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Editorial

The Nixonian Whitewash, Scrubbed

The saga of the unexpurgated Richard Nixon never seems to end. A fresh supply of 78,000 documents and 11 1/2 hours of President Nixon’s secret White House tape recordings — not for those of delicate sensibilities — have just been released. This time, however, eavesdropping on more of his tragicomic conspirings is secondary to the fact that they are part of an agreement to finally legitimize the privately run, propagandistic Nixon library.

The library at Yorba Linda, Calif., has been turned over to the National Archives after serving for years as the center of bowdlerized Nixonia. The institution insulted history by peddling ludicrous whitewashings — describing the Watergate criminal conspiracy as a “coup” by Nixon’s political rivals fed by fake scoops purchased by the Woodstein investigative duo at The Washington Post.

That approach has been properly packed away as part of the price of coming clean to join the other 11 presidential libraries run according to the scholarship standards of the National Archives.

One of the early acts of President Bush and the former Republican Congress was to allow the Nixon tapes and papers to be transferred to Yorba Linda from the archives’ storage in Washington. Historians who had to sue after Watergate to get at the tapes were properly suspicious (and have hardly been comforted by the Bush administration’s Nixon-class mania for secrecy and document denial).

But Timothy Naftali, respected as an apolitical historian, has taken over at the library, promising to showcase the new tapes for the public — “the good, the bad and the ugly.” This is good news, and as Mr. Naftali delivers on this mission, the nation can relish, or not, the latest revelations. In one of these, a few days before his re-election, Mr. Nixon asked an aide, “What about Watergate?” The president was assured no one was finding out much.

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