ONE OF THEM:

Still the One: Nixon at 90 (Andrew Ferguson, 01/20/2003, Weekly Standard)

WE LIVE IN A FREE COUNTRY, thank God, so we are each of us entitled to celebrate Richard Nixon's birthday in our own way. Out in Yorba Linda, California, at the Nixon Library & Birthplace, the hardiest of the nation's merry-makers assembled on January 9 to toast the former president's 90th birthday with their annual "Victory of Freedom Gala." Other Americans celebrated quietly, surrounded by family and friends, while some preferred to be left alone, to gather their thoughts and memories. Still others chose not to mark the occasion at all, which is their right.

For myself, when the big day rolls around I like to drive out to suburban Maryland, to an annex of the National Archives called Archives II, where, in a fourth-floor room lined with towering gray filing cabinets, the Nixon tapes are stored. The tapes constitute one of the country's oddest historical artifacts--a portrait of a presidency, in second-by-second detail. There are 3,700 hours of tapes, recorded in the Oval Office and in Nixon's private White House hideaway between early 1969 and early 1973, touching on every subject from the China overture and Russian detente to Tricia Nixon's wedding and Bebe Rebozo's taste in movies. Of these conversations about 1,800 hours have so far been released for public listening, with many more scheduled to arrive over the next few years.

"We have people come by the busload, still," Karl Weissenbach, the tapes' curator, told me. They come to hear the Greatest Hits, of course--"Smoking Gun" and "Cancer on the Presidency," "I Want Brookings Cleaned Out" and "Did Mitchell Know?" and "We Could Get the Million Dollars (But It Would Be Wrong)"--but since these conversations can be readily downloaded from various Internet sites, most people come to chase Nixonian demons peculiar to themselves. The researchers, cranks, and hobbyists sit long hours at the gray metal desks, heads bent low in headphones, fingers stabbing the playback buttons on the cassette recorders, searching for this clue or that. "I've seen people sit through the entire eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap," Weissenbach said. "I guess they think they'll hear something no one else has."

I come tracking my own mystery.

With all due respect to Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Steyn, Theodore Dalrymple, and our own friends Steven Martinovich, Derek Coppold and Ed Driscoll: Andrew Ferguson is the best essayist on Earth. It's a tragedy that he's stuck off in the corner at Bloomberg. We highly recommend his only collection to date: Fools' Names, Fools' Faces. But he's nowhere near harsh enough on Richard Nixon. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 11, 2003 10:04 AM