THE NIXON YEARS: DOWN FROM THE HIGHEST MOUNTAINTOP

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tolerant, more statesmanlike, more "presidential." Then Watergate descended, and it seemed to embody all of the worst tendencies of his career — a conniving secretiveness and manipulation, suspicion and vindictiveness, a harsh instinct for guerrilla politics. The Nixon of Watergate behaved, in the memorable phrase of the late Stewart Alsop, as if he were waging war, not politics. Some of Nixon's defenders excused this as an overreaction to the radical threat of the '60s. But the record shows that this kind of paranoia was present in Nixon long before. His Watergate record suggested a serious failure to understand the boundaries of the democratic process.

Nixon was occasionally capable of eloquence; he could be graceful and witty in some informal settings. Yet too often his rhetoric had a fatally inauthentic sound. As Garry Wills wrote, "There is a genius of deflation that follows Nixon about" — a talent for bathos. Too often he confused moral leadership with attitudinizing, with public relations gambits. He was preoccupied with technique — above all, the technique of winning elections — and possessed too little interest in the larger questions of what an election is all about.

Two Levels

John Mitchell said in 1969: "Watch what we do, not what we say." More than most politicians, Nixon tended to operate on two distinct levels: 1) the psychologically necessary level of rhetoric and 2) the frequently contradictory le el of action — the place where "real life" and "hardball" politics occur. It is no wonder that Nixon's public words of ten fell with the thump of oversimplification and overstatement. He relied on the event itself, "what we do," as a corrective to the falsifications of his own language, or else he found his freedom in the ideological blur between the two. He would give some constituents the rhetoric and some the policy.

Such discrepancies reinforced a sense of Nixon as a man not so much engaged in sophisticated Realpolitik as somehow divorced from the real world outside his own crisis-ridden mind. The gap between public and private man was startling. Any leadership implies a certain amount of theater, but anyone who has read through the White House transcripts now and then feels himself in the presence of the unfrocked Wizard of Oz. The decisive, articulate, superbly managerial Nixon seems stuttering, vague, lost and occasionally almost bullied by his subordinates—unless one accepts Rutgers Professor Richard Poirier's thesis that in those conversations the President was shrewdly trying to feel out his lieutenants about how much they knew.

Britain's conservative Daily Telegraph had another theory: "The sordid clique which he brought into the White House and with which he talked in a sleazy and obscenely vulgar style entirely absent from his talks and contacts with others seems to have corroded part of his character."

One of the enduring mysteries of Watergate, of course, will be why Nixon did not simply destroy the White House tapes the instant their existence became known, later pleading national security considerations. From the beginning, Nixon's handling of Watergate has been marked by a clumsiness, sometimes an outright incompetence, that has been startling in a man with a previous reputation for