The Nixon Tapes

"Resigning. . . said it all"

When CBS announced that it had bought rights to air 90 minutes of videotaped interviews between former President Richard Nixon and onetime Nixon Aide Frank Gannon, Executive Producer Don Hewitt of 60 Minutes said that the conversations revealed "a Nixon we have never seen before." If not quite that, the broadcast segments, for which CBS paid $500,000, show a controversial man at his most controversial. They were set to air this week and next on 60 Minutes and American Parade. A sampler:

On the Watergate coverup: "I had the feeling--and I think in retrospect I'd probably do it again--that I should stand by my friends. . . I should have destroyed them [the tape recordings of meetings in his office] . . . If I had thought that they revealed criminal activities, I would have been out of my mind not to destroy them . . . There's no way you could apologize that. . . would exceed resigning the presidency . . . That said it all."

On his relations with the press: "I don't mind a microscope, but boy, when they use a proctoscope, that's going too far . . . One of the reasons that I think most of our 'media friends' rather miss me is that they just can't resist psychoanalyzing, because they think I'm a very complex, and therefore interesting, person--and in this case, I'm not going to disillusion them."

About Mrs. Nixon: "She was called 'Plastic Pat' because she was my wife. If she had been the wife of a liberal, my God, they would have canonized her . . . When I hear people slobbering around publicly, 'I love her' and all that sort of stuff, that raises a question in my mind as to how much of it is real. . . We just don't go for those public declarations of love."

About having wiretapped reporters: "I was paranoiac, or almost a basket case, with regard to secrecy . . . If you think I was tough on these leaks, [Henry Kissinger] was even tougher at times . . . One of the reasons that the release of the Pentagon papers caused great concern in the CIA was that one of the items in the papers could only have come from the fact that we had [Leonid] Brezhnev's car bugged."

About the late Soviet leader: "Brezhnev was pretty much of a lady's man . . . When we went down the line and there were a lot of--several--pretty girls . . . there with flowers and so forth welcoming us--this is in Russia--and he turned to me with a little wink, and he said, 'Would you want to take one of these with you?' "

On the moments just after his resignation speech: "Suddenly they all got up and they came around, just surrounded me--it was sort of a huddle, sort of a family embrace, saying nothing and saying everything. And then Tricia said, 'Daddy! You're wet. Your coat's wet through.' And I began to have a chill."