Watergate Revisited: Notes from Underground

By Margaret Carlson/Washington

Only in America, the land of fresh starts and clean slates, could someone who fell from power in such complete disgrace return to tell heads of state how the world should be run and not be laughed off the editorial page.

Richard Nixon has managed that feat by following a kind of self-imposed work-release program ever since he resigned and left for San Clemente, Calif., in 1974, churning out dozens of articles and seven books on subjects ranging from Vietnam to geopolitics. Former aide-turned-bete-noire John Dean summed it up neatly: "He's running for the office of ex-President, and he's won."

Quick to forget, anxious to forgive, many Americans began to wonder whether Nixon had ever really been as bad as all that. Just how thoroughly he has been resurrected was underlined earlier this month when the Washington Post, a primary agent of his destruction, gave front-page play in its opinion section to his plan for granting economic aid to the Soviet Union.

So last week's release of 60 more hours of White House tapes came as a timely reminder that Nixon is not simply an author and global analyst but an unindicted co-conspirator who is lucky to have escaped prison. Listen to any random conversation, on any day, and the mask of respectable elder statesman melts away to reveal a deceitful, lowbrow, vindictive character, dangerously armed with the full power of the IRS, FBI and CIA, and all too willing to use it. Audit his enemies, he orders. "We have to do it artfully so that we don't create an issue by abusing the IRS politically," says Nixon, warming to the subject. "And there are ways to do it. Goddam it, sneak in in the middle of the night."

The so-called smoking-gun tapes that prompted Nixon's resignation were released in August 1974. They are the ones that contain the incriminating conversations on stonewalling Congress and paying hush money to the hired hands who executed the ill-fated Watergate break-in. They also detail many of the charges of obstruction of justice, perjury, tax evasion, wiretapping and destruction of evidence that landed some of Nixon's closest aides -- including Attorney General John Mitchell, chief of staff Bob Haldeman, White House adviser John Ehrlichman and counsel John Dean -- in jail.

The latest batch of tapes, which languished for nearly two decades in the National Archives while Nixon lawyers and the government argued over how to release them, show just how coarse and ruthless a man he was. At one point he enthuses over a suggestion to recruit "eight thugs" from the Teamsters Union -- "murderers" -- to gang up on peace protesters. "They've got guys who will go in and knock their heads off," says Nixon. "Sure," adds Haldeman, "Beat the s--- out of some of these people."

These recordings are the latest in a series of tapes that are made public every so often, like time-release capsules, to administer a healthy dose of reality whenever Nixon seems to have rehabilitated himself. Full of sentence fragments and garbled syntax, a cross between Valley Girl-speak and locker- room profanity, the tapes reveal Nixon in the raw, unimproved by speechwriters, aides or editors. Contrast his statesmanlike published prose on the Soviet Union's "strategic challenge of global proportion, which requires a renewed strategic consciousness" with this typical passage from the tapes about sacking IRS Commissioner Johnnie Walters for refusing to harass Nixon's enemies: "Kick Walters' ass out first, and get a man in there." So damaging are the tapes to the Nixon rehabilitation that Republican Party leaders, who had been considering a Nixon appearance at the 1992 convention, are now rethinking the invitation.

The tapes show that long before he was under siege by the Watergate investigators, he was under siege by his own demons. His re-election campaign belied its official slogan -- "Bring Us Together" -- by beginning with a pogrom. "I want there to be no holdovers left. The whole goddam bunch go out . . . and if ((George Shultz)) doesn't do it, he's out as ((Treasury)) Secretary." Nixon returns to his purge later: "You're out, you're out, you're finished, you're done, done, finished. Knocked the hell out of there." And these are his own people.

When Nixon's attention turns to his real enemies -- Jews, Democrats, liberals, intellectuals, anyone who came from a loftier social background than he did -- the President erupts in spurts of venom about clowns in government, conspiratorial leakers, preacher types, gum-chewing reporters, Kennedys. "A lot of our own people come in here, and they start sucking around the Georgetown set. All of a sudden, they're just as bad as the others . . . They're disgusting." He speculates that the antiwar protests are part of a Jewish plot. "Aren't the Chicago Seven all Jews? ((Rennie)) Davis is a Jew, you know." Told that he wasn't, Nixon guesses again. "Hoffman, Hoffman's a Jew?" he asks Haldeman, who confirms that, yes, Abbie Hoffman is Jewish. "About half of these are Jews," Nixon concludes.

The one person for whom Nixon showed a grudging respect was J. Edgar Hoover -- the only man in Washington with an enemies list longer than his own. Nixon wanted to get rid of Hoover but feared that the FBI director might "bring down the temple" by releasing compromising information from his thick files. Fate settled the matter on May 2, 1972, when Hoover died of a heart attack. Months later, Nixon delivered his own kind of eulogy, musing, "There was senility and everything . . . He wasn't perfect, but he ran a tight ship. Goddam it, that's the way."

But for all his paranoia, Nixon's own ship was anything but tight. For that, he had no one to blame but himself. He was the one who ordered the installation of concealed recording devices in the Oval Office, the Executive Office Building and Camp David, yet he continued to carry on crude, incoherent and ultimately incriminating conversations. As late as April 25, 1973, well after the smoking-gun conversations about stonewalling and hush money, Nixon was still congratulating himself on the secret system. "I'm damn glad we have it, aren't you?" he crowed.

Nixon seems to destroy himself every so often in order to keep fighting. Able to live without friends, but not without enemies, he needed Helen Gahagan Douglas, the cloth coat, the Checkers speech, the 1960 defeat -- and maybe even Watergate. It is not the desire to scale great heights that gets Nixon up in the morning and sends him to his New Jersey office, where he waits for the phone to ring and tries to peddle op-ed pieces on geopolitics; it is the need to claw his way out of a dark hole of his own digging.

While other former Presidents are content to do good works, serve on boards and play golf, Nixon, like the Energizer bunny, just goes on and on and on. At the Nixon library in Yorba Linda, Calif., beside the small, white frame farmhouse where Nixon was born, a movie called Never Give Up: Richard Nixon in the Arena runs continuously in the 293-seat theater. It's a reel he plays over and over in his own mind.