X-Rated Expletives

"It makes you realize that whoever is President is going to be a man that all the children of America will either look up to or will look down to. And I can only say that I'm very proud that President Eisenhower restored dignity and decency and, frankly, good language to the conduct of the presidency of the United States. And I only hope that should I win this election, that I could [see] to it that whenever any mother or father talks to his child, he can look at the man in the White House and say: 'Well, there is a man who maintains the kind of standards personally that I would want my child to follow.

Thus during a televised campaign debate with John F. Kennedy on Oct. 13, 1960, Richard M. Nixon sanctimoniously criticized the salty language of Harry S. Truman. Now the transcripts of Nixon's Watergate tapes publicly reveal what many White House insiders already knew—that Nixon uses plenty of X-rated expletives. Those who have heard him speak in private say that the swearwords he commonly uses are both blasphemous and obscene; they include four-letter expletives that are salacious and scatological.

Moreover, the transcripts suggest that he uses them with a greater frequency than any President in recent memory—a great deal more than Kennedy and Eisenhower, both of whom could muster choice words on occasion, and even more than Truman and Johnson, whose racy vocabularies were legendary. Truman's language, though earthy, had a funny, folksy flair that Nixon's lacks. As for Lyndon Johnson, his command of invective was a constant source of purple surprise. But unlike Nixon, he did not mechanically spew out obscenities; he used them pointedly to cap his stories. L.B.J. could make people chuckle with his inventive cussing and barnyard phrases, and those who were not afraid of him rather admired what Newsman Peter Lisagor once called his "rich, almost lyrical, Pedernales patois."

To the extent that Nixon is at all like L.B.J., he swears, as Johnson did, at least partly in order to show contempt for others, according to Dr. Michael Maccoby, a Washington psychoanalyst who has made a classification of cussers. "Both were lower-middle-class guys who made good. They felt that certain people were contemptuous of them, so they in turn were contemptuous of those they perceived to be their enemies."

Other behavioral scientists connect Nixon's swearing with his admiration for tough guys like General Patton and the characters John Wayne plays and with his love for sports. Notes Harvard Sociologist David Riesman: "He always wanted to be in the locker room, but never belonged there; he's like the coxswain on the crew." Many psychologists observe a deep-seated insecurity in Nixon and feel that he swears simply to be one of the boys.