RICHARD NIXON: 1913-1994 : Nixon Foresaw Exoneration in Tapes, Haig Says : Oval Office: Former President reportedly feared what he might be accused of by aides. He believed recordings were ‘exculpatory.’

Richard Nixon refused to destroy the tapes that led ultimately to his resignation as President because he thought that they would exonerate him--and he believed that to his death, one of his top aides said Sunday.

Alexander M. Haig, Nixon’s last chief of staff, said he tried to get Nixon to burn the recordings of the Oval Office discussions during which Nixon conspired with aides to direct the cover-up of the Watergate scandal.

“I brought lawyers in, one of whom the President knew I supported, who urged him” to burn the tapes, Haig said on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation.”

But Nixon refused “because his own paranoia had suggested to him--and he told me this at that time--that he didn’t know what he’d be accused of by his closest associates,” former Chief of Staff H.R. (Bob) Haldeman and domestic affairs adviser John D. Ehrlichman, Haig said.

“He felt those tapes were exculpatory,” Haig said, “and I think to the day he died he believed that.”

One of several key figures involved in Watergate to appear in TV interviews Sunday, Haig also said the former President instinctively wanted to fight rather than resign the presidency in August, 1974.

“His instincts were to fight and to fight through the impeachment and, if necessary, to go to jail. This was clearly an alternative that he would have faced,” Haig said.

“I think he concluded, however, in the final analysis, that the economy was beginning to erode very seriously, that conflict was shaping up in the Middle East and that he simply couldn’t govern, and therefore it was time to leave.”

Another major figure from the time, former Republican Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee, said he went into the investigation of the scandal thinking that it would damage the Democrats. Baker was the ranking minority member of the Senate’s special Watergate Committee.

When burglars were first arrested trying to bug Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building and identified themselves as working for Nixon, “I thought it was a Democratic dirty trick to embarrass Nixon in the ’72 campaign,” Baker said on ABC-TV’s “This Week With David Brinkley.”

He said he first began to suspect that Nixon was involved after meeting with the President in a hideaway office next door to the White House.

“When I left there, I had the jolting realization that I had a very difficult task ahead of me. I had helped nominate Nixon. . . . And I was going to follow the facts wherever they led me.”

To this day, Baker said, “I’m convinced that Richard Nixon didn’t know a thing on Earth about that burglary before it happened. . . . But the real triggering episode that brought about the fall of Richard Nixon was that decision to try to contain the thing instead of going to the American people and saying: ‘You wouldn’t believe what some of these clowns have done’ and firing them, maybe on television. But he didn’t make that decision, and it brought him down.”

Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Me.) was a House freshman when he was assigned to the Judiciary Committee that conducted the impeachment inquiry. Also appearing on the CBS program, he said his newness to Congress may have influenced him to vote to impeach Nixon, but that time had not changed his views.

“I think the evidence, the accumulation of evidence, was simply overwhelming. As we sat and listened to the tape-recorded conversations, you could not ignore the fact that there were encouragements to commit perjury . . . discussion of the payment of hush money, obstruction of justice--it was just the total accumulation of evidence that said this conduct is inconsistent with the powers that the people expect the President of the United States to exercise.”

Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger praised Nixon, saying that “in the field of foreign policy (Nixon) will go down as one of the seminal American Presidents, not only because of the specific initiatives that he guided or invented but, above all, because he tried to relate the various elements of American foreign policy to some overriding theme.”

Kissinger also denied the charge that Nixon’s detente policies of easing relations with the Soviet Union might have prolonged the Cold War.

“We faced what looked like a Communist monolith with a badly divided country. . . . We divided the Communist bloc. We demonstrated that the Communist world was not a monolith. We then began to play these two (China and the Soviet Union) against each other. We gradually weakened their self-confidence.”