Watergate's Clearest Lesson

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> In 1976, Jimmy Carter ran for President as the antithesis of everything that Nixon supposedly embodied in the American imagination. "Trust me," said Carter. "I will never lie to you." He ran as an anti-Nixon, the blue-eyed sweet guy in a cardigan. But when Carter's foreign policy foundered and the hostage crisis deepened and the gas lines grew longer, Nixon's stock rose a little. At least, many Americans said, Nixon commanded respect abroad.

> The Victor Lasky thesis acquired new impetus and evidence. In It Didn't Start with Watergate, Lasky detailed a variety of dirty tricks and unsavory habits practiced by previous Presidents. John and Robert Kennedy played unethically rough in the 1960 primary campaigns against Hubert Humphrey. As President, J.F.K. got involved with a Mafia chiefs girlfriend. In a new book, The Kennedy Imprisonment, Author Garry Wills presents the Kennedys as an energetic but morally empty collection, fatally and somehow pointlessly ambitious. Wills is as ruthlessly eloquent—and often unfair—with the Kennedys as he was with Nixon in his 1970 book, Nixon Agonistes.

> New biographies of Lyndon Johnson accuse him of both worldly corruption and spiritual hallucinations. Journalist Ronnie Bugger, for example, cites L.B.J.'s vivid conviction that he was talking regularly to the Holy Ghost—in person, like Joan of Arc.

Nixon's best stroke of comparative public relations has arisen from disclosures that, almost since the invention of recording tape, Presidents have surreptitiously recorded conversations in the Oval Office. Franklin Roosevelt did it. Dwight Eisenhower did it. John Kennedy did it. The new knowledge of such taping has helped Nixon's negotiation with history, or at least his case in the public perception. It should not. Taping conversations on the sly is not polite. It is often morally wrong. But the fact that he taped his conversations did not destroy Nixon's presidency. It was what he said in those conversations—his talk of hush money, his coaching of the cover-up and his tone of cunning and low spite.

> A psychological backlash against the press has also helped Nixon. From the moment that Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward began their pursuit of Watergate in the Washington Post, some Americans have subscribed to the theory that a liberal press was out to undo the results of the 1972 Nixon landslide. The implications of that belief are troubling: they carry the suggestion of a sort of cultural civil war, between Nixon's America and a suspect elite that trafficks mostly in information and services.