The Nixon TapesEdited and Annotated by Douglas Brinkley & Luke A. NichterHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014 For two years, from 1971 to 1973, President Richard Nixon made liberal use of clandestine taping equipment in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, and even Camp David to record over 3700 hours of conversations between himself and his chief aides, miscellaneous guests, and visiting officials. The resulting archive is a vast, daunting mass of recordings of various clarities, and researcher Luke Nichter undertook the prodigious task of listening to all those hours and transcribing them. Those transcriptions form the underpinning for The Nixon Tapes, a 750-page brick of a book, with annotations provided by historian Douglas Brinkley (who did such a fantastic job on 2007’sThe Reagan Diaries) and new from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.This is Nixon at the apogee of his power, lionized for his foreign policy triumphs with the Soviet Union and the Chinese, re-elected in a massive landslide in 1972, certain of his place in history – and yet he himself is as vicious and paranoid as he’d been in his previous decades of public service. Consequently, the book makes for intensely ugly and distasteful reading. How on Earth Brinkley and Nichter managed to wade through all this slime and still come out the other side with such a big and, ultimately, valuable volume defies understanding, and we can legitimately worry for them. Prolonged contact with President Nixon can stain the soul of even a virtuous man, even long after Nixon’s death (as witness the hundreds of thousands of people dead in two 21st century wars planned and orchestrated by two former Nixon acolytes who thoroughly absorbed his lessons of secrecy and autocracy), so Brinkley and Nichter should probably invest in a few indulgently long seaside vacations in the wake of creating this book.It’s a thoroughly soiling reading experience, however invaluable it will no doubt be to later generations. Reviewers have tended to make much of the casual, pervasive anti-Semitism that especially marks the exchanges between the President and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger (and others: at one point we hear Nixon petulantly complaining to Billy Graham that “you can’t really talk about it publicly” – and getting sympathy in response), but one of the saddest things about these transcriptions is the absolute universality of the drizzled contempt in the recorded conversations. Nixon and his virtually inseparable alter ego Kissinger (I lost count of how many times Nixon assures Kissinger with some variation of “Don’t worry. I’ll follow your instructions right to the letter”) chuckle and mutter mockery of virtually everything and everybody.They reserve a special kind of acid for the good, the worthy, the honorable; the steady barrage of hatred in these pages is physically wearying. Even in these months before Watergate exacerbated their fear and suspicion to epic proportions, these two would huddle together and revel in their surrounded isolation, condescending so thoroughly to so many groups of people that all the reader’s breathable air is sucked out of the passages:
NIXON: What I meant is, at the time – what I’m talking about is, are we going to have enough time? All these assholes in the press said we were wrong. Now, at the present time, the press will say, “We’re quite aware we’re very, very close to peace, and da-da-da-da.” They were wrong, and so when it turns the other way, they’re going to say, “Peace has escaped da-da-da-da,” and they’re going to be wrong again. And it isn’t going to make a goddamn bit of difference. My point is, you’ve got to remember who the enemy are. The enemy has never changed. The election didn’t change it. The only friends we’ve got, Henry, are a few people of rather moderate education out in this country, and thank God, they’re about sixty-one percent of the people, who support us. The left-wingers, most of your friends, and most – and many of mine –KISSINGER: Some friends of mine –NIXON: - are against us.
By the time Brinkley and Nichter bring their account to a close in January of 1973, you’ll want to toss every single one of these bastards into the darkest dungeon you can find and throw away the keys. There’s a definite value in such a strong reaction, but it’s tough to recommend a book that provokes it. Readers who lived through the Nixon administration – and whose ideas of the U.S. government were fundamentally altered by the Watergate scandal – won’t be able to avoid reading The Nixon Tapes, and it’ll all come back to them, in great oily gulps.
