Nixon Without Nostalgia

By Richard Zoglin

Nostalgia may be the last refuge of a desperate culture, but that hasn't stopped it from becoming an American obsession. The theme song of the '90s seems to be The Anniversary Waltz. Thirty years pass since the Kennedy assassination; time for another round of J.F.K. reminiscences. D-day hits the / big five-oh; trot out the veterans and the homilies. We've commemorated the 25th anniversary of virtually every milestone of the '60s -- last month it was the moon landing; coming up next, Woodstock. Forrest Gump, the hit movie of the summer, leads baby boomers through a veritable highlight reel of their shared memories, from Elvis Presley to Vietnam.

The 20th anniversary of Richard Nixon's resignation on Aug. 9, 1974, has been comparatively ignored. For one thing, Nixon nostalgia was pretty much used up on his death last April. For another, the Watergate scandal that brought down the Nixon presidency doesn't offer much in the way of warm memories. It represents a craven abuse of power, a breakdown of our system of government so appalling that most people would just as soon forget it. Indeed, judging by the Nixon eulogies, many of them have forgotten it. Significantly, it is not an American network but the British Broadcasting Corp. that has taken on the task of reminding us of the third-rate burglary and its consequences.

Watergate, a five-hour documentary series produced for the BBC by Norma Percy (The Second Russian Revolution), narrated by former CBS and CNN correspondent Daniel Schorr and airing next week on the Discovery Channel, is a refresher course that shouldn't be missed. Lucid and laconic, unsparing but never sanctimonious, it retells the Watergate story in patient, no-nonsense detail. Here, once again, is the paranoid Nixon White House of the early '70s, so obsessed with political foes that it had a psychiatrist's office burglarized to get dirt on Daniel Ellsberg (who had released the Pentagon papers) and ordered the fateful break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee.

Nixon's hands-on role in the cover-up of that crime is amply documented, both in the recollections of his chief aides and in excerpts from the White House tapes. He orders the CIA to thwart the FBI's investigation of the break- in, discusses paying hush money to the Watergate burglars, devises ever more outlandish stratagems to avoid turning over the incriminating tapes. For nutty nostalgia, can anything beat the unforgettable Stennis gambit? As a compromise, Nixon proposed that only one person be allowed to listen to the tapes -- John Stennis, a conservative 72-year-old Senator from Mississippi who was hard of hearing.

To assemble the Watergate story, the BBC's team interviewed nearly every key figure possible. H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's former chief of staff, talked not long before his death last year. John Dean, the White House lawyer who blew the whistle on the cover-up, is on hand; so are John Ehrlichman, Jeb Magruder, E. Howard Hunt and a host of other familiar, long-unseen figures. Gerald Ford describes the conversations he had with top Nixon aides about the possibility of a pardon for the soon to be ex-President. Fred LaRue, political adviser to then Attorney General John Mitchell, recalls the meeting at which Mitchell (who later denied it) approved G. Gordon Liddy's intelligence operation that led to Watergate. LaRue expresses poignant regret that he didn't try to talk his boss out of the "crazy" scheme: "John would have listened to me ... and this whole mess could have been avoided."

Time -- and possibly the cool detachment of the BBC reporters -- seems to have encouraged candor, with a minimum of self-justification. The stories told by this relay team of recollectors are surprisingly consistent with one another. And there are important revelations. The producers have uncovered a memo, thought to have been destroyed, showing that Haldeman personally gave his assent to Liddy's operation. "This is a truly amazing document to surface at this late date," says Dean, seeing the memo for the first time. "If Haldeman knew about this, there is no doubt in my mind that Richard Nixon knew about this."

Watergate reminds us of the extent to which the scandal absorbed the Nixon Administration -- and the country. "We really devoted 100% of our time to Watergate," recalls Haldeman. Nixon's own defense comes largely in clips from his 1977 interview with David Frost (being rerun in its entirety this month on the Disney Channel). There, for all who have forgotten, is Nixon in his classic post-Watergate defensive posture: chastising himself with rueful bluntness even as he tries to divert the issue. "I fouled up," he says, "in the area where I'm supposed to be a master ... politics." Actually, he fouled up in the area where he was always suspect: ethics. No amount of nostalgia can change that.