Forgive and Forget? : Politics: Polls show that some outrage over Watergate and Richard Nixon is fading. But this may say more about the American people than the former President.

Maja Tillman curled up in a chair at the Richard M. Nixon archives here, put on a set of bulky headphones and braced herself for the Smoking Gun. Suddenly, it was June 23, 1972, and the President of the United States was about to obstruct justice with his chief aide, H. R. Haldeman.

With a puzzled look on her face, Tillman listened to a secret White House tape made six days after the Watergate break-in. The 16-year-old Crenshaw High student, who was born the year Nixon resigned the presidency, heard him approve a plan to block an FBI investigation of the crime:

Haldeman: “ . . . the FBI is not under control . . . their investigation is now leading into some productive areas. . . . “

Nixon: “. . . just say this is a comedy of errors, without getting into it. . . . They should call the FBI in and don’t go any further into this case, period!”

When it became public in 1974, the so-called “smoking gun” tape was the key piece of evidence that forced a vote on impeachment and caused Nixon to step down. But to judge from Tillman’s reaction, it was no big deal.

“I don’t think that much about Nixon, nobody talks about him these days,” she said, after a tour of the archive last week with 14 other students. “He shouldn’t have done all of those things, that wasn’t right. But I don’t know, it really was a long time ago.”

What about the California Republican’s other legacies, like the historic opening of U.S. relations with China? Tillman, a bright teen-ager who might be mistaken for Whoopi Goldberg’s kid sister, frowned and shrugged.

“Yeah, I heard something about that,” she said. “I guess that was a good thing.”

Because she is so young, Tillman can hardly be expected to dwell on details about the Nixon years. But she is not alone. There seems to be a shift in sentiment about the 37th President these days that includes people of all ages. It’s a fogging of memory, a grudging forgiveness and a dimming of outrage that would have seemed inconceivable during Watergate.

The new mood of charity will reach a peak this week, when Nixon’s privately run museum opens in Yorba Linda. President George Bush, the Nixon family and former Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan are expected to attend. A spokesman says the facility will help “clear the air” and put the 77-year-old former President’s accomplishments in perspective.

To be sure, millions of Americans will never forgive or forget. When liberal New York journalist Jack Newfield boarded a shuttle flight to Washington several years ago, he was startled to find the former President quietly sitting behind him. Almost by reflex, he blurted out: “When did you get out of the can?” Nixon’s security guards quickly put an end to the conversation.

But even Newfield concedes that the political winds may be shifting. For a variety of reasons--ranging from historical amnesia to an enduring fascination with the man--some Americans are taking a second look at a public figure who was all but washed up 16 years ago. Some journalists who once scorned him in exile at San Clemente now treat him like an Elder Statesman in his Saddle River, N.J., home. Like it or not, he’s tanned, rested and won’t go away.

Public opinion polls tell much of the story. In 1977, 75% of the people in a Gallup survey said Nixon had obstructed justice; a similar number said he lied during a David Frost television interview. In a 1979 poll, he was listed as one of America’s 10 most disliked persons.

But by 1986, 54% said in a Newsweek poll that Ford was right to pardon Nixon. More important, almost 40% said they would like to see him in a public role, as an ambassador or presidential adviser.

“People have tried to shove Nixon into a coffin and drive a silver stake through his heart, but they just can’t do it,” says Jim McClellan, a Virginia history teacher who escorted Tillman’s group through the Nixon archives. “I think every generation has to learn and relearn the lessons of Watergate. But this man is really something else. He keeps bouncing back in public opinion, just when you think he’s down and out forever.”

The Be Kind to Nixon bandwagon has picked up support in unlikely places.

In 1987, a three-day conference on his Administration at Hofstra University in New York produced polite indifference among students when it came to Watergate. Co-ed Roberta Franco said all she knew about Nixon was in the film, “All the President’s Men,” adding that “nobody really cares anymore.”

Meanwhile, former critics seem to be mellowing. Author Joe McGinniss, who wrote a scathing expose of Nixon’s campaign in “The Selling of the President 1968,” says he has trouble explaining Watergate to his 19-year-old son, even though the nation was threatened with a constitutional crisis.

In the aftermath of Nixon’s resignation, 11 of his aides were found guilty of Watergate-related crimes. Haldeman, domestic adviser John Ehrlichman and former Atty. Gen. John Mitchell were indicted on charges including conspiracy, obstruction of justice and lying under oath. Each was sentenced to a prison term of 2 1/2 to eight years.

But it might just as well be ancient history to some people.

“My son will tell me that nobody died at Watergate, it’s not like the Vietnam War,” McGinniss says. “And I myself have trouble getting worked up over it like I once did. On a scale of one to 10, in view of things which have happened since, how important was it?”

Back in 1974, the tiny town of Thetford, Vt., became the first political body in America to officially call for Nixon’s impeachment. Bernard Benn, an architect who spoke in favor of the resolution at a community meeting in the high school gym, says his views have eased since then.

“Nixon did some good things, you know, and I think his historical image over time will heal,” Benn says. “I’m no fan of his, but I miss not having him to kick around anymore. You know, people tend to forget a lot about him.”

Since he left the White House, Nixon has been hoping--expecting, even--that Watergate and its horrors will be forgotten. Somehow, he has said, Americans will focus on his larger achievements in foreign policy and forget the two-year political scandal that brought him down.

Just as he did after losing the presidency in 1960 and the California governor’s race in 1962, Nixon has staged his latest comeback with tenacity and skill. Much of it has been a media production, with television interviews, newspaper Op-ed pieces, best-selling books and speeches to VIP audiences.

On occasion, the public has caught glimpses of a more relaxed Nixon. He was doused with champagne in the California Angels’ locker room after they clinched the pennant in 1979. The former President made a surprise appearance on a recent New York Mets baseball broadcast and caused a stir several years ago when he dined in a Burger King on the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey.

More important, he has plunged back into the political arena. Nixon lobbied Congress in January to sustain Bush’s veto of a bill giving permanent U. S. sanctuary to Chinese students. Last year, he sternly lectured Chinese officials in Beijing about the massacre at Tian An Men Square.

Usually, Nixon has tried to put a gracious, statesmanlike spin on his remarks. But quite often the old partisan warrior comes booming through.

“History will treat me fairly,” he said in a 1988 television interview. “Historians probably won’t. Because most historians are on the left.”

The jury is still out on whether Nixon will succeed. However, even his worst critics concede that the former President’s rehabilitation will take a giant step forward this week when his museum opens in Southern California. Curators say the facility will contain papers and memorabilia mostly from before and after Nixon’s presidency. The bulk of his presidential papers, including the Watergate tapes, are kept in federal archives in Alexandria, Va., as a result of legislation passed shortly after he resigned.

Congress was wary that key documents might be tampered with, if they were handed over to Nixon. The materials are kept in a warehouse that includes 44 million pages of papers and a room where scholars and tourists can listen to 12 of the tapes that were used as evidence in the Watergate trials.

But the majority are still unavailable, because Nixon has contested their release. It is a messy affair, with no legal resolution in sight.

There will be no such clouds, however, over the Orange County festivities. The mood is upbeat, and sponsors hope the site will one day be a tourist attraction just like Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm.

“These events in Yorba Linda may signify the final recovery and rehabilitation of Richard Nixon, at least in his own mind,” says historian Stephen Ambrose, who is completing a three-volume biography of the former President. “It’s been a pretty remarkable effort on his part.”

How did it happen? Don’t look for clues in Nixon himself. Most historians who have studied his career believe he is unchanged from the tough, red-baiting politician who won a Whittier congressional seat in 1946 and made headlines with his bare-knuckled attacks on leading Democrats.

If anything, Nixon’s beliefs seem to have hardened over the years. In his most recent memoir, “In the Arena,” he still insists that the Vietnam War could have been won and blames Congress for abandoning a worthy American cause. The man who once called student protesters “bums” continues to take shots at the counterculture, saying the Woodstock music festival’s only significant legacy was “the glorification of dangerous, illegal drugs.”

More to the point, he still denies committing any crimes in the Watergate affair. Nixon insists he was only guilty of poor judgment and failing to set the proper ethical tone for his subordinates. He accepts responsibility for what happened, and says his secret effort to block the FBI investigation of the scandal was “an inexcusable error.”

But for the most part, he flails at one “myth” after another, blaming the press, blaming his political enemies, blaming his staff and sounding very much like the man who denied all wrongdoing up until the bitter end.

“He’s still the same old Dick Nixon,” Ambrose says. “So if you’re wondering why this comeback is possible, you might say the secret lies more in the American people themselves. This nation was just dying to forgive Richard Nixon . . . to give him a second chance.”

Stanley Kutler, a University of Wisconsin historian who wrote “The Wars of Watergate,” a harsh critique of Nixon, says the former President is waging his last and most important campaign--this time for the soul of history.

“He’s shameless,” Kutler said. “In spite of everything that’s happened, he never really left the scene. And the worst thing is, he’s busy rewriting the past.”

Some observers believe that Nixon began planning his comeback only days after he left Washington in disgrace. At the time, the former President faced mountains of legal bills and feared that he would be forced to stand trial. He was shunned by Republican leaders and nearly died in a bout with phlebitis.

But there was one bright spot: Literary agent Irving Paul “Swifty” Lazar traveled to Nixon’s San Clemente home and pledged to get him a $2-million advance for his memoirs. The only proviso was that he had to make a full accounting of Watergate--a condition to which he readily agreed.

When it appeared, the book was criticized by some reviewers for the President’s continuing denials. But as he wrote in the second sentence, “memory is fallible and inevitably selective.”

The comeback had begun.

Three years later, Nixon was paid $500,000 to appear in a series of television interviews with Frost. Asked about political dirty tricks, he made his famous comment that, “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Public opinion was still negative, but a poll taken after the shows suggested that 44% now had a more sympathetic opinion of him.

Soon, Nixon began appearing in other carefully chosen forums, such as a GOP event in a small Kentucky town and a debate at Oxford University. He made a triumphant trip to China, the scene of his greatest foreign policy success.

Eventually, the former President began giving Reagan confidential advice on the Soviets. The ultimate irony came in 1984, when he got a standing ovation from the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington.

Today, the resurgence is in full gear. Nixon’s latest memoir, “In the Arena,” was on the New York Times best-seller list for more than 10 weeks. He recently appeared on the “Today Show,” gave a 90-minute interview to PBS and talked about his life since 1974 on Larry King’s television show.

Now, there is even talk among some GOP consultants that, given the right political climate, he might address the Republican Convention in 1992.

“We’ve reached a juncture where even the press can give him a rousing welcome,” Kutler says. “Doesn’t anybody remember anything?”

But that’s precisely the point. To paraphrase P. T. Barnum, nobody ever went broke underestimating the short attention span of the American people.

Roger Stone, a Washington political consultant who is close to Nixon, believes the former President has an uncanny sense of timing: “He always knew, I think, that many years down the line, people simply wouldn’t remember or care so much about Watergate. Richard Nixon understands the American people and what makes them tick better than anybody.”

Iran-Contra. The Hostage Crisis. AIDS. Earthquakes. Who has time to remember Watergate when so much information is thrown at people every day? John Petrocik, a political science professor at UCLA, says he is personally amazed that Nixon could be creeping back into respectability. But on another level, it’s no surprise at all.

“The half-life of public memory on these things is very short in our culture,” he notes. “The electorate is not very politicized, as a rule, and they really don’t have any enduring ideologies about this. Unless people are constantly reminded of Nixon’s sins, they’ll forget.

“You also have to remember that nearly 45% of the voters were under the age of 18 when he resigned. So they have no direct experience with him.”

What people do remember may also be helping Nixon.

Compared to his successors, Ford, Carter and Reagan, the former President looks better and better, knowledgeable observers say.

“Reagan was so lacking in even elemental knowledge about foreign and national policy that, when Nixon began speaking out, it was a reminder to people that he was vastly more intelligent,” says George McGovern, who lost to Nixon in the 1972 presidential election. “I don’t think he’ll ever escape the taint of Watergate. But that contrast with Reagan made many people think that he was smart, tough and wise.”

These days, Nixon’s expertise in foreign policy is the key to his commercial success, according to Michael Korda, editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster. The strong sales of “In the Arena” suggest that his stature is greater than other living former Presidents, says Korda, who edited the book.

The former chief executive, Korda contends, “never skirts the issues, and his public image is growing all the time. I don’t see anybody beating a path to Ford or Carter’s door to ask for advice about what to do with Hungary or Russia. But they do with him.”

Not surprisingly, these attitudes have kindled a fierce debate over Nixon’s record. In 1968, Joan Wilson was a history student at UC Berkeley who had little respect for the newly elected President. She had voted for Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver and bitterly opposed the Vietnam War.

Today, Wilson is a professor at Indiana University who will soon publish “Nixon Without Watergate,” one of the first revisionist histories of his presidency. If Americans look beyond the scandal, she says, Nixon emerges as a surprisingly moderate President on issues such as education, welfare, hunger and the environment. Someone the liberals might even enjoy having around.

“I have trouble discussing this unemotionally with my colleagues, because most of them are still dancing on Nixon’s grave back in 1974,” she says. “There’s a generational hatred of this man, among a very powerful group of people. But when we all die and pass from the scene, a new generation will be more receptive to him. It’s time to look beyond the haze of Watergate.”

Hogwash, says Ambrose: “Nixon without Watergate is an absurd proposition. It’s like Macbeth without the murder. You can’t have that. It was a crime and it won’t be forgotten.”

James David Barber, a political science professor at Duke University, goes further, saying Nixon’s drive for rehabilitation reflects the dangerous belief that Americans will forgive anything.

“We’re supposed to think that, because someone makes a big mistake and barely says they’re sorry, we can start all over again with them,” he says. “But that little game is not what we need when it comes to history.”

Vietnam generates the same fireworks. In his books, Nixon continues to say that Congress should never have pulled the plug on aid to South Vietnam. One consequence, he writes, is that communist guerrillas overran Cambodia: “Any doubts about the justice of our cause should have been removed by what has happened since we left. When the communist Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia, they killed or starved to death 2 million people.”

Not so fast, answer a host of Cambodian experts. They point out that Nixon’s secret bombing and 1970 invasion of that neutral country forced it into the war. In the ensuing chaos, Pol Pot’s victory was made easier.

Although the North Vietnamese were also to blame, Nixon “helped to destroy my country,” asserts Dith Pran, the Cambodian holocaust survivor whose life was portrayed in the award-winning film, “The Killing Fields.”

“His bombing and invasion were terrible things that no Cambodian can ever forget,” Dith Pran says. “I hope Americans don’t forget either.”

But forgetting is something America tried to do after the Vietnam War. It took years before the trauma began to ease and people could objectively re-examine the conflict. So it has been with Nixon, says McGinniss: “Ten years ago, an editor suggested to me that I do a book about Nixon, and I laughed, I thought we were all up to here with him. But I was wrong. Now, the cycle is to go back and take another look.”

For some, the man with the 5 o’clock shadow never lost his allure.

“When I go to the Elks Club these days, I still hear affection for the guy,” says Tony Ulasewicz, a tough-talking New York cop who once delivered money in paper bags from Nixon’s election fund to the Watergate burglars. “Time heals all wounds, you know? People like me always stand up for him. We’re not flag burners. With us, it’s, ‘My President, right or wrong.’ ”

Many Americans might disagree. In the end, Nixon’s re-emergence may be simply attributable to the nation’s continuing fascination with his character. In four years, he will have straddled half a century of American life. People have grown up hating or loving him; they find him hard to dismiss.

How, then, will history judge Nixon?

Much depends on how future generations are taught, says former California Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, who beat Nixon in the 1962 gubernatorial race.

But let’s make one thing perfectly clear: The man who vowed he was giving his last press conference after that election will never quite fade away.

“There is no one person in the last 50 years who has been up and down so much. He’s always fighting back and never accepts defeat,” Brown says.

“I never liked the man much, I’m one of his most severe critics, to tell you the truth. But I think that when they finally add up what he’s done, there will be more pluses than minuses.”