Forty years ago this week
Richard Nixon’s presidency crumbled, his name became as anathema as
Benedict Arnold, and we began the longstanding tradition of
suffixing scandals with
“gate.” To commemorate this, the folks at the Nixon
Presidential Library (yep,
you paid taxes for that) and the private Richard Nixon
Foundation are beginning today releasing some new (old) tapes of
Tricky Dick.
From the
Associated Press (AP):
The postings begin with Nixon recalling the day he decided to
resign and end Saturday — his last day in office — with the 37th
president discussing his final day at the White House, when he
signed the resignation agreement, gave a short speech and boarded a
helicopter for San Clemente, California.The segments were culled from more than 30 hours of interviews
that Nixon did with former aide Frank Gannon in 1983. The sections
on Watergate aired publicly once, on CBS News, before gathering
dust at the University of Georgia for more than 30 years.
There’s nothing too revelatory about the videos, or at least the
ones that have come out so far. Though, whether speaking about his
decision to resign, telling his family about that decision, or
their reactions, Nixon doesn’t live up to the villainous, paranoid
popular conception. He’s dynamic, alternating among reflectiveness,
candidness, and even flashing a few smiles as he discusses the
“smoking gun” tape and how it was “the final nail in the coffin,
although you don’t need another nail when you’re already in the
coffin, which we were.”
Gannon told the AP, “This is as close to what anybody is going
to experience sitting down and having a beer with Nixon, sitting
down with him in his living room. Like him or not, whether you
think that his resignation was a tragedy for the nation or that he
got out of town one step ahead of the sheriff, he was a human
being.”
Lest one feel too sentimental, read Gene Healy’s latest for
Reason on why
we should celebrate Watergate and the cutting-down of an
imperial presidency.
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