The Lesser Nixoniana : FROM: THE PRESIDENT : Richard Nixon’s Secret Files <i> edited by Bruce Oudes (Harper & Row: $22.50; 661 pp.) </i>

Richard Nixon has been the most visible political personality during the last four decades. Historians will long debate his role and achievements; Nixon undoubtedly will both fascinate and repel them, as he did his contemporaries. Most certainly, he will be noted in the history texts as the first (and, one hopes, the last) President of the United States to resign because of scandal.

Nixon also is unique in that following his resignation in 1974, Congress declared presidential papers public property, and provided they be made available, with proper limitations on national security, personal and family matters. For 13 years, Nixon resisted compliance with that law and fought to maintain control of what he insisted were “his papers.” In one case, Justice John Paul Stevens called Nixon an “unreliable custodian” of his papers.

Finally, in 1987, after the former President exhausted his appeals, the National Archives released 4 million of its holdings of more than 40 million pages. This volume contains approximately 1,000 documents, with maybe one-tenth written by Nixon himself. Apparently, the collection has as many memos by Charles Colson as by the President.

“Secret Files” may amuse and titillate more than illuminate. The petty, vindicative thoughts of the President and his aides predominate; at other times, the subject matter is obscure or incomprehensible, except perhaps to scholars familiar with the details of the Nixon Administration. Too few documents provide “dramas of global significance,” as the editor promised; instead, they are outweighed by “episodes of banality, baseness, and humor.”

Bruce Oudes’ introduction briefly assesses Nixon’s career, but mainly focuses on the controversy surrounding his papers. Unfortunately, Oudes has offered little to guide and inform the reader about the authors or the meaning of various memoranda. For example, he has reprinted the “smoking gun” tape transcription (by now, a familiar item) from the June 23, 1972, Nixon-Haldeman conversations, yet the casual reader will find it difficult to decipher the heart of the Watergate cover-up in that seemingly cryptic, disjointed talk. A number of entries refer to the “5 o’clock Group.” How many know that these White House aides met almost daily at that hour to decide how to “play” stories in the media?

Documents are the raw material of history. But a presidential memo is not always historically significant. Indeed, most are trivial or repetitious, and this volume abounds in both. Documents must be shaped into a narrative of context, with analysis and explanation; otherwise they are meaningless and bewildering, as they often are here.

The reader will struggle to find Nixon memoranda relating to substantive policies. Instead, the selections basically depict the ceaseless campaigner, ever-worried about capturing another vote, and insatiably tending to self-promotion and the “PR” aspects of his presidency. After he returned from China, Nixon bombarded his aides with memos about Panda bears, the public display of his gifts from Mao and how they should play the media regarding his successful dealings with Chinese leaders.

The first entry, written by Nixon two weeks before his inauguration in 1969, directed chief aide H. R. Haldeman to develop plans for collecting campaign funds for 1972. In the next few days, Nixon asked for an analysis of the 1968 campaign, fretted about future leaks of information, demanded that aides audit the columns of unfriendly journalists and pursued the details of plans to celebrate the 10th anniversary of his famous “kitchen debate” with Nikita Khrushchev. The President-elect thus established a typical pattern for the next four years.

Nixon’s admirers often point to him as a “hands-on” President. At the outset he instructed Haldeman “that I be informed as to what action has been taken and, if action is not taken, why the decision has been made not to take it.” But endless memoranda regarding imagined enemies, the media and White House entertainment, or the preoccupation with Howard Hughes and the Kennedys, overshadow such nuggets.

Must we really know Nixon’s musings regarding wine selections? Why include a three-page Haldeman memo on Mrs. Nixon’s choices for films at Camp David? Or a secretary’s note to Colson, merely noting the attachment of a transcript from a Gary Hart press conference? Given the editor’s fascination with memos relating to Colson’s questionable political dealings, he should have explained why the President, in a letter to Colson, spoke of June 3, 1974, as a “terribly sad and difficult” day. Indeed it was--for Colson had just been sentenced for obstruction of justice.

(Colson, incidentally, derided George Bush’s losing effort against Lloyd Bentsen in 1970. Bush, Colson complained, had resisted negative ads, “ignored the social issue and tried to be more liberal than Bentsen.”)

The Nixon Archives are striking for the comparatively few Nixon papers available for the period after his key aides, Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, resigned in April, 1973. Oudes has noted this discrepancy, and thus can provide only 30 pages to the tumultuous year of 1973, and merely three Nixon notes for 1974--the most familiar, and probably most interesting, period. (Alexander Haig, Haldeman’s successor, managed to remove most of his papers from the Administration records; they might well reveal more of this crucial time.) The dearth of Nixon material for the height of the Watergate crisis probably indicates the extent of the President’s intense private preoccupation with the affair.

Ironically, the lack of documents serves Nixon in his final campaign, a campaign that minimizes Watergate and maximizes his policy achievements. In 1974, he predicted that Watergate would only be “a footnote in history.” In 1988, he characterized Watergate as a “small thing,” echoing the line of his press aide in June, 1972, when he dismissed the break-in as a “third-rate burglary.”

Egil Krogh, the head of the “Plumbers,” who served the President with another illegal break-in, and John Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general, knew that Watergate was more. Krogh acknowledged that the Plumbers had struck at the very basis of individual freedom, and Mitchell noted that Watergate included the “White House horrors” that had permeated Nixon’s first term. Appropriately, the House Judiciary Committee and a good part of this nation concluded in the summer of 1974 that “Watergate” involved a consistent pattern of presidential abuses of power and obstruction of justice, and thus left Nixon with the unhappy choice of resignation or impeachment. “Secret Files” offers some glimpses into that “underside” of the Nixon Administration, but barely hints at the agony attending its fall. “Footnote” indeed.

Nixon resigned in part because of his role in the Watergate cover-up. Ironically, he and his aides left a wide documentary trail that exposed those misdeeds. Those records will provide future historians with a rich lode of material to elaborate that story, as well as the positive achievements of the Nixon Administration.