The New York Times

Tuesday, October 19, 1999

Richard Nixon, Unedited

By LEONARD GARMENT

WASHINGTON -- It is a clich , but irresistibly apt. We will have Richard Nixon to kick around some more, at least until the supply of White House tapes runs out at an as yet unknown point in the millennium after next.

The National Archives has released an additional 445 hours of recordings of private conversations he had with his senior staff. These took place in 1971 when the Pentagon Papers were released, a critical stage in the runup to Watergate. The preservation of the tapes, in which for better or worse I had a hand, turns out to have been a perpetual gift to Nixon's critics and enemies. The tapes are a gumbo of ingredients bound by a lot of unpleasant and incoherent babble. The excerpts selected for publication by The New York Times and The Washington Post were likely the worst of a bad lot.

In the tapes, Nixon rants about "disloyal" Jews and their dangerous power. Nixon refers to "that damned Jew Frankel" -- Max Frankel, who at the time led the Washington bureau of The New York Times.

Mr. Frankel, the retired executive editor of The Times, who writes a column for the paper's Sunday Magazine, called Nixon's comment "a vulgarity," which is an understatement. What Nixon said was indefensible. In addition, that comment and others are not altogether surprising. Previously released tapes contained intimations that on the subject of Jews, worse might be coming; it has now arrived.

News reports, while noting that elsewhere on the tapes Nixon denied being an anti-Semite, do not take this denial seriously. Yet flatly calling Nixon an anti-Semite is not an adequate explanation, not just of Nixon, but of the nature of public leadership.

Recall that Nixon was altogether an extraordinarily angry politician whose resentment found a wide range of targets. In the same conversations in which he ranted at Jews, he spewed epithets at Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and at Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post.

This President was a champion, equal-opportunity hater. Mainly, he hated liberals, reserving his most intense hatred for journalists, academics and government bureaucrats, all of whom had returned the favor over years of partisan combat. Nixon thought Jews overrepresented in all these populations. He could not resist making the fevered connection.

News reports said that although Nixon found Jews to be disloyal, he made exceptions for Jews in top positions of his Administration -- specifically Henry Kissinger; William Safire, his speechwriter and now a New York Times columnist, and me. (Thanks a lot.) A jaundiced reader might wish to dismiss us as mere aberrations. But such a dismissal does not explain Nixon's actual behavior. He did not merely appoint a few Jews as tokens. He appointed Jews in numbers and depth, until the end of his Presidency. Indeed, just before he resigned in 1974, he appointed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Thus we must face the Nixon Paradox. His anti-Semitic outbursts in the private conversations found virtually no correspondence in his speech or actions outside those explosions.

At this point in our politics we should find this juxtaposition less implausible than we once might have. President Clinton was impeached, partly for reasons having to do with the administration of justice, but largely because of his private actions. Yet the country, with unmistakable clarity, declared that his private failings were not to determine our judgment of his public character.

Those who consider this verdict reasonable should consider how much more forcefully its logic applies to the private conversations of public persons. The best expression I have found of this logic comes from Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist whose country under Communism learned some lessons about the consequences of trampling the distinction between public and private.

"In private," Mr. Kundera wrote in an essay, "a person says all sorts of things, slurs friends, uses coarse language . . . makes a companion laugh by shocking him with outrageous talk, floats heretical ideas he'd never admit in public."

Mr. Kundera argues that this difference is not a mere curiosity but a fundamental fact: "That we act different in private than in public is everyone's most conspicuous experience, it is the very ground of the life of the individual. Yet curiously this obvious fact remains unconscious, unacknowledged"

Mr. Kundera worries about this obliviousness, as we should, because an understanding of the distinction between public and private speech is indispensable to a decent politics -- one built upon respect for individual privacy, a fundamental ingredient of freedom. What is on the Nixon tapes is undeniably ugly. It is for us to decide, however, what effect this private talk should have on our evaluation of Nixon's public life.

(Leonard Garment, who was counsel to President Nixon, is author of the forthcoming, "In Search of Deep Throat." )