Speaking of Nixon tapes, I have one of those GPO paperback transcripts of key Nixon tapes that the investigating committee focused in on. Think I'll put it up on eBay or Craigslist. While I was interested in the Watergate hearings, that was more thanks to the personalities and drama of the Senate Committee headed by Sam Ervin with counsel Sam Dash and Howard Baker leading the Republicans with that young Tenessee lawyer Fred Thompson obfuscating and advising them.
Interesting how the perps either went under or reinvented themselves. G. Gordon Liddy, while a psychotic misguided pawn of the villains, went on to make a comfortable living as a talk show host, exactly as Ollie North did after Reagangate; the spin of the losing side never quite goes away, and there are those who pay in an effort to hang on to the spin; nostalgia, probably. Chuck Colsen found God in prison (just the place, if you ask me!). John Dean went on to lecture on legal and governmental ethics. Most everybody wrote a book (or had one ghostwritten).
Nixon himself never sounded as smart or as presidential as he did when interviewed in later years.
Nixon's taped conversations are hard to endure. As you can infer from the new tapes. I never even tried to read the GOP transcript I have. Interesting primary material for psychology and politics, I suppose, if one has the patience.
All of which brings up Harry Truman's story about when he was first elected to Congress (or was it the Senate?). He was treading fearfully and respectfully when an old timer came up and put a figurative arm around his shoulder. "You're new here, and you're looking around at all these great and august men and wondering how the hell you came to be elected and to sit among them. But just you wait; soon you'll be wondering how in hell THEY got elected."
Which is the case with Nixon. How the hell did that guy get elected so many times, and to the presidency! Makes you wonder what other presidents were clay from the hair down.
Today, though, presidential candidates are put under a dissecting microscope for a grueling two-year campaign. I doubt that Nixon would have been nominated, considering the gift scandal he managed to weather by the skin of his teeth as vice president. But most disturbing about Nixon is the private man.
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