Dick is back in the news as there is about to be a exhibition about him and the Nixon supporters (we are all geriatric at best and I am NOT a supporter trust me) are not happy. Read about it here.
I have no issue, nor did I then although the technology to voice accentuate recording - well I knew it from Music Theory lab at Michigan State - was cutting edge..that means the recorder only records if there is sound way back then....sound actually turned it on. Nixon's tapes, it turns out, just ran and ran whenever he was in the oval office with people.
As an historian this is primary source material. It is what it is not what the next person writes about it...primary (first or origination) source. It is gold. The image isn't pretty, in fact, the image is horrible. to the American people, after years of a sheltered view of presidents, of a gentleman's club of sorts that covered up Kennedy the cad, Eisenhower the golfer and health risk...well anything that a gentleman wouldn't talk about never got reported, this Nixon stuff in full blown press was really something....I can remember Lexington Kentucky, a bastion of (at that time) racism, republicanism, and above all southern propriety, coming to a standstill during the hearings...not a car on the streets so to speak..as we all watched this unfold. I remember Fran Nichols, a keeper of the southern flame, calling me up on another matter and absolutely crazed that Mr. Nixon would have used the "f" word in the Oval Office. She really really really was appalled.
Don't rewrite or blurr history. We can take it.