Perlstein And The Ellsberg Break-In

This post originally appeared on The New Nixon on July 14, 2008.

Although I haven’t quite finished the massive Nixonland yet and had promised author Rick Perlstein I’d withhold substantive comment until I had, I’m sorry to have to note that, like at least one important scholar before him, he has fudged the available record in an apparent effort to pin President Nixon with foreknowledge of the September 1971 break-in at the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. That break-in was the opening act of Watergate, and so there is probably no more important question than whether RN knew about it in advance. Perlstein made a small but telling compromise in telling his version of story.

A former Pentagon official, Ellsberg had leaked to the newspapers the Defense Department’s massive study of the decisions in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations to deepen U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Mr. Nixon, who along with Henry Kissinger was passionate about secrecy during that time of war and complex diplomatic maneuvers involving Moscow and Beijing, created a leak-plugging unit in the White House that called itself “the Plumbers.” Fearing that Ellsberg might leak again, the Plumbers asked the CIA to prepare a psychological profile of him similar to the ones it routinely did on international figures. When the agency provided an assessment that the White House considered inadequate*, the Plumbers were authorized by White House aide John Ehrlichman to undertake covert operations, which led almost immediately to a burglary at the Beverly Hills office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, who had been treating Ellsberg.

Did the President know in advance? Here’s what Perlstein writes (p. 584):

It was time, the Plumbers decided, to plan a black-bag job. Ehrlichman brought the proposal to the president. “[Bud] Krogh should, of course, do whatever he considered necessary to get to the bottom of the matter,” the president replied, to learn what Ellsberg’s motives and potential further harmful action might be.” His only complaint was that the plan wasn’t aggressive enough.

Obviously Perlstein wishes the reader to infer that the plan brought by Ehrlichman was the burglary — but his own sourcing makes clear that he has overreached. A footnote sends the reader to Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years by J. Anthony Lukas, which has this passage:

Ehrlichman says he kept the President up to date on Plumbers’ activities and “invariably when they made recommendations jointly or severally, the President concurred. His only criticism of their effort was that it was not vigorous enough.” After Krogh recommended that some Plumbers personnel be sent out to “complete the California investigation of Ellsberg,” Ehrlichman says he told the President about this. Nixon — after discussing it with Hoover — said that “Krogh should, of course, do whatever he considered necessary…” So Ehrlichman told Krogh he should do “whatever he considered necessary.”

As Lukas recounts, only then did Krogh send Ehrlichman a memo, dated Aug. 11, proposing a “covert operation” to examine Ellsberg’s medical records, which Ehrlichman approved in writing. There is no evidence that Ehrlichman or anyone else talked to the President about a break-in in advance — no secretly recorded tape, no document. Indeed Ehrlichman himself, in his memoir Eyewitness to Power, doesn’t contend that he told RN about it in advance. He does write that he asked the President to give general approval to the idea of the Plumbers acting in an investigatory capacity since the FBI was dragged its feet when it came to Ellsberg. He wrote that he learned about the break-in only after it had occurred and told the President about it the following July, during a walk on the beach in California (conveniently not subject to taping).

As far as the tapes are concerned, one substantial piece of evidence suggests strongly that RN didn’t know about the break-in when it occurred or even for some time afterwards. In a Sept. 8 conversation, a week after the Fielding caper, Ehrlichman tells RN, “We had one little operation. It’s been aborted out in Los Angeles which, I think, is better that you don’t know about.” Although on p. 584 Perlstein basically says RN ordered it, he is diligent enough to include the comment from the tapes ten pages later.

Mr. Nixon contended that he learned about the Ellsberg job in the spring of 1973, and so far no one has produced any evidence to the contrary (beyond Ehrlichman’s charges, by which he sought to transfer responsibility for the Aug. 11 green light from himself to Mr. Nixon, whom he surmised sent the go-ahead through Chuck Colson or some other agent). It’s a vital question for any complete and accurate Watergate narrative, since RN’s critics have long asserted that when he acquiesced in the Watergate coverup in June 1972, it was to prevent people from learning about the Plumbers’ other illegal activities. But if he didn’t know about the Ellsberg job at that time, his contention that there was a national security dimension to his Watergate statements and actions during June 1972-March 1973 is much easier to defend credibly.

When he published his otherwise indispensable book of Watergate tape transcripts, Abuse of Power, Stanley Kutler edited one transcript to make it appear as though RN had had foreknowledge of the Fielding job. He fixed the problem in the paperback version. Perlstein now has such an opportunity as well.

*The original version of this post erred in saying that the CIA refused to provide a psychological profile of Ellsberg.

To Be President: Obama And The War

This post was originally published at The New Nixon on July 5, 2008:

Joe Conason may be right that Sen. McCain learned the wrong lessons from the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. In his speeches and comments, he’s talked about Johnson-era limits placed on commanders’ use of air power against communist North Vietnam. His analysis echoes anguished laments heard in the mid-1960s from Americans who were frustrated that the mighty military conglomeration that had obliterated Hitler was bogged down with Ho Chi Minh in southeast Asia. As quoted by Conason, here’s what he said to the Council on Foreign Relations:

We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal.

But what about the long months of the Vietnam war when it no longer fell to brave Americans to fight at all? Rarely does McCain or anyone else talk about the period beginning in 1973, when South Vietnamese had taken over the war, relying on U.S. promises of continued non-personnel aid and air strikes when the communists violated the Paris Peace Accords.

Creating this completely new, Vietnamized theater was the work of Gen. Creighton Abrams, performed under political cover provided by Commander-in-Chief Nixon. South Vietnamese forces fought well all those months, notwithstanding their being a “joke” (according to Rick Perlstein) commanded by a “corrupt dictatorship” (Joe Conason). Mired in Watergate, we matched their mettle with mush. Neither Presidents Nixon or Ford felt they had the political capital to bomb as North Vietnam tested them with violations of the accords, and Congress slashed the aid budget. In the spring of 1975, Hanoi, which had trouble believing its good fortune, mounted a massive conventional invasion, greatly aided by their friends in Moscow, and squashed an ally we’d permitted to run out of bullets.

Historians, journalists, and bloggers rightly argue about how long Saigon could have held out with or without adequate levels of U.S. aid. But if she lasted 15 months after U.S. forces left, why not 20? 30? 100? In any event, since most Americans want out of Iraq, since Iraqification is almost everyone’s preference, the latter phase of the Vietnam war — the Nixon phase — is the one McCain and the Republicans might want to investigate as they ponder the politics and tactical realities of the situation they hope to inherit next January. Yet President Nixon has even disappeared from the McCain campaign’s version of his homecoming as a POW.

Instead, it’s Sen. Obama who’s displaying Nixonian subtlety in the calibration of his war policy. Like RN with Vietnam in the 1966 and 1968 elections, Obama has enjoyed the benefit of being able to say that the war was started by the other guys. After riding antiwar sentiment to victory in the primaries, he is beginning to give himself some wiggle room. Like Nixon, he would inherit a war that he wouldn’t have started. He would be wise to study how Nixon ended it.

Granted, Obama’s lurch to the center on Iraq and a variety of other issues has been ham-handed. The New York Times denounced his opportunism in an almost-blistering editorial, which no one will remember in November (unless Obama chooses to reproduce it in his swing-state advertising for the sake of right-leaning independents). But at least on Iraq, Obama’s is precisely the move his critics warned he’d make and pragmatic friends such as Andrew Sullivan insisted that he’d have to make.

If he seems changeable, perhaps that resonates with Americans who were opposed to the war in 2003 or ambivalent but now understand that a too-hasty withdrawal, no matter how much his Bush-hating base may wish it, would be bad for America’s position in the region, for the Iraqi people, and for those who volunteered to fight, bleed, and die. On Iraq, Obama’s doing what he must to do be elected President. It’s also what he should do if he’s going to be President.

James Rosen's Inconvenient Truths

This post was first published at The New Nixon on June 17, 2008.


James Rosen, backstage at the Nixon library

Seventeen years in the writing, the product of 250 interviews and his painstaking study of records no other journalist or historian has ever seen (or evidently asked to see), James Rosen’s just-published The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate (Doubleday), which brims with new information about Watergate, ought to be the political junkie event of the season. Before a crowd of 70 at the Nixon Library this evening, the Fox News Washington correspondent and first-time author talked about the years after President Nixon’s resignation when journalists were desperately hungry for new revelations, especially that hoped-for tape or document that would explain the Cold War era’s greatest political scandal once and for all.

So using the Freedom of Information Act, Rosen dug deep for those new revelations. He was the first to see all the records of the Watergate special prosecutor and the transcripts of the Senate Watergate committee’s executive sessions. “Now I stand here able to talk about Watergate with a breadth and depth unequaled by any other human being,” he said with a wry smile, “and no one wants to talk about it anymore.”

Nor, it seems, review it. Though Rosen has written the only biography of the only attorney general in American history to do time, the New York Times still hasn’t found the time to review The Strong Man. It’s not that it contains no smoking guns. But it may be that some would prefer if Rosen had found somebody else’s fingerprints on the triggers. “What did the special prosecutor know and when did he know it?”, one of Rosen’s key questions, may not be of pivotal interest to the Times, even though Rosen demonstrates conclusively that ambitious prosecutors deep-sixed evidence that tended to undermine the cases they were making against Mitchell and the President.

Even more inconveniently, Rosen concludes that not Mitchell but former White House counsel John Dean, now a darling of the left for his Bush- and conservative-bashing books, is the most likely author of the Watergate break-in, which occurred 36 years ago tonight. Dean has called Rosen’s findings “pathetic,” and he and Mrs. Dean have denied any connection with the lurid story about a Washington prostitution ring that lies behind the revisionist theory of the genesis of the Watergate break-in first proffered in the early 1990s by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin in their book Silent Coup.

Yet the fact remains, Rosen said tonight, that the only information gleaned from the Watergate bugs came from a phone in the office of a functionary responsible for looking after visiting Democratic state and county chairmen. The conversation was mostly about sex. Nothing was picked up from the phone of Democratic national chairman Larry O’Brien, accepted by history as the target of the bugging because of the White House’s preoccupation with his links to industrialist Howard Hughes. O’Brien’s phone was completely out of reach of the line-of-sight bugs, and O’Brien was known to be out of town for most of the three weeks the bugs were in place.

Meanwhile, back at the White House, Dean put a bug in the President’s ear to say that Mitchell supported a coverup even though Dean and Mitchell had evidently not even discussed the matter.

Seemingly not bugged by the relative lack of attention being paid to The Strong Man, at least so far, is its patient, methodical, quietly brilliant author. As it happens, Rick Perlstein’s much more convenient Nixonland has ended up being the Nixon book of the hour. It received a front-page review in the Times Sunday book review, and by George Will, no less, thus putting RN in his accustomed position of being simultaneously hammered and with equal ardor by ideologues of the left and right.

Edged out by Perlstein, Rosen is biding his time. Recently dubbed the funniest celebrity in Washington, Rosen — in his opening remarks and then in conversation with Nixon Library director Tim Naftali — enlivened his account of long-ago events with dead-on impersonations of President Nixon and General Mitchell. His George W. Bush is great, too. But behind Rosen’s affability is skill, will, and not a not inconsiderable measure of heart. In the mid-1980s, as a college student on Staten Island who became fascinated with the Nixon era, he realized that the author of RN’s 1968 campaign victory deserved a biography of his own. He got to know Mitchell and came to admire him for his largely unheralded accomplishments ranging from civil rights to law and order.

Rosen concludes in his book that Mitchell was guilty of only one of the ten offenses with which he was charged by prosecutors. You would think this would attract a line or two from the newspaper of record that once devoted millions of words to Mitchell and Watergate. TNN is complaining, but Rosen isn’t. It appears his greatest regret is that William F. Buckley, Jr., who gave encouragement and support to the young author in the early 1990s, didn’t live to receive an inscribed copy of The Strong Man. This sense of obligation to a mentor is a deeply impressive thing, as is Rosen’s command of the massive detail and literature of the complex scandal. The Strong Man is here now, and its equally formidable author isn’t going away.

[Expletive Repeated]

Originally published at The New Nixon on March 24, 2008.

Our brother Hugh Hewitt invites a debate about Sen. Obama’s use of profanity in the abridged audio version of one of his books. Shows how much times have changed since 1973-74, when some people seemed honestly if naively surprised that people swore in the White House. I was struck by the senator’s Elmore Leonard-like flair for dialog as well as his earnest attempt to convince an African-American high school buddy that girls weren’t racist just because they wouldn’t go out with him.

A Tale Of Two Break-Ins

This post originally appeared at "The New Nixon" on February 22, 2008.

Though the Nixon Presidency foundered on two famous break-ins, President Nixon denied that he knew about either in advance. Scholars and journalists have been trying to prove him wrong ever since. As the Nixon Foundation first charged, in his 1997 book of Watergate tape transcripts Stanley Kutler edited the transcript of one conversation misleadingly, so that it suggested that the President had had foreknowledge of the 1971 break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Kutler seemed to make his intentions clear when he insisted to an Orange County Register reporter that he’d proven that Mr. Nixon knew about the break-in. According to Max Holland’s “Washington Decoded” website, scholar Joan Hoff seconded our criticism. Kutler fixed the problem in the paperback edition of his book Abuse of Power.

Six years later, hoping to demonstrate that Mr. Nixon had known about the June 1972 Watergate break-in in advance, public television documentary producers exploited the confusion of a troubled Watergate figure, Jeb Magruder. Contradicting his earlier testimony and statements, Magruder told the TV team that on March 30, 1972 he’d heard Mr. Nixon’s voice (coming over a phone reciever held by John Mitchell) approving the fateful break-in at the Democratic National Committee. Since Mr. Nixon was in the White House that day, such a conversation would have been caught on tape. It wasn’t. The White House Daily Diary would have disclosed that he spoke with Mitchell. It didn’t. Mitchell aide Fred LaRue was in the meeting with Magruder; he said the Nixon-Mitchell conversation never took place and that PBS never contacted him. PBS disclosed none of this evidence in its broadcast. In a July 2007 Associated Press article detailing Magruder’s personal setbacks, historian Kutler dismissed the charge. “There is just no evidence that Richard Nixon directly ordered the Watergate break-in,” Kutler said. “Did Magruder hear otherwise? I doubt it.”

Veteran journalist and historian Ron Rosenbaum isn’t so sure. Writing in “Slate” on Valentine’s Day about correlations he sees between Mr. Nixon and Sen. Clinton — an unlikely couple indeed — he again raised what he calls “Nixon’s last lie.” His “Slate” post contains a link to a 2005 New York Observer article in which he claims to have discovered the proof that RN had known about the June 17, 1972 break-in in advance. His argument hinges on an exchange between Mr. Nixon and his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, three days after the break-in. (Our criticism of Stanley Kutler notwithstanding, the exchange below comes from a transcript in his Abuse of Power, the only book available with a broad range of Watergate chatter, rushed out by Kutler and his team after his successful effort to force the National Archives to open the recordings.) Here’s what Rosenbaum identifies as the key exchange:

NIXON: My God, the committee isn’t worth bugging, in my opinion. That’s my public line.

HALDEMAN: Except for this financial thing. They thought they had something going on that.

NIXON: Yes, I suppose.

Rosenbaum argues that Haldeman means that “they,” the burglars, had been after financial intelligence on the activities of DNC chairman Larry O’Brien. Mr. Nixon’s off-handed acquiescence would show that he must’ve known why the burglars had gone in all along. But it’s hard to argue that Haldeman is talking about the burglars or O’Brien when we look at the whole conversation as well as Haldeman’s next comment, which Rosenbaum doesn’t address:

HALDEMAN: But I asked the question: If we were going to all that trouble, why in the world would we pick the Democratic National Committee to do it to? It’s the least fruitful source–

A few moments before, Haldeman had been talking about what “they,” meaning reporters, had been saying about burglar E. Howard Hunt and his check for $690 found in the possession of another burglar. So Mr. Nixon and Haldeman were actually talking about what “they,” the press, were saying about Hunt’s finances. When Mr. Nixon says his public line is going to be that the Watergate wasn’t worth bugging, Haldeman gently implies that the President’s line is bit too absolutist since “they,” the reporters, “thought they had something going on [this financial thing]” — that is, the seeming financial link between the burglars and Hunt, whose association with the White House had already been established. Bugging the Watergate was obviously worth Hunt’s money. Then Haldeman alludes to conversations he’s been having with others about the silliness of bugging the Watergate. Spinning gears? Certainly. Smoking gun? Seemingly not. And yet the Nixon tapes, with their undefined demonstrative articles, endless inside baseball, and sometimes indecipherable mumbling, can be a canvas on which a Nixon critic sees collusion, an advocate confusion. Telling the Watergate story on a strictly factual basis, as the federal Nixon Library has pledged to do, won’t be as easy as it sounds.

Rosenbaum’s “Slate” article principally concerns Sen. Clinton’s Watergate days, not Mr. Nixon’s. He revisits charges by Jerome Zeifman, Clinton’s boss on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, that she was carrying water for the Kennedy family by participating in efforts to keep Mr. Nixon in office until the end of his term in the hope that another Camelot President would move back into the White House as the man from Yorba Linda moved out. Rosenbaum suggests that the senator hasn’t talked much during the campaign about her true political initiation — helping prepare to impeach a President — for fear that Zeiftman’s charges will receive wider play. Returning to Mr. Nixon, Rosenbaum writes that the 37th President “never recovered from being — as it turned out — right about [Soviet spy] Alger Hiss…I believe this incident — in which he was pilloried when he knew he was right — probably helped endanger the paranoia that we have come to call ‘Nixonian’ and that ultimately led Nixon to believe he needed to pre-empt his enemies through the schemes that have come to be grouped under the term Watergate.”

Rosenbaum’s armchair lay diagnosis aside, Mr. Nixon offered a measured critique of his adversarial mind-set in his 1990 book, In the Arena:

In retrospect…I should have set a higher standard for the conduct of the people who participated in my campaign and administration. I should have established a moral tone that would have made such actions unthinkable. I did not. I played by the rules of politics as I found them. Not taking the higher road than my predecessors and my adversaries was my central mistake.

Mr. Nixon atoned for his errors. If Rosenbaum is right — that many journalists and politicians got Hiss wrong and therefore Nixon wrong, contributing to his lifelong assumptions about how to conduct politics — when will they be atoning?

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.

The Missing Tapes

This article originally appeared on the Nixon foundation web site on Sept. 9, 2003.

After Richard Nixon’s death in April 1994, his family and the friends responsible for his estate dared to hope that a better place in history could be secured by the same fragile loops of coated plastic that had strangled his Presidency. Historians concurred that the Nixon White House tapes, when cross-referenced with the documentary record of the Nixon years, would offer extraordinary insights into the dynamics of Presidential decision-making. Nearly a half-century of partisan score-settling that has typified commentary about Mr. Nixon ever since the Alger Hiss case would finally give way to a flood of theses, dissertations, and biographies by students and scholars less possessed than their forebears by the ideological passions of the Cold War and Vietnam eras.

We did not think it would happen overnight. We assumed that working journalists would first cull the tapes for profanity and racial and ethnic references by the President and his aides, all of them uttered during private conversations. At least that assumption proved correct. Yet we trusted that the tapes would be eventually used to illuminate his deft policy-making in Vietnam, foreign affairs, and domestic policy and also to provide new perspectives on the scandal that destroyed his Presidency.
In retrospect, we proved to be especially naïve when it came to Watergate. Journalists and prosecutors had pushed hard for the release of the tapes during 1973-74 so we could see what they revealed about Watergate. What we never anticipated was that a generation later, journalists and scriptwriters would ignore the tapes when what they revealed about Watergate proved to be inconsistent with the conventional wisdom.

For instance, in July PBS broadcast a documentary featuring a charge by former campaign aide Jeb Stuart Magruder that President Nixon had personally approved the Watergate break-in in a phone call on March 30, 1972. Since the President was in the White House that day, such a conversation would have been caught on tape. The tapes show that no such conversation took place. Mr. Magruder’s statement was contradicted by other evidence as well, including his own conflicting statements over the years. In their rush to promote and amplify Mr. Magruder’s explosive charge, the producers revealed none of the contradictory evidence.

President Nixon would not have been surprised. Yet for a little while, we had dared hope it would be otherwise. The former President had long resisted the release of his tapes on the grounds that the National Archives had not fulfilled its court-mandated obligation to return to him tapes of personal and family conversations. Two weeks after his death, President Nixon’s son-in-law Edward Cox reached out to executors and attorneys for the Nixon estate. The accolades recently heaped on the late President by his eulogists and even by some in the media suggested that the era of harsh anti-Nixon commentary was over, Mr. Cox said, which meant that the expensive court battles should end as well. He said while the President had been right to fight to protect his and his family’s privacy, it was time for his executors to cut a deal.

Mr. Cox’s suggestion was a relief to many on the late President’s battle-scarred legal team as well as to those of us working on his staff and at his library. It was tantalizing to think that an era was dawning when discerning scholars would patiently comb the files and tapes and write balanced accounts of the Nixon years. In July 1995, we reached an agreement with the National Archives setting a timetable for opening the thousands of hours of tape recordings. Eight years later, over half the tapes have been opened to scholars at the Nixon Project in College Park, Maryland. The archivists themselves control the pace of the openings. Their painstaking work is sometimes slowed by new declassification rules and other factors. The Nixon estate has not formally objected to the opening of a single second of tape. A few years ago we even agreed to permit the archivists to sell copies of the tapes to the public earlier than the July 1995 agreement had stipulated.

Yet the reading room at College Park is not clogged with listeners. Officials say about five people a week come in to listen to the tapes. Even for dedicated students of Presidential decision-making, taped conversations are sometimes too much of a good thing. Listening to and transcribing tapes is expensive and laborious. All 4,000 hours of Nixon tapes would fill about 480 500-page volumes, and that’s without any annotations. Our best source for accurate, thoughtfully annotated transcripts of important taped conversations from Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon White Houses is the project underway at University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Still, it will take experts many years to complete transcripts of relatively few selected conversations.

Yet even when transcripts are available, journalists with an interest in Watergate tend to overlook them unless they bolster the conventional wisdom. Our first disappointment came in 1997 with press coverage of the first book containing extensive transcripts of the newly-released Watergate tapes, Abuse of Power by Stanley Kutler of the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Kutler published selected transcripts that actually confirm President Nixon’s own account of his actions during Watergate. In suggestive, sometimes misleading annotations, Dr. Kutler tried his best to explain away his transcripts’ exculpatory flavor. The transcripts themselves ultimately received little if any notice from reporters and reviewers in spite of the insights they offered into the state of mind of a President overseeing a war in Vietnam, peace negotiations in Paris, and a political campaign at home.

To paraphrase Sen. Howard Baker’s famous question, the keys to understanding Watergate are what the President thought and when he thought it. Though critics ridiculed his assertion that he acquiesced in a limit on the Watergate investigation because of national security, the tapes show he was telling the truth. Some of the burglars had also worked on a team, called the Plumbers, that had investigated Daniel Ellsberg after he stole top-secret Vietnam files, the Pentagon Papers, and gave them to the newspapers. Mr. Nixon was dismayed to learn in the spring of 1973 that the team had performed a 1971 break-in at the office of Dr. Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, Louis Fielding. But in June 1972, when the Watergate break-in occurred, he was still operating on the assumption that the Ellsberg investigation had been above board. He thought Dr. Ellsberg had put American fighting men at risk, and he considered his right to investigate him inviolable, as well as unrelated to Watergate. So he blithely approved his White House counsel John Dean’s plan to limit the investigation – only to revoke the order two weeks later after the FBI complained.

The tapes for the rest of 1972 reveal that he thought the burglars should be accountable for Watergate but not for investigating Ellsberg – exactly the distinction he said he had kept in his mind all along. Again and again he counseled his aides to avoid a Watergate cover-up. On June 30, he said, “I think the best thing to do is cut your losses in such things, get the damn thing out.” On July 19, he said, “You know, I’d like to see this thing work out, but I’ve been through these. The worst thing a guy can do, the worst thing – there are two things and each is bad. One is to lie and the other one is to cover up.” On September 18, he said, “The cover-up is what hurts you, not the issue. It’s the cover-up that hurts.” On October 16, he tells chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, “I just want to know whether [Appointments Secretary Dwight] Chapin or you guys were involved in Watergate….I don’t want anybody to lie about Watergate, do you know what I mean?…If we are, we’ve got to admit it, you know what I mean, because I have said it and I’m out on a limb.” As for his mentality about national security, when Haldeman reminds him on June 30 that the same crew had done earlier work for the White House, the President barks, “You mean in the Pentagon Papers? What the hell is the matter with that?”

Yet upon the publication of these transcripts, no paper carried the headline, “Tapes Show Nixon Pressed Aides To Avoid Cover-up.” Instead, Dr. Kutler claimed that the tapes showed that Mr. Nixon had actually known about the Fielding break-in at the time it occurred. In fact, the tapes Dr. Kutler himself transcribed and published strongly support Mr. Nixon’s contention that he had not learned about it until the spring of 1973. These dates are vitally important – perhaps the most important in the whole Watergate saga. If in June 1972, the President had known the Plumbers had an earlier break-in under their belt, then his acquiescence in Mr. Dean’s suggestion to limit the investigation indeed seems questionable. But if he was not yet aware of the Fielding job, the tapes make abundantly clear that he was making a careful distinction between Watergate, which he considered wrong and fair game for prosecutors, and the Plumbers’ Ellsberg work, which he considered his legitimate purview as a wartime commander-in-chief. Perhaps that’s why so many of his critics persist in claiming or implying that he “must have known about Fielding” and so had to order the Watergate cover-up in order to cover up the White House role in the earlier burglary as well.

Equally elusive has been any evidence that Mr. Nixon knew in advance about the June 1972 Watergate break-in — until Mr. Magruder’s star turn on the July 30 PBS documentary, Watergate Plus 30: Shadow of History. Mr. Magruder said that during a meeting in Key Biscayne, Florida with the late John Mitchell, then Mr. Nixon’s campaign manager, he had heard Mr. Nixon’s voice, coming over a telephone held by Mr. Mitchell and approving a plan by G. Gordon Liddy for a break-in at the Watergate. In making the charge, Mr. Magruder contradicted statements he had made in his 1974 memoir and in taped interviews with scholars in 1988 and 1990. When we asked the program’s publicist, Colby Kelly, about the discrepancy with the Magruder memoir, she wrote back that he had freely admitted the contradiction and “explained that it was written before he went to prison and he was hoping for a pardon.” Yet the interviews in which he also contradicted his new charge were given long after Mr. Nixon had lost his pardon power. Indeed fingering the boss would have enhanced his chances for a pardon from subsequent Presidents. Asked about the contradiction in July, Mr. Magruder didn’t mention pardons but said that he had never been asked a direct question about Mr. Nixon’s involvement, which is also untrue.

When a source appears this conflicted, changing his story and wrapping inconsistencies in more inconsistencies, responsible journalists back off. Mr. Magruder, a retired Presbyterian pastor, may still be seeking expiation. Such speculation increased in mid-August when he was arrested, booked, and jailed near his home in Columbus, Ohio after police said he was lying drunk on a sidewalk and refused an officer’s request to get up, a charge his attorney denies.

Mr. Magruder’s arrest did not attract the same nationwide publicity as his accusation against President Nixon, which the PBS program’s promoters released in advance to selected reporters to bolster viewership. It is hard to avoid the impression that PBS and the show’s London-based producer, Carlton Productions, did not want to try too hard to test their source’s shaky memory. They did not report, for instance, that John Mitchell’s friend and aide, Fred LaRue, had attended the March 30, 1972 meeting during which Mr. Magruder now says he heard the President’s order. Mr. LaRue says that the telephone call never took place. Ms. Kelly, the publicist, did not respond to two e-mails asking if producers had reached out to Mr. LaRue, whose number is in the phone book. Mr. LaRue says he was never contacted.

In response to a Nixon library statement noting that Mr. Magruder’s statement was also contradicted by the White House tapes, Ms. Kelly wrote, “I know the producer investigated this and felt that the issue was more complicated than your statement allows.” But when we asked her when the producer had consulted the White House records, she didn’t reply. National Archives records show that no one associated with PBS, Carlton, or the documentary had visited. In the script for the program, the producers failed to point out that White House tapes and logs make clear that the Mr. Nixon said nothing all day about the Key Biscayne meeting and participated in no telephone calls with Key Biscayne or anyone in the meeting.

A PBS spokesperson, Carrie Johnson, also declined to respond to questions about whether Mr. LaRue or the tapes had been consulted.

Washington Post Watergate reporter Bob Woodward likes to call Mr. Nixon’s tapes “the gift that keeps on giving.” But it’s unfortunate that when the tapes could help President Nixon, his critics withhold the gift of the benefit of the doubt. Ironically, the Post lent its name to the PBS/Carlton production. During Watergate, the Post said that it always insisted on two sources before printing a Watergate accusation. The rule must no longer apply. Offered a chance to double-check Mr. Magruder’s charge, the Post’s documentary team excused its source’s obvious confusion, overlooked Mr. LaRue, and ignored the tapes. Was pinning the momentous burglary on President Nixon just too hard to resist? Whatever PBS’s motives, its program demonstrates that the real story of Watergate, the scandal sparked by our nation’s argument with itself over Vietnam, remains to be told. Whenever the true inquirers are ready to role up their sleeves, the tapes are waiting.