No Tax Dollars for Nixon Estate

For nearly a year, lawyers for the estate of former President Richard M. Nixon have been seeking through a civil suit to win compensation from the government for the tape recordings and other White House materials it seized after Nixon’s resignation 25 years ago. The Justice Department argues the Nixon estate is owed nothing. The materials Congress ordered sequestered weren’t created for commercial purposes but were intended by Nixon to be deposited as “a public trust” in his presidential library. The government’s assertion that no compensation is due is absolutely right.

The Nixon material most notably at issue is, of course, the 3,700 hours of Oval Office recordings made from the earliest days of his presidency. The revelation of the taping in 1974 testimony before a congressional committee and the disclosures from those tapes pointing to criminal behavior by the president were decisive in forcing him from office.

Nixon quit shortly after the House Judiciary Committee voted articles of impeachment that accused him of acting “in a manner contrary to his trust as president and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice, and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.” There is virtually no doubt that had he not resigned Nixon would have been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate.

The Oval Office tapes released so far provide powerful support for the decision not to let Nixon retain them. Had he done so it’s likely many would have been destroyed, for they cast an ugly light on Nixon’s character. The compulsive repetition of anti-Semitic slurs, the whining self-pity and almost pathetic macho posturing that he paraded before his intimates will forever do much to define the nature of the 37th president, whatever conclusions historians may reach about his presidency’s policies and actions.

The Nixon estate’s lawyers put the value of the disputed material at possibly several hundred million dollars. They argue that no previous president’s records have been treated like Nixon’s. True. But, then, no president before Nixon had been so clearly implicated in a criminal conspiracy or forced to resign. No other president had to be pardoned by his successor to protect him from possible criminal prosecution. The Justice Department is right: The Nixon estate is not owed a penny.