Nixon Tapes Don’t Reveal Whole Story

How convenient.

Bill Clinton and his scalawag compatriots are scattering like water drops on a hot griddle for their election-year manipulations and related stonewalling. So, out comes the predictable defense--the release of more than 200 hours of tape recordings from the Nixon White House. Twenty-three years after his resignation and 3 1/2 years into his grave, Dick Nixon is still the left’s favorite boogeyman.

Quel surprise!

Leading this parade is Stanley Kutler, a University of Wisconsin professor whose drooling Nixonphobia drove him to more than two decades of litigation to liberate these tapes for purported scholarly research. But Kutler is a driven academic Ahab and proxy for Nixon haters looking for this mud wallow to settle scores over political wars dating back 50 years.

Their story, however, is incomplete. These folks have overlooked additional presidential abuses, ugliness, profanity and pettiness.

For starters, there was the president’s use of the FBI to vanquish political enemies. The president decided to meet regularly with then-FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover in anticipation of a dirty presidential election. As he and Hoover perused photos of call girls over lunch in the White House, he told a friend: “Boy, the dirt he has on those senators. You wouldn’t believe it.”

Claiming a “major security violation,” his administration unleashed a massive FBI investigation of a New York Times reporter--creating a chilling effect without even having to engage outside “plumbers.” And when political enemies bedeviled the president, he arranged to have their raw FBI files provided to a Newsweek magazine writer for rebuttal.

The president also commanded the FBI to launch intimidating investigations of adversaries during a major national policy dispute. Asked if he was being vindictive, the president exploded: “We can’t just walk away and lie down. We’re going to tuck it to them and screw ‘em.”

He also reveled in possessing confidential information from the IRS regarding the tax returns of prominent American millionaires. He passed the information along to a reporter even while knowing it was secret information and probably illegal for him to know or least tell the reporter about it.

The president routinely trafficked in dirt on his political opponents, once offering derogatory information on the opponent of a favored Senate candidate. He had an even stronger obsession with New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, a perceived threat to his reelection. Asking a friendly reporter to look into Rockefeller’s war record (hinting cowardice), he suggested: “You ought to cut Rocky’s guts open a little this week.”

He opined that the press were “bastards” and cut off White House subscriptions to a major newspaper whose reporting he believed was critical of him and supportive of Rockefeller. Oblivious to the pettiness of this act, the president blurted: “We read enough [expletive deleted]. We just don’t have to read that particular brand.”

Finally, there was the time the president was inebriated in the family quarters with a small group of guests, one of whom observed: “The champagne was flowing like the Potomac in flood, and the president himself was opening bottle after bottle in a manner that sent the foam flying over the furniture . . .”

This presidential portrait is from the book “Conversations With Kennedy” by his close friend Ben Bradlee. Bradlee was a Newsweek reporter during JFK’s presidency and later became editor of the Washington Post. While Bradlee did not possess tape recordings, he kept “detailed records of conversations, telephone calls, and contacts with JFK . . . normally dictated into a machine within twenty-four hours after they took place.”

President Kennedy’s own tape recordings have long since been sanitized by loyalists in charge of his presidential records. But if Bradlee’s tiny slice of insider reporting is representative, imagine what the whole unexpurgated record would have been.

It’s not hard to understand the titillation experienced by Nixon haters when exposed to raw, private conversations. Their voyeurism and hatred are fed at one and the same time. But their hypocrisy is not excusable--the preening, self-righteous dogma they embrace of a uniquely sinful president.

When the last Nixon tape has been played, the last document released and the last prurient anecdote recounted, there will remain the desert that is liberalism. And that, my friends, is what this stomping on the corpse of an American giant is all about.