Released tapes show Nixon's maneuvering

0 Comments | Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Jul 12, 2007 | by Neil A. Lewis New York Times News Service

WASHINGTON -- The National Archives on Wednesday made available more than 11 hours of tape-recordings that show President Richard M. Nixon maneuvering in 1972 to remake the Republican Party in his image, crush South Vietnamese opposition to his efforts to end the Vietnam War and dole out patronage to ethnic groups based on how much they supported his re-election.

The release of the tapes along with 78,000 pages of newly disclosed documents should be a trove of fascinating detail and context for historians, archives officials said. The Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., is now part of the National Archives, as a result of an agreement forged after years of bitter fights between the government and the Nixon family over custody of Nixon's official papers.

The most dramatic and revelatory tape recordings involving abuses of government power were disclosed in 1996 and included Nixon's conversations as recorded by a hidden taping system as the Watergate scandal enveloped him and eventually forced him from office.

The newly released recordings provide a fresh glimpse of the political Nixon, especially in the heady moments of his 1972 landslide re-election victory over Sen. George McGovern as the Watergate clouds were just beginning to form.

The documents span a wider period and include a memo that may intrigue students of Nixon's character. In the memo, written in December 1970 to H.R. Haldeman, a top aide, Nixon expresses both anger and pain that his aides have not been able to establish an image of him as a warm and caring person. He makes several suggestions about how this could be accomplished, warning frequently in the single-spaced 11-page document that it must appear that the examples of his warmth were discovered by others and not promoted by White House aides.

"There are innumerable examples of warm items," he writes, saying he has been "nicey-nicey to the Cabinet, staff and Congress around Christmastime" and that he has treated Cabinet and sub-cabinet officials "like dignified human beings and not dirt under my feet."

"With regard to the warmth business," the memo says, it is important to emphasize to anyone who may write an article that the president "does not brag about all the good things he does for people."

Nixon is heard on a Nov. 19, 1972, tape criticizing two men who would go on to be president: Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush. He tells Charles W. Colson, a senior aide, that the Republican Party is in trouble and needs to be reinforced with a coalition of working-class Democrats. "Basically, your leadership in the states is so bad," Nixon says. "Frankly, in California, it's Reagan. You can't do it around him. He's got to do it, and he is a drag."

He talks in the same conversation about replacing Bush as representative at the United Nations, saying: "That whole staff up there is violently anti-Nixon, and Bush hasn't done one damn thing about it. He's become part of it."

Colson suggests replacing Bush with John Scali, a former network television correspondent whom he describes as completely loyal to Nixon. The two men note that naming Scali would fulfill Nixon's desire to have an Italian-American in the top ranks of the administration.

A proposal to name Walter Washington, the first elected black mayor of the District of Columbia, to the post is dismissed during the conversation.

"We don't owe the blacks a damn thing, anyway," Nixon tells Colson, who notes that African-Americans contributed little to the landslide victory.

Nixon responds: "After all, pampering the blacks isn't good. I think you've got a good point there."

Nixon also initially dismissed the idea of naming someone to a high position as "the house Jew," but then says of Leonard Garment, a White House lawyer, "Let him be the house Jew."

In conversations at around the same period of time, Nixon tells callers including Hubert H. Humphrey, the Democratic nominee he defeated four years earlier, that Henry Kissinger had reached a tentative agreement with North Vietnam a few days before the election.

Nixon is heard in subsequent days expressing sharp anger that Nguyen Van Thieu, the South Vietnamese president, was balking at assenting to the agreement reached in Paris by Kissinger and Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam.

In one conversation, Nixon raises the idea that the United States might sign a bilateral agreement with North Vietnam, leaving South Vietnam out of it.

Stanley Karnow, a leading authority on the Vietnam War, said Wednesday that Nixon had been deeply concerned at the time that Congress would take the reins of war policy if he did not have an agreement to demonstrate his control of the situation.

Allen Weinstein, the archivist of the United States, said the merging of the Nixon Library with the Archives made the Nixon administration, "the best documented presidency in American history."

The collection at the library and online also includes such historical gems as a letter from a Nixon political adviser suggesting in 1973 that John Kerry, then an opponent of the Vietnam, would be a prize recruit for the Republican Party. It also includes a letter in 1968 from President Dwight D. Eisenhower to Nixon offering advice about whom to appoint to the Supreme Court and another memo from Alexander Butterfield, a White House aide, complaining about the difficulties of looking after King Timahoe, Nixon's intractable Irish Setter.