood why we needed to climb down.

After all that, so as far as I know Woodward's never done research at either the private or public Nixon library. He and I did have an exchange of e-mails in January 2007, when he was trying to confirm a claim by one of his and Carl Bernstein's sources many years ago that former Nixon campaign manager John Mitchell had briefed President Nixon about the roots of Watergate over dinner on June 19, 1972, just two days after the break-in. He asked me to consult the White House daily diary, which disclosed that Nixon actually had dinner in Key Biscayne with buddy Bebe Rebozo that night before flying back to Washington. I never did find out what Woodward was working on.

About One FBI Official, Ruckelshaus Felt Different

In a fascinating Oct. 3 speech about Watergate's Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973, when he resigned his Justice Department post after refusing to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, William Ruckelshaus also describes his brief tenure as FBI acting director. He said he came away with renewed respect for the dedicated professionals of that agency -- all but ambitious W. Mark Felt, who wanted Mr. Nixon to give him the director job and later became famous as one of Woodward and Bernstein's sources of confidential government data:

I can hardly forget my first morning as FBI Director, on the Monday following my meeting with the President. On my desk upon arrival was a letter to the President from the Deputy FBI Director and the Associate Directors protesting my appointment. The Deputy Director assured me nothing personal was intended, they just felt it was inappropriate to have a bird watcher as Hoover’s successor. The Deputy Director, Mark Felt, of ‘deep throat’ fame, who was actively lobbying for the job as Director subsequently resigned when confronted by me for leaking classified information to the N. Y. Times – an unforgivable sin for an FBI agent.

"Bird watcher" is an allusion to Ruckelshaus's prior service as founding director of the EPA, part of the broader policy legacy of the Nixon administration that he believes was tainted as the result of Mr. Nixon's handling of Watergate.

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

Ought To Have Done Vs. Ought Not To Have Done

Though he praises Frank Langella's subtle, powerful portrayal, Carl Bernstein doesn't like "Frost/Nixon" because it makes Richard Nixon look too good.

That, at least, was journalist and Nixon biographer Elizabeth Drew's assessment, which Bernstein embraced during a restaurant chat with buddies. Drew actually called director Ron Howard "dishonorable." Specifically, Bernstein wishes filmmakers had included RN's denial of an illegal coverup of the Watergate burglary.

If that's a sin (and we may discuss it if you wish), then it's a sin of omission. Neither Bernstein nor anyone else (besides The New Nixon's Robert Nedelkoff and us other true believers) acts offended about another transgression, namely the film's contention that RN's famous "it's not illegal" comment was made about Watergate rather than a controversial plan for cracking down on dissenters during wartime. The demerits of the never-implemented Huston Plan notwithstanding, Howard and playwright-screenwriter Peter Morgan may have worried that, in the age of terrorism, some moviegoers would nod their heads at a President saying that extra steps to combat violent groups such as the Weather Underground were justified.

So what's worse, Carl: Leaving something out, or rearranging the narrative to avoid burdening the audience with ambiguity?

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

Anatomy Of A Sneer

The LA Times continues its federophilic coverage of the Nixon Library with this ungenerous reflection by Karin Klein.

Last Thursday, her colleague Christopher Goffard left readers with the misleading impression that the transfer of the library to the National Archives has resulted in the opening of more Presidential records than would otherwise have been the case.

Klein called us later in the day to ask some follow-up questions. As she recounts it,

“What kind of changes to the library did you want to ask about?” a spokesman for the foundation inquired guardedly when I called for information Wednesday. And then, sardonically, “Oh, yes, I would expect the L.A. Times to be asking about Watergate.”

Well, considering that the archives had just released notes and recordings detailing Nixon’s attempts to smear perceived “enemies” — anyone who disagreed about the Vietnam War — that would seem the natural question.

My colleague couldn’t possibly have been more sardonic than Klein was in her piece. As a matter of fact, his question was natural precisely because her questions were coming from the LA Times — which, for instance, last year falsely attributed to reporter-hating Nixonians a famous scholar’s quote about the the Washington Post’s Watergate ethics.

Klein says she visited the Nixon Library to observe our old Watergate gallery. She evidently observed poorly:

When I first visited the library nearly five years ago, its greatest quirk was the Watergate exhibit, which asserted that the break-in and coverup that ushered in an era of mistrust of government were actually caused by the zeal of two unethical Washington Post reporters “to create a Watergate story.”

That’s an image — zealous Carl and Bob dressed up as zealous Hunt and Liddy. Actually, neither we nor anyone else on the planet ever claimed that “the break-in and coverup…were actually caused” by newspaper reporters. But at the LA Times, you can write whatever you want about Nixon Foundation folks, no matter how fanciful or confusing, and it gets past editors and copy editors and goes right into the first draft of history. Why? Because we’re a small band of people — or, as Klein says in her article, “cronies” — who believe that notwithstanding his sins and omissions the 37th President deserves a balanced portrayal in view of his course-changing policies as a statesman and wartime commander-in-chief. For whatever reason, our perspective is evidently inconvenient to the LA Times.

Our old Watergate exhibit did include a quotation about “Woodward and Bernstein’s failure to address any of the ethical deficiencies of their investigative reporting, including offering of bribes, illegally gaining access to telephone numbers, and talking to members of the grand jury.”

We admit it. We definitely had that quote in the gallery. And it was taken word for word from Stanley Kutler’s widely praised book The Wars Of Watergate.

Klein does seem to have intuited that we had something against Woodstein. Goffard was more clear if not more accurate. In an article last year in which he accused us of despising poor Mr. Bernstein just on the evidence of the Kutler quote being in our gallery, Goffard went so far as to proclaim that our charges against the reporters were false.

Goffard and Klein should have taken it up with the person who had actually made the charges. But Kutler is one of the most respected scholars in the country. So the LA Times wraps his inconvenient statements around our necks. If it were you, you'd be sardonic, too.

The LA Times And The New Nixon Records

From the LA Times’s Christopher Goffard, more misleading reporting about the Nixon Library:

The library opened in 1990 as a privately run facility in the hands of Nixon loyalists, containing only his pre- and post-presidential papers and featuring a Watergate exhibit, widely ridiculed by scholars, that portrayed the scandal as a “coup” hatched by Nixon’s enemies. The exhibit has since been dismantled.

The library entered the National Archives system last year, with its first federal director, Timothy Naftali, promising historical accuracy and openness. Although the library released a batch of Nixon’s personal and presidential documents last year, Monday marked the library’s largest release of materials so far.

“The strength of our democracy is that these kinds of documents get preserved, and they are released, whether or not they shed good light on the government,” Naftali said. “In many countries in the world, these documents would have been destroyed. We’re pleased we can make these documents available and others can judge.”

So the opening of the federal library in Yorba Linda, with its new spirit of openness, means more records are coming out, right? Isn’t that the message these paragraphs seem designed to convey?

If so, Goffard’s intimation is false. Access to Nixon White House records has never had anything to do with whether the Nixon Library was federally run. The opening of thousands of hours of tapes began in the mid-1990s under a settlement negotiated by the feds, University of Wisconsin professor Stanley Kutler (who had sued to have more records opened before President Nixon’s death in 1994), and the Nixon estate. There hasn’t been a tapes opening for several years — not because of who’s running the library but because of myriad challenges facing government archivists who are in charge of preparing the records for public listening.

As for the Nixon family, foundation, and estate, they have taken many steps over the years to clear the way for the opening of records. Even when the government wants to open non-governmental records still belonging to the Nixon Foundation, such as RN's so-called wilderness years records from 1962-68 or Mrs. Nixon's files, we have readily agreed.

Why did we decide to push for the library's absorption into the federal system in the first place? So that all the records would be in one place (in an archives addition now under construction in Yorba Linda) and so President Nixon’s library would be run in the same way as the libraries of his modern predecessors and successors.

We hard bitten, secretive Nixon loyalists have been Goffard’s targets before, such as when Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein visited Yorba Linda in October 2007 as a guest of the federal library and the private Nixon Foundation. As I wrote earlier this year,

Goffard…[reported in 2007] that Bernstein had long been an “arch-villain” who “elicited special loathing” at the private Nixon Library.

The evidence for Goffard’s attacks? You guessed it: Our old Watergate exhibit, which, Goffard wrote, “falsely accused” Woodward and Bernstein of wrongdoing. It’s certainly true that the exhibit (written by a diligent and highly ethical political insider, Bob Bostock) contained a quotation about “Woodward and Bernstein’s failure to address any of the ethical deficiencies of their investigative reporting, including offering of bribes, illegally gaining access to telephone numbers, and talking to members of the grand jury.” But was this the work of a snarling Nixon partisan? Not hardly. The quote came from The Wars of Watergate by historian Stanley Kutler. A reliable critic of the late President, Kutler was praised for his book’s meticulousness by the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh. Just to be perfectly clear, this means Christopher Goffard has called Stanley Kutler a liar.

Reviewing Goffard’s novel Snitch Jacket, “Publisher’s Weekly” said he “has a keen ear for telling detail.” In my experience, his reporting has been a bit too novelistic.

When he called me for a quote back in March 2007, when we authorized the government to remove the old Watergate gallery, I could tell he wanted me to wax miserable about the lost exhibit. He kept asking me how I felt as it was being destroyed. It was an excruciating conversation, because he already had my line of dialog written. He just had to figure out how to coax it out of me.

Snitch Jacket is advertised as a romp through the seamy side of Orange County. For the author, that obviously includes me and my colleagues. I’ve ordered a copy in the hope of figuring out why he seems so obsessed with turning a small band of admirers of President Nixon and his transformative work as a statesman into cardboard characters in one of his yarns.

Welcome To The New Nixon

My first blog post ever, at The New Nixon, which I launched at the Nixon foundation on February 18, 2008:
While the handover of the Nixon Library to the National Archives last year was a high point in our institutional life, it was a drag for us personally at the Nixon Foundation, what with being called liars, haters, and belligerent and hostile paranoids who had been mean to Carl Bernstein.
The attacks began in July when a reporter for the Associated Press, Gillian Flaccus, published an article containing a ham-handed poke at our integrity by historian David Greenberg. The private Library’s Watergate exhibit (removed by Uncle Sam a year ago) had text telling visitors that the famous 18 1/2 –minute gap on a Watergate tape might have been accidental. “It’s not only not true,” Flaccus quoted Greenberg as saying, “it’s the opposite of truth. There was a lot along those lines in the library, which was not a matter of interpretation, but flat wrong, a lie.” Having overseen creation of the original museum, and since some experts indeed said it was possible the erasure was accidental, I wrote an article about Greenberg’s charge for the Nixon Foundation web site. In an e-mail, he chastised me for getting “worked up” and said that Flaccus had misquoted him. He told me what he had meant to say was a lie was our exhibit’s presentation about a group of Democratic House members who in 1973 tried to persuade their leadership to leave the Vice Presidency empty long enough following Spiro Agnew’s resignation to enable the Democratic Speaker, Carl Albert, to become President in the event RN resigned. Writes one authority, “This is the closest to a coup d’etat that the country has ever come.” So that wasn’t a lie, either.

In addition to his denunciations via the AP at the time of the handover last summer, Greenberg wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Will the Nixon Foundation…stay out of all questions of access to tapes and papers? Or will it continue to throw up roadblocks for scholars?” Writing to him again, I said that he hadn’t yet correctly identified a lie in our museum and that, contrary to his derogatory implication, he was well aware that the Nixon family and Foundation had enabled the opening of massive caches of records. Contradicting his own article, Greenberg wrote back, “I did not imply that you are intending to ‘roadblock scholars on documents’.” For attempting to hold him accountable for falsely accusing us of being liars to tens of millions of newspaper readers, he accused me of “belligerence…hostility and paranoia.”

More such unpleasant qualities in your Nixon Foundation servants were identified by LA Times reporter Christopher Goffard in an October 2007 article celebrating Carl Bernstein’s appearance at the Nixon Library. My wife and colleague Kathy and I had hung out with Bernstein in Austin once. We even had invited him to go see Steve Earle at La Zona Rosa with us (he politely declined). We weren’t in Yorba Linda for his visit because Director Tim Naftali arranged it while we were on a cruise that had been scheduled for months. Goffard implied that we had snubbed Bernstein intentionally and went on to report that Bernstein had long been an “arch-villain” who “elicited special loathing” at the private Nixon Library.

The evidence for Goffard’s attacks? You guessed it: Our old Watergate exhibit, which, Goffard wrote, “falsely accused” Woodward and Bernstein of wrongdoing. It’s certainly true that the exhibit (written by a diligent and highly ethical political insider, Bob Bostock) contained a quotation about “Woodward and Bernstein’s failure to address any of the ethical deficiencies of their investigative reporting, including offering of bribes, illegally gaining access to telephone numbers, and talking to members of the grand jury.” But was this the work of a snarling Nixon partisan? Not hardly. The quote came from The Wars of Watergate by historian Stanley Kutler. A reliable critic of the late President, Kutler was praised for his book’s meticulousness by the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh. Just to be perfectly clear, this means Christopher Goffard has called Stanley Kutler a liar. Work it out peacefully, okay, guys? And next time, leave us out of it.

For including Kutler’s words in our museum, did my colleagues and I deserve to be attacked in the news columns of the LA Times? For our positions on Watergate issues about which gentlemen might differ, why did an historian call us liars? I guess there are folks who are even more emotionally invested in this Nixon stuff than we are. Richard Norton Smith, historian and visionary head of five Presidential libraries, is right: History really is too important to be left to the historians – or for that matter, to the journalists. That’s where you come in. Welcome to The New Nixon.