All of the People, Always

RUMOR HASIT that Richard Nixon wants to get back into politics as a special adviser to the Republican Party, but there is another rumor going around--Nixon is becoming a rock-n-roll star and his first releases have created a new genre in the dying art form: the you were there genre, a cross between the blues, and solo schmalz (i.e., Frank Sinatra's "I Did it My Way"). Nixon, according to unofficial sources, is even preparing some television advertisements to be released next year in celebration of the bicentennial, and a rough copy of one of those ads goes something like this:

Hey there Americans! I'm Richard Nixon, remember me? Remember the effervescent early seventies? Remember those challenging times when we had both recession and inflation, the glittering carpet bombing of Cambodia in Christmas of '72, the days when a politician could be two-faced without being two-timed by a baby-faced, punk afraid of being molested in prison?

And then there was Watergate, remember that? Remember all of the song-and-dance routines back then like "There Will be No Whitewash at the White House," and "I Will Not Place the Blame on Subordinates." Surely you can't forget that catchy tune. "Nobody Has Cornered the Morality Market," and the ever-popular "In the Interests of National Security."

Remember Sam Ervin's "Nicodemus Come Down in the Night" and Bernard Barker's "I Wasn't There to Think," (one of my personal favorites)?

Now all of these and more can be yours for one low, low price. Just send your orders to me. Hurry! Rush your orders today to Richard Nixon, care of San Clemente Snow-Job...

Even if the rumors are true, we're going to have to be satisfied with just the records until next year. And they point out two things: Watergate has little entertainment value, and the American brand of accumulative history, according to which anything and everything is worth preserving, is flourishing.

Post-Watergate morality has turned into mortality: this colorless, odorless cure-all "morality" is supposed to excuse the mortality of those events themselves. The overkill in the media has led to a numbing of the spirit. Nobody cares about Watergate enough to listen to all of the boring details again, and yet the record companies still exploit that tragi-comedy.

THE FOLKWAYS COLLECTION, with more volumes to come, is a pretty thorough examination of the entire Watergate nexus of corruption. It contains no narrative, just straight excerpting from the available testimony; for the most part the excerpts stick to the highlights. There are even some funny lines: Bernard Barkers paraphrases Tennyson's "Ours is Not to Question Why..." somber-voiced James McCord replies to Ervin's question about what Mitchell called him. "Before or after the Break-in?" Folkways also includes one Nixon speech, his Watergate Address of April 30, 1973.

We've all heard Nixon say nothing too many times for this recording to have much meaning, but there is one interesting feature that usually doesn't show up in a regular written transcript of his speeches. Toward the end of his address Nixon says, "After my inauguration last January I made each...I gave each member of my cabinet and each member of my White House Staff, a special four-year calendar..." It seems that Nixon almost said, "I made each member take it" whether he wanted it or not. But that isn't like the kind, generous image he wanted to project on the television screen. If you're interested, such analysis of Freudian slips is about the best that can be made of these records. Otherwise, congressional transcripts are probably more thorough, and cheaper.

The WBCN production is very different. It presents all of the characters of the plot from the bottom, right up to Nixon himself, in a fairly comprehensive study of the entire mess. While the background music and quotes are interesting, the one major problem with the record is that it was made from a BCN show presented May 13, 1973 and the material was outdated well before Nixon resigned. Parts of this record actually make Watergate entertaining. The beginning, for example, features a holy roller preacher howling "The hypocrites in the Amen corner have got this world in a hell of a state!" and later on, in a reenactment of the break-in, cheap violins and restaurant noises copped from a grade B mafia movie provide background for a lobster dinner before the break-in, and the theme song from "Mission Impossible" plays as the narrator recounts the details of the burglary itself.

WBCN is good at making even the most serious of political events look like self-parodies, but some of their idle speculations about Watergate rest on too many paranoid assumptions. These assumptions make phrases like the description of Haldeman and Erlichman as "the german shepherds, the palace guards, the leaders of the White House Band," memorable, but they also lack any kind of insightful analysis. That's not to say that exercises in paranoia are bad, "especially then, when all of the facts still weren't out. The record only leaves you wishing BCN would do another show about Watergate, and forget about making a record out of it, because like most comedy records, after you've heard it a couple of times, it's not funny any more.

NIXON WAS ALWAYS conscious of his moments in history, almost as if he imagined Frank Friedel taking copious notes in the wings while he made his speeches and toured around the world, promising "a generation of peace." It's only right that his moment in history' should be his resignation speech, and CMS records has made that phrase the title for its recording. Again the speech is just another example of Nixon's beat-around-the-bush style. But more than that, it evokes the same frustrations: Nixon didn't resign, he simply didn't "have a strong enough political base in Congress," and he sauntered off to a quarter-million dollar free ride to San Clemente "while daring greatly." Ford's inaugural speech, what he called "just a little straight talk among friends," is just as patronizingly obsequious as his predecessor's speeches. Again, the only interesting aspects are his Freudian slips: he tells us he comes to the Presidency "with full con...confidence," an ironic piece of self-criticism, and he also praises Nixon, the great man "who brought pee-eace to millions" in a broken voice that reflects either tear-jerking sentimentality or an uncharacteristic inability to tell a lie.

What comes out of all of these records is the inanity of Watergate, and the bathos of the crisis-orientation peculiar to modern American politics. These plastic artifacts will only add to the mountain of information political historians will have to sift through some day in an effort doomed from the start by the law of diminishing returns, the law that characterized the entire Watergate investigation. In a larger sense, this law is manifest in our constitutional system of checks and balances. That is, no government agency is able to adequately police other agencies because the amount of information and the specialized knowledge required for such investigations is prohibitive. This may be one of the lessons of Watergate apparent in these records.

The records also raise an incidental question: will Nixon get the golden disc marking the million-record sale?