Nixon's Ghost, 40 Years On

WASHINGTON -- Forty years after he slunk out of office, Richard M. Nixon retains the capacity to astonish and disgust.

Just when you thought you could no longer be shocked by Nixon's willingness to abuse power, his seething resentments and paranoia, and his florid anti-Semitism, another round of tapes emerges.

To listen to them -- I highly recommend HBO's new "Nixon by Nixon: In His Own Words" -- is to be reminded, again, of the 37th president's unrelenting self-absorption. The question is always about what is best for Nixon, never what is best for the country; his willingness to hijack the machinery of government to assure his success shows no bounds.

In Watergate, the crime, it turns out, was even worse than the cover-up. "I want it implemented on a thievery basis," Nixon explodes at aides. "Goddamn it, get in there and get those files. Blow the safe and get it."

Nixon is referring to an earlier, aborted plan to burglarize the Brookings Institution. By the time of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee -- and it took the bungling burglars several attempts -- Nixon had already orchestrated a burglary at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist.

The cover-up was foreordained because of the crimes that predated Watergate, Ken Hughes, author of "Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate," noted at a Washington Post panel I had the privilege of moderating the other evening.

"It was a mindset of doing anything to advance Nixon's policies, his political stature, and there was no barrier, including the law," Bob Woodward observed at the session, commemorating Nixon's resignation, 40 years ago this week.

He was, let us hope, a uniquely damaged and dangerous man to have ascended to the heights of the presidency. The ensuing scariness of the Watergate moment, as the country watched a White House unravel and the country approach a constitutional crisis, was, and thankfully remains, unrivaled in post-Civil War political history.

Indeed, Elizabeth Drew, who chronicled the period for The New Yorker, noted the deliberate diminishment of Watergate by the practice of appending "gate" to every run-of-the-mill scandal, or pseudo-scandal. To take one current example: However suspicious you may be of the Internal Revenue Service's handling of conservative groups' request for tax-exempt status, the evidence amassed so far shows no Nixonian plot in which the White House schemed to use the IRS to harass political enemies.

So what is the relevance of Nixon to the modern era?

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