Who You Calling An Ambassador?

Max Holland's book about Mark Felt, Bob Woodward's secret Watergate source, gets kudos from former Nixon counsel John Dean (shown here), who compares it favorably with what he describes as a sloppy account of the scandal in Tim Weiner's new book about the FBI. Among other things he lauds Holland for making his own Watergate transcripts:

Weiner quotes Nixon from a conversation when he was reacting to information I had learned on October 19, 1972, which unequivocally established that Mark Felt was leaking information. At one point, Nixon said to Haldeman, in Weiner’s (incorrect) version: “You know what I’d do with him [Felt]? Bastard!” In fact, what Nixon really said to Haldeman was much more telling, and interesting. He didn’t say “Bastard!” Rather, he said, “Ambassador.”

In short, Nixon would have done with Felt what he would later do with CIA director Richard Helms, to keep him happy and get him out of the way: make him an ambassador in a foreign land.

According to Dean, Weiner doesn't identify his sources for Watergate transcripts. NARA tapes specialist Samuel W. Rushay, Jr. writes that two scholars have made this particular error, one of whom is Stanley Kutler, who rushed out a book of transcripts in 1998. More about Kutler's errors here. Kutler also erred when transcribing a comment of Nixon's about the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate committee, Howard Baker. One day in 1973, Nixon told his aides that Baker needed bucking up, one of his classic idioms. Kutler picked another consonant. Funny how these mistakes never make 37 look better.

Bash Lazy Politicians, Not Unions

Stanley Kutler on the move against public employee unions, in his state of Wisconsin and elsewhere:

Whether in polite country club conversation or in the angry voices of barroom exchanges, we have an atavistic, ugly strain of hostility toward public workers, and even the idea of unions, that arouses some of our most divisive political dialogue. U.S. House Republicans, by way of example, have proposed legislation that would deny food stamps to the children or relatives of any worker who strikes. Real budget hawks, those people.

Yet where and when have any candidates for public office declared and advocated such hostility and promised to destroy unions? Neither Wisconsin's Gov. Scott Walker nor his dutiful followers in the Legislature ever, ever openly called for the actions they are now taking. Theirs was a stealth campaign, one of calculated deceit.

Kutler chalks it up to people's anger at teachers and teacher unions. He's right that there's plenty of that. But it's also Republicans wanting to hobble unions' ability to influence elections with campaign contributions. Will legislators who don't get union support be tougher during contract negotiations? Probably. But it's not all the unions' fault that lazy politicians of both parties negotiating at the local and state levels over the last 30 years or more made imprudent bargains that failed to take into account the possibility of an extended revenue drought such as the one we're experiencing now.

All in all, it's pretty ironic that the same sorts of folks who welcomed the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which amply protected corporate free speech, are now using raw state power to gag workers. On this issue, give me stand-up, East coast Republicans like Gov. Chris Christie and Donald Trump who refuse to bash unions but know how to protect themselves and their stakeholders at the bargaining table.

The Final War Of Watergate?

Historian Stanley Kutler wrote a book called The Wars Of Watergate. Has the final one come to an end at last? In a press release today, the Nixon library announced that its new Watergate gallery will be unveiled on March 31 at a ceremony attended by the archivist of the U.S., David S. Ferriero, his presidential libraries chief, Sharon Fawcett, and the library director and organizer of the exhibit, Cold War historian Tim Naftali. According to the release, here's what the public can expect:

The Watergate Gallery chronicles the events beginning in June 1971, with the Pentagon Papers leak and the formation of a clandestine White House group known as the Plumbers and ending with former President Richard Nixon’s public explanations of Watergate after he left office. Through documents, recordings, and oral histories, the Gallery addresses issues such as abuses of governmental power, secret Presidential taping, and the role of the three branches of government and the media in this constitutional crisis. The exhibition includes a timeline of Watergate events with eight interactive screens that draw from the White House tapes and 131 oral history interviews done by the Richard Nixon Library with key participants like G. Gordon Liddy, Bob Woodward and Charles Colson. The exhibit concludes with Watergate’s legislative legacy and an interactive resource center of documents, oral histories, excerpts from the White House tapes, and television coverage from the era.

The public first saw smoke from the battlefield in Yorba Linda last summer, when the New York Times revealed that the former Nixon White House operatives now controlling his foundation, including individuals involved in Watergate or Watergate-era activities, had gone to war against Naftali over the exhibit's contents. These ended up being no secret, since they were available on the library's web site. Among Naftali's interviews is one in which convicted perjurer Dwight Chapin (shown above) says that Nixon was present when chief of staff Bob Haldeman ordered him to set up a dirty tricks unit for Nixon's 1972 campaign.

As Nixon's chief of staff in the late 1980s, I oversaw the design and writing of the private Nixon library's exhibits, most of which are still on view in the federal library. But in the spring of 2007, as we prepared to give the keys to the feds, I authorized Naftali to remove the Watergate gallery which, while never successfully challenged on a factual basis, had outlived its usefulness as a museum exhibit principally because of its polemical tone. It was former U.S. archivist Allen Weinstein along with Sharon Fawcett who, at my suggestion, assigned Naftali to come up with a replacement -- a four-year-long struggle which, as details become known, history may well remember as the toughest, most thankless job ever undertaken by a public historian. Among other things, there will no doubt be lots to learn about the secret role of politics, influence, and money when it comes to curating the people's business.

Naftali (shown below with Nixon's last chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor) must be happy March 31 is coming. Nixon's former White House operatives obviously aren't. But it's a day that has to come before Nixon, at least, can get his richly deserved shot at redemption. It will help when the rest of his tapes are finally opened as well, since their periodic piecemeal openings always seem to push him a rung or two down in the public's estimation.

Still, in ten days, nearly 21 years after it opened, the Nixon library will finally be complete, a full account of what Nixon called his peaks and valleys featured in its museum, the rich story of his far-reaching, course-changing presidency in its archives.

It's about time. As 37 himself might have said, 465 months of Watergate is enough.

Nixon Library, Momentarily Redeemed

Take this, Stanley Kutler! In his critique of Bill Clinton's library, columnist Dave Gibson holds up Richard Nixon's as the gold standard of historical objectivity:

One of the exhibits deals with Clinton’s impeachment, which the library claims was purely political. Part of the permanent display claims: "The impeachment battle was not about the Constitution or the rule of law, but was instead a quest for power that the president's opponents could not win at the ballot box."

The truth is, Bill Clinton lied under oath to protect himself from a woman accusing him of sexual harassment. The investigation ended with his impeachment and the surrender of his law license… Period.

Historians have ranked Bill Clinton last, behind President Nixon on "moral-authority."

Nixon resigned in disgrace and later opened a library which presents a candid look at the facts about the Watergate scandal. Nothing is hidden, nothing is spun. Visitors to the Nixon Presidential Library are given the opportunity to draw their own conclusions.

The canny Nixonian blogger would just let that pleasing assertion lie (so to speak). But as Nixon's ex-chief of staff, having overseen and edited all the exhibits at the Nixon library when they were being written, designed, and constructed by contractors and assistants during 1988-90, I can tell you that we spun Watergate harder than a Whirpool on steroids. Our talking points were exactly the same as the Clinton library's: The president's opponents used the scandal for political payback.

As with all good spin, ours embodied some truth. Impeachment is always a political act. Just ask Andrew Johnson. While our Watergate gallery was never popular with journalists and historians, critics such as David Greenberg tried and failed to identify errors.

The problems were matters of thoroughness as well as tone. After Nixon died in 1994 and we decided that his privately operated library should be part of the National Archives, it was obvious to the feds and me (I was then running the library) that the exhibit had to go, if for reasons of common sense alone. In museum exhibits, polemics work just like in newspaper columns like Gibson's and blogs like mine. If you agree, you're satisfied; if you disagree, you're offended; and if you're open-minded, you're inclined to be suspicious that you're not getting the whole story.

That why in 2006, at my suggestion National Archives official Sharon Fawcett assigned the Nixon library's first federal director, historian Tim Naftali, to create a new Watergate exhibit that would (using Dave Gibson's words, ironically enough) give visitors the opportunity to draw their own conclusions about modern political history's worst scandal. Nixon's White House aides, some of them personally involved, resisted it, just as Clinton spurned a neutral narrative about his troubles.

It took the Reagan library until this year to uncover the Iran-contra scandal, which occurred 24 years ago. Thirty-eight years after Nixon's resignation, Naftali's Watergate installation is now underway. Perhaps he should invite Gibson to the ribbon cutting -- along with his NARA colleagues in Little Rock and elsewhere who might learn from his experience, warts, scars, and all. Deficit permitting, hazardous duty pay may even be in order.

Who Really Bottled Up The Nixon Tapes?

A comment I left tonight at NixoNARA:

Ironic that while Nixon’s interest while alive may have been to delay the opening of tapes, now that he’s dead, it would be better to get them out ASAP so balanced assessments might begin. Further irony: Nixon legal pressure, political pressure, or a combination of both delayed tape openings from 1987 until [Stanley] Kutler’s lawsuit in, what, 1992? With no apparent external pressure whatsoever, NARA will have taken from 1996 (when the Kutler suit was settled) until 2012 (est.) to open the entire collection of non-Watergate tapes.

Henry's Bad Idea

Jeffrey Goldberg on a excerpt from newly-opened Nixon tapes (thanks to the Nixon library in Yorba Linda) in which the president and Henry Kissinger take a discussion of realpolitik way too far. Goldberg wonders whether Kissinger's distasteful speculation about what the U.S. would do, or not do, in the hyper-hypothetical case of a Soviet holocaust will be his epitaph, but that seems unlikely. Like many of these recorded conversations, it's just hot air.

There's one small irony, however. After Nixon died in 1994 and I was negotiating with Stanley Kutler and the National Archives about the Nixon tapes, I had several conversations with Kissinger in which he expressed concern that, when they were finally opened, he would appear to have been too agreeable when Nixon said outrageous things. This time, it went the other way around.

Grand Passions

Should the 300-page transcript of Richard Nixon's 1975 testimony before (sort of; he was in San Clemente, they were in Washington) the Watergate grand jury be made public? Chums John Dean and Stanley Kutler think so.

Strip Search

Politicians love to collect the original art of editorial cartoons in which they feature, and Richard Nixon's domestic affairs advisor, John D. Ehrlichman, although doomed, was no different. In February 1973, not long before Nixon fired him over Watergate, Ehrlichman wrote to Garry Trudeau asking for a Doonsbury strip parodying Nixon's relative disinterest in domestic affairs. The letter was released last month by the Nixon library. Read a blogger's sardonic take here.

I met with Ehrlichman many years ago at the library, when he was trying to enlist our support for a TV project on the scandal. He died in 1999. He always blamed Nixon for making the decision for which he went to jail: Over Labor Day weekend in 1971, sending burglars to get dirt on Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Scholars Stanley Kutler and Rick Perlstein have also tried to pin the Ellsberg caper on the chief. After all, it's the Watergate mother lode. If Nixon had even known about it at the time, it would tend to put a criminal coloration on his Watergate actions and statements beginning in June 1972. But none -- neither scholars nor self-serving aides -- has actually made the case.

Stanley's Steamin'

Stanley Kutler, a scholar of the Constitution long before becoming a nemesis of Nixon, ridicules those who ridicule the idea of a "living Constitution":

It is a phrase loathed by justice Antonin Scalia - anyone, he said, who believes that is "an idiot." But would the constitution have survived for 222 years on the basis of only 27 amendments? Like it or not, judicial interpretation of our constitution is a fact, and it has been a vital component of our history.

Still, it wouldn't be Stanley without a little Nixon-bashing. Who started the drive to find strict-constructionist judges that he finds so abominable? You guessed it.

Props From A Pro

A belated thanks to historian and former archivist Maarja Krusten for commending, on a New York Times blog, my Feb. 5 post about Stanley Kutler, the Ellberg break-in, and the Nixon White House tapes.

Stanley's Splicer

Fred Graboske, who oversaw the initial review of the Nixon White House tapes for the National Archives, explains why he believes historian Stanley Kutler purposely edited a key Watergate tape to alter its apparent meaning.

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

St. Watergate

Writing about whether our understanding of Watergate, or any historical event, can be sacrosanct or nearly so, as historian David Greenberg put it recently, Fred Graboske, who supervised the initial review of the Nixon White House tapes for the National Archives, commented as follows in response to my blog entry at The New Nixon (I added two paragraph starts):

The writing of history is about locating, sorting, and explicating information. There are cultural assumptions built into this process, so history can change through the decades as society changes.

A glance at the historiography of the causes of the Civil War will show this. Because historians bring their own preconceptions and cultural background to their work, each will emphasize some information differently from others. If historians did not do this, there would be little to the profession of history: Parson Weems would still be the authority on George Washington.

It is the constant re-evaluation of information that provides new insights. But, if all the information is not available, as the 1973 Nixon tapes are not (except for those few characterized by the National Archives as relating to Watergate), then it's a bit too soon to talk about establishing a canon. Perhaps the historical community should now put aside its differences as to the accuracy of the Kutler transcripts (a dying, if not dead, horse) and focus on why it has taken so long for NARA to release the tapes.

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

Stanley Yes, Patricia No, Says Times Editor

At the New York Times, public editor Clark Hoyt's rebuke of reporter Patricia Cohen is stinging:

I asked [former National Archives supervisory tapes archivist Frederick J.] Graboske how he was certain Kutler mixed the two tapes on purpose. To have done it, he said, “would have been the height of sloppiness, and Stanley is a sloppy researcher or he did it deliberately.” That is a different answer than he gave Cohen. If plain error was a possibility, I do not think The Times should have printed the charge without strong evidence. Journalistic balance, giving both sides, did not produce fairness here.

It Wasn't Fit To Print (At Least On Page One)

The supreme and all-powerful in-house arbiter of journalistic practice and ethics at the New York Times, the paper's "public editor," has issued his report on its recent story about Professor Stanley Kutler, former White House counsel John Dean, and the Watergate tapes. While copies of the full text are bouncing around the Internet, the History News Network offers this excerpt pending the article's publication in tomorrow's editions:

I think The Times blew the dispute out of proportion with front-page play, allowed an attack on a respected historian’s integrity without evidence to support it and left readers to wonder if there was anything here that would change our understanding of the scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency.

Clark Hoyt, author of the critique, believes that while Kutler's published transcripts of March 1973 Watergate conversations contained errors, there's no reason to believe they were intentional.

I raised some concerns of my own about the way Kutler edited a July 1972 conversation that I am certain are being studied carefully not only at the Times but in newsrooms around the world.

Following Up On Kutler And Ellsberg

The History News Network has provided a link to my post last week about historian Stanley Kutler's Abuse of Power and the Ellsberg break-in.

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

Too Narrow And Too Short

The American Historical Review has rejected historian Peter Klingman's article about Stanley Kutler's Watergate tape transcripts.

The Story Of Mr. Y

History News Network editor Rick Shenkman painstakingly dissects how it was that historian Stanley Kutler's Watergate transcripts were featured in a front-page New York Times article.

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.

Kutler's Way

Stanley Kutler says his critics are off base.