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These recordings are the latest in a series of tapes that are made public every so often, like time-release capsules, to administer a healthy dose of reality whenever Nixon seems to have rehabilitated himself. Full of sentence fragments and garbled syntax, a cross between Valley Girl-speak and locker- room profanity, the tapes reveal Nixon in the raw, unimproved by speechwriters, aides or editors. Contrast his statesmanlike published prose on the Soviet Union's "strategic challenge of global proportion, which requires a renewed strategic consciousness" with this typical passage from the tapes about sacking IRS Commissioner Johnnie Walters for refusing to harass Nixon's enemies: "Kick Walters' ass out first, and get a man in there." So damaging are the tapes to the Nixon rehabilitation that Republican Party leaders, who had been considering a Nixon appearance at the 1992 convention, are now rethinking the invitation.
The tapes show that long before he was under siege by the Watergate investigators, he was under siege by his own demons. His re-election campaign belied its official slogan -- "Bring Us Together" -- by beginning with a pogrom. "I want there to be no holdovers left. The whole goddam bunch go out . . . and if ((George Shultz)) doesn't do it, he's out as ((Treasury)) Secretary." Nixon returns to his purge later: "You're out, you're out, you're finished, you're done, done, finished. Knocked the hell out of there." And these are his own people.
When Nixon's attention turns to his real enemies -- Jews, Democrats, liberals, intellectuals, anyone who came from a loftier social background than he did -- the President erupts in spurts of venom about clowns in government, conspiratorial leakers, preacher types, gum-chewing reporters, Kennedys. "A lot of our own people come in here, and they start sucking around the Georgetown set. All of a sudden, they're just as bad as the others . . . They're disgusting." He speculates that the antiwar protests are part of a Jewish plot. "Aren't the Chicago Seven all Jews? ((Rennie)) Davis is a Jew, you know." Told that he wasn't, Nixon guesses again. "Hoffman, Hoffman's a Jew?" he asks Haldeman, who confirms that, yes, Abbie Hoffman is Jewish. "About half of these are Jews," Nixon concludes.
The one person for whom Nixon showed a grudging respect was J. Edgar Hoover -- the only man in Washington with an enemies list longer than his own. Nixon wanted to get rid of Hoover but feared that the FBI director might "bring down the temple" by releasing compromising information from his thick files. Fate settled the matter on May 2, 1972, when Hoover died of a heart attack. Months later, Nixon delivered his own kind of eulogy, musing, "There was senility and everything . . . He wasn't perfect, but he ran a tight ship. Goddam it, that's the way."
But for all his paranoia, Nixon's own ship was anything but tight. For that, he had no one to blame but himself. He was the one who ordered the installation of concealed recording devices in the Oval Office, the Executive Office Building and Camp David, yet he continued to carry on crude, incoherent and ultimately incriminating conversations. As late as April 25, 1973, well after the smoking-gun conversations about stonewalling and hush money, Nixon was still congratulating himself on the secret system. "I'm damn glad we have it, aren't you?" he crowed.