Post by MacBeth on Feb 2, 2009 18:52:05 GMT -5
Scholarly feuds seldom end amicably, and nearly 35 years after President Richard M. Nixon resigned, a dispute involving his Watergate tapes would seem to be no exception.
A handful of historians and authors maintain that the most authoritative transcripts of those recordings include significant omissions and misrepresentations that could influence interpretations of the cover-up.
At the center of the quarrel is “Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes,” a 1997 collection of transcripts edited by Stanley I. Kutler, a pre-eminent historian of the Watergate era, that has become the standard reference. Mr. Kutler has been a hero to many people because of a lawsuit he brought with the nonprofit group Public Citizen that led to the release of 201 hours of recordings related to unethical or illegal activity in the Nixon White House.
But longtime critics of his transcripts say Mr. Kutler deliberately edited the tapes in ways that painted a more benign portrait of a central figure in the drama, the conspirator-turned-star-witness, John W. Dean III, the White House counsel who told Nixon that Watergate had become a “cancer” on his presidency.
Behind the accusations are rival visions of Mr. Dean, who is seen by some as a flawed but ultimately courageous man reluctantly sucked into the scandal, and by others as a primary architect of the cover-up who saved himself by deflecting guilt.
The conflict has flared again because an article detailing the charges against Mr. Kutler has been submitted to the American Historical Review, the profession’s premier journal.
Mr. Kutler scoffed at the accusations.
“Are you aware under what conditions I worked in 1996?” he said by telephone from Mexico. “It’s only because of my lawsuit that you or anybody else can pick up a tape. In those days, I could not leave the archives with that material. I used state-of-the-lost-art equipment. I brought in a team of court reporters to help me with the first drafts.
“I am responsible for whatever was transcribed,” said Mr. Kutler, recently a plaintiff in a lawsuit to compel former Vice President Dick Cheney to preserve his records. “Did I make any mistakes? Of course. Did I ever make a deliberate mistake, did I ever deliberately transform a negative into a positive?
“Please, I’m a trained historian. I don’t work that way.”
Other experts who have listened to the tapes, a painstaking and difficult task, note significant disparities between some transcripts in the Kutler book and the recordings, but say there is no reason to think they are anything but accidental.
Questions about Mr. Kutler’s transcripts have rattled around for a decade, and many people currently involved have previously battled over his editing as well as interpretations of Watergate. The lack of a complete or official and publicly available record of the tapes has helped keep the dispute simmering.
Peter Klingman, the historian who submitted the article, has been trying to call attention to Mr. Kutler’s editing in recent months. He has not yet heard from the American Historical Review on whether it will publish his essay, and because of pre-publication rules he would not comment.
About Mr. Klingman, Mr. Kutler said: “I’ve tried to deal with this man in a very professional, patient way. I don’t know what he wanted — for me to get in my sackcloth and my ashes?”
To anyone besides Watergate buffs, the dispute may seem trivial. “On one level it looks very petty,” said Joan Hoff, a historian at Montana State University and the author of two books on Nixon. “But because the book is used authoritatively as the official transcript of the event, it becomes very important.”
At issue are a week’s worth of recordings beginning March 13, 1973, a few days before Mr. Dean’s cancer-on-the-presidency declaration and the sentencing of the burglars who broke into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex.
In one conversation from that first day that is not included in “Abuse of Power,” Mr. Dean tells Nixon that Gordon Strachan, a White House aide, knew about the break-in before it happened. During hearings of the Senate committee investigating Watergate in the months to come, Mr. Dean would testify that there had been no prior White House knowledge of the break-in.
To Mr. Kutler’s scholarly critics, though, the most serious failing is that excerpts from two separate conversations that took place on March 16 — one made during a face-to-face meeting in the morning, and a second over the telephone in the evening — were reversed in order and presented as part of one continuous meeting. Most of the evening conversation between Mr. Dean and Nixon was eliminated, as were any references to it.
“If you look back at the conversations that Stanley didn’t include what you see is Nixon and Dean closely involved in a joint obstruction of justice,” said Frederick J. Graboske, who was the supervising archivist in charge of processing the Nixon tapes at the National Archives. (Mr. Dean pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and served four months, most of which was spent working with Watergate prosecutors.)
In their March 16 evening telephone conversation, Mr. Dean and Nixon discussed what the president might tell the public. Mr. Dean says, “A lot of my conclusions were based on the fact that there was not a scintilla of evidence in the investigation that led anywhere to the White House.”
Mr. Graboske maintains that Mr. Dean, who had discussed Mr. Strachan’s participation a few days earlier with the president, was emphasizing that they could hoodwink the public because no one could prove the White House had previous knowledge of the break-in.
“In the history profession, you never change the original evidence; Dr. Kutler has changed the original evidence,” said Mr. Graboske, who learned of the disparities six months ago.
“I spent 12 years listening to the tapes,” he said, contending that no one could mistake the evening and morning recordings as being part of the same conversation. “I don’t know why he did it, but what he did was deliberate.”
He added: “I did work with Stanley. I’m sorry that it has come to this.”
Yet Ken Hughes, a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs, who has studied the tapes since 2000 as part of the Presidential Digital Recordings project, said the attacks on Mr. Kutler were “misguided.”
“I was very critical of errors in the transcripts and I thought he had left out some important conversations,” Mr. Hughes said of Mr. Kutler’s book, “but they are entirely honest and predictable mistakes that anyone who would try to make a transcript from extremely difficult tapes could make.”
Also left out of Mr. Kutler’s book is a 35-minute conversation from March 17, 1973, in which Mr. Dean and Nixon discuss the vulnerabilities of various administration officials. Mr. Dean adds himself to the list.
Nixon: “You? Why?”
Dean: “Well, because I’ve been all over this thing like a blanket.”
To some ears, the most dramatic section not included in “Abuse of Power” is a conversation in the Oval Office from March 20, 1973, among Nixon, Mr. Dean and Richard Moore, a White House adviser, as they tap out a possible public statement on a manual typewriter.
In it, Mr. Dean refers to a meeting with G. Gordon Liddy, who planned the break-in, during which establishing an intelligence operation for the president’s 1972 re-election committee was discussed.
Nixon replies, “I’d be inclined just to knock that out. I’d just say there were limited problems involving campaign law compliance. And then I would——then I would say never at any time were there any discussions that had anything to do with intelligence gathering operations ——on the order of something like that.”
Mr. Dean says, “I see what you mean.”
Mr. Graboske noted, “You can hear the typewriter clacking away.”
Mr. Kutler’s critics include Mr. Klingman and Ms. Hoff, as well as the authors Len Colodny and Russ Baker, whose books about Watergate have advanced controversial conspiracy theories involving Mr. Dean. They all argue that Mr. Kutler was protecting Mr. Dean, his friend, and avoiding having to revise his previously published accounts of Watergate.
Mr. Dean, now an author and commentator, said in a telephone interview from Washington that the accusers are part of a fringe group of revisionists.
“It’s amazing these guys have the credibility to be covered,” he said. “Hopefully the American Historical Association can figure out fact from fiction, and Klingman doesn’t represent fact.”
Without going into a point-by-point rebuttal, Mr. Kutler said that at the time he prepared the book, his overriding priority was to look for evidence of the president’s guilt: “My concern in 1996 was to see what Richard Nixon had to say.” He added that he is now friends with Mr. Dean but was not at the start of his work on the tapes.
Another well-known presidential historian, Herbert S. Parmet, who wrote a biography of Nixon, said he was not certain the disparities were that important: “I’m not convinced that it does all that much to change the history.”
There are no official government transcripts. These tapes from 1973 were released as the result of a lawsuit in the 1990s by Mr. Dean against Mr. Colodny and excerpts can be heard at nytimes.com/arts. The National Archives and Records Administration is releasing the entire 3,700-plus hours of recordings in chronological order; they are now up to December 1972. One archives estimate figured it takes 100 hours of staff time to process a single hour of tape.
In the end, Ms. Hoff of Montana State said, the dispute underscores the importance of an official, comprehensive record: “If there is this kind of distortion of that one crucial week, it does raise the question of what else is missing in the transcripts.”
www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/washington/01kutler.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
A handful of historians and authors maintain that the most authoritative transcripts of those recordings include significant omissions and misrepresentations that could influence interpretations of the cover-up.
At the center of the quarrel is “Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes,” a 1997 collection of transcripts edited by Stanley I. Kutler, a pre-eminent historian of the Watergate era, that has become the standard reference. Mr. Kutler has been a hero to many people because of a lawsuit he brought with the nonprofit group Public Citizen that led to the release of 201 hours of recordings related to unethical or illegal activity in the Nixon White House.
But longtime critics of his transcripts say Mr. Kutler deliberately edited the tapes in ways that painted a more benign portrait of a central figure in the drama, the conspirator-turned-star-witness, John W. Dean III, the White House counsel who told Nixon that Watergate had become a “cancer” on his presidency.
Behind the accusations are rival visions of Mr. Dean, who is seen by some as a flawed but ultimately courageous man reluctantly sucked into the scandal, and by others as a primary architect of the cover-up who saved himself by deflecting guilt.
The conflict has flared again because an article detailing the charges against Mr. Kutler has been submitted to the American Historical Review, the profession’s premier journal.
Mr. Kutler scoffed at the accusations.
“Are you aware under what conditions I worked in 1996?” he said by telephone from Mexico. “It’s only because of my lawsuit that you or anybody else can pick up a tape. In those days, I could not leave the archives with that material. I used state-of-the-lost-art equipment. I brought in a team of court reporters to help me with the first drafts.
“I am responsible for whatever was transcribed,” said Mr. Kutler, recently a plaintiff in a lawsuit to compel former Vice President Dick Cheney to preserve his records. “Did I make any mistakes? Of course. Did I ever make a deliberate mistake, did I ever deliberately transform a negative into a positive?
“Please, I’m a trained historian. I don’t work that way.”
Other experts who have listened to the tapes, a painstaking and difficult task, note significant disparities between some transcripts in the Kutler book and the recordings, but say there is no reason to think they are anything but accidental.
Questions about Mr. Kutler’s transcripts have rattled around for a decade, and many people currently involved have previously battled over his editing as well as interpretations of Watergate. The lack of a complete or official and publicly available record of the tapes has helped keep the dispute simmering.
Peter Klingman, the historian who submitted the article, has been trying to call attention to Mr. Kutler’s editing in recent months. He has not yet heard from the American Historical Review on whether it will publish his essay, and because of pre-publication rules he would not comment.
About Mr. Klingman, Mr. Kutler said: “I’ve tried to deal with this man in a very professional, patient way. I don’t know what he wanted — for me to get in my sackcloth and my ashes?”
To anyone besides Watergate buffs, the dispute may seem trivial. “On one level it looks very petty,” said Joan Hoff, a historian at Montana State University and the author of two books on Nixon. “But because the book is used authoritatively as the official transcript of the event, it becomes very important.”
At issue are a week’s worth of recordings beginning March 13, 1973, a few days before Mr. Dean’s cancer-on-the-presidency declaration and the sentencing of the burglars who broke into the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex.
In one conversation from that first day that is not included in “Abuse of Power,” Mr. Dean tells Nixon that Gordon Strachan, a White House aide, knew about the break-in before it happened. During hearings of the Senate committee investigating Watergate in the months to come, Mr. Dean would testify that there had been no prior White House knowledge of the break-in.
To Mr. Kutler’s scholarly critics, though, the most serious failing is that excerpts from two separate conversations that took place on March 16 — one made during a face-to-face meeting in the morning, and a second over the telephone in the evening — were reversed in order and presented as part of one continuous meeting. Most of the evening conversation between Mr. Dean and Nixon was eliminated, as were any references to it.
“If you look back at the conversations that Stanley didn’t include what you see is Nixon and Dean closely involved in a joint obstruction of justice,” said Frederick J. Graboske, who was the supervising archivist in charge of processing the Nixon tapes at the National Archives. (Mr. Dean pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and served four months, most of which was spent working with Watergate prosecutors.)
In their March 16 evening telephone conversation, Mr. Dean and Nixon discussed what the president might tell the public. Mr. Dean says, “A lot of my conclusions were based on the fact that there was not a scintilla of evidence in the investigation that led anywhere to the White House.”
Mr. Graboske maintains that Mr. Dean, who had discussed Mr. Strachan’s participation a few days earlier with the president, was emphasizing that they could hoodwink the public because no one could prove the White House had previous knowledge of the break-in.
“In the history profession, you never change the original evidence; Dr. Kutler has changed the original evidence,” said Mr. Graboske, who learned of the disparities six months ago.
“I spent 12 years listening to the tapes,” he said, contending that no one could mistake the evening and morning recordings as being part of the same conversation. “I don’t know why he did it, but what he did was deliberate.”
He added: “I did work with Stanley. I’m sorry that it has come to this.”
Yet Ken Hughes, a senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs, who has studied the tapes since 2000 as part of the Presidential Digital Recordings project, said the attacks on Mr. Kutler were “misguided.”
“I was very critical of errors in the transcripts and I thought he had left out some important conversations,” Mr. Hughes said of Mr. Kutler’s book, “but they are entirely honest and predictable mistakes that anyone who would try to make a transcript from extremely difficult tapes could make.”
Also left out of Mr. Kutler’s book is a 35-minute conversation from March 17, 1973, in which Mr. Dean and Nixon discuss the vulnerabilities of various administration officials. Mr. Dean adds himself to the list.
Nixon: “You? Why?”
Dean: “Well, because I’ve been all over this thing like a blanket.”
To some ears, the most dramatic section not included in “Abuse of Power” is a conversation in the Oval Office from March 20, 1973, among Nixon, Mr. Dean and Richard Moore, a White House adviser, as they tap out a possible public statement on a manual typewriter.
In it, Mr. Dean refers to a meeting with G. Gordon Liddy, who planned the break-in, during which establishing an intelligence operation for the president’s 1972 re-election committee was discussed.
Nixon replies, “I’d be inclined just to knock that out. I’d just say there were limited problems involving campaign law compliance. And then I would——then I would say never at any time were there any discussions that had anything to do with intelligence gathering operations ——on the order of something like that.”
Mr. Dean says, “I see what you mean.”
Mr. Graboske noted, “You can hear the typewriter clacking away.”
Mr. Kutler’s critics include Mr. Klingman and Ms. Hoff, as well as the authors Len Colodny and Russ Baker, whose books about Watergate have advanced controversial conspiracy theories involving Mr. Dean. They all argue that Mr. Kutler was protecting Mr. Dean, his friend, and avoiding having to revise his previously published accounts of Watergate.
Mr. Dean, now an author and commentator, said in a telephone interview from Washington that the accusers are part of a fringe group of revisionists.
“It’s amazing these guys have the credibility to be covered,” he said. “Hopefully the American Historical Association can figure out fact from fiction, and Klingman doesn’t represent fact.”
Without going into a point-by-point rebuttal, Mr. Kutler said that at the time he prepared the book, his overriding priority was to look for evidence of the president’s guilt: “My concern in 1996 was to see what Richard Nixon had to say.” He added that he is now friends with Mr. Dean but was not at the start of his work on the tapes.
Another well-known presidential historian, Herbert S. Parmet, who wrote a biography of Nixon, said he was not certain the disparities were that important: “I’m not convinced that it does all that much to change the history.”
There are no official government transcripts. These tapes from 1973 were released as the result of a lawsuit in the 1990s by Mr. Dean against Mr. Colodny and excerpts can be heard at nytimes.com/arts. The National Archives and Records Administration is releasing the entire 3,700-plus hours of recordings in chronological order; they are now up to December 1972. One archives estimate figured it takes 100 hours of staff time to process a single hour of tape.
In the end, Ms. Hoff of Montana State said, the dispute underscores the importance of an official, comprehensive record: “If there is this kind of distortion of that one crucial week, it does raise the question of what else is missing in the transcripts.”
www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/washington/01kutler.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all