EDITORIAL
PROTECTING HISTORY Old soldiers, we know from General Douglas MacArthur, never die, they just fade away. Old Presidents, we are learning from Richard Nixon, don't even do that. At least Mr. Nixon...
...law: who, between individual and nation, owns what in the files of an administration...
...Nixon makes a joke...
...From behind the protected fences of San Clemente he is launching an assault on public opinion and history that promises to be as self-serving as any of his notorious political campaigns, but it is to be hoped, not as successful as some...
...The trick for the public is to feel sympathy, within bounds, but not be forgetful that this alleged injured party was involved in monumental violations of the law and the system (hence the necessity of his pardoning), and that this would-be guardian of presidential confidentiality was concerned above all with his own protection (hence the fact of the cover-up...
...Only he, his wife and his daughters, Nixon asserts, can make "the delicate judgments with regard to what is private and what is personal and what is political and what is embarrassing, what is national security...
...Apart from the question of his reliability as custodian of anything so historically important, there is the rationale that accompanies the argument...
...This is not to say that Nixon should be denied any Constitutional right...
...The ultimate objective, of course, is not only to achieve another Nixon resurrection (though not as candidate this time), but also to conclude his self-canonization as political martyr, who died that the virgin prerogatives of the presidency might be preserved...
...The strategy at the moment is two-pronged: a challenge in the courts over the custody, ownership and disposition of the White House documents and tapes of his administration...
...A principal worry in all of this is that Nixon will somehow succeed in circumventing the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act of 1974 and gain control over the White House documents and tapes of his administration...
...followed by a television "memoir" guided by a British talk-show entertainer who probably knows as much about American law as Johnny Carson does about the Magna Carta, and as much about culpability as Carson does about Old Bailey...
...It is a situation ready-made for Nixon...
...It's enough to have bought one bum used car...
...It is all very cynical, and the public should be on guard...
...Later, of course, there will be a book, or series of books, rearranging the historical record as Nixon would have it...
...The public memory is short, and there resides in most Americans deep wells of sympathy for the defeated...
...Nor should it be forgotten that this anxiety to place his case before the public follows his successful frustration of official channels, including congressional investigating committees, whose access to Nixon should always have been more immediate than David Frost's, but wasn't...
...In kindness he is best left unrebutted.butted...
...His new exercises will reconvince partisans and undoubtedly win some converts to the view of himself as wronged man, a ground already seeded by Nixon lawyers in arguing that the law transferring control of his presidential papers and tapes to the government is punitive and was passed to punish the former President...
...Never mind that the act only closed after 200 years a major oversight in US...
...National security...
...Nixon isn't...
...But let the rest of us be warned against a pitch that is certain to be slick...
...Let him plead, speak and write as he will...
Vol. 102 • September 1975 • No. 13
