NIXON: THE SEQUEL : Harry Hunkers Down With Haldeman, Erlichman, Colson and Dick Himself

From Washington, D.C., the trip to the past takes you down Interstate 395. The National Archives occupies a splendid, monumental building in the middle of the federal city, but the Archives division that keeps, processes and occasionally releases the Nixon tapes is relegated to a warehouse district in Alexandria, Va. When, some days ago, 60 new hours of vintage Nixoniana were released to inquiring ears, one of the nation’s more demented news organizations dispatched me to spend a day with the Richard Nixon of two decades ago.

To get to him, you have to leave behind the stylish northwest Washington of beige-brick facades, each with its own postmodern pyramid. You have to pass by the Pentagon, somehow more prosaic and less ominous when seen bordered on at least two sides not by bristling arrays of exotic antennas but by acres of plain old parking lots. One is led to think of the people inside the building as being obsessed not with global chess or procurement boondoggles but with a shortcut alternative to the 90-minute commute into rural Virginia.

You’re not inside the early-’70s Oval Office yet. You have to go past an El Torito and into a warehouse row that features two industrial recycling plants--oh, man, the tapes could have become Hefty bags before Sam Ervin ever saw the red light on the camera--and a bar called the Escape (San Clemente, anyone?). You arrive at an industrial strip that features “Smitty’s Your Electrical Supply” and “National Archives” cheek-to-jowl on its menu board, and there, inside the blandest repository imaginable, sits the richest, most flamboyantly bizarre collection of recordings of Power at Play ever assembled by the hand of man.

Once, before Nixon started writing op-eds on foreign policy for the Washington Post, the release of new tapes would clog the parking lot, jam the security guard’s sign-in sheet and create a severe headphone shortage in the listening room. This time, on this first occasion of public access to the largest load of live-on-tape Nixon ever released, I had the special opening-day listening room to myself for much of the day. Just me, Bob Haldeman, John Erlichman, Chuck Colson, Howard Hunt and Dick Nixon, hunkering down together.

It’s not the evil Nixon of cartoonists’ creation that steals the spotlight here. Relish, instead, the thoughtful Nixon, speaking to a group of dairy lobbyists: “. . . Not to get into your business at all, but . . . everybody is going for gimmicks these days, you know. . . . Take, take sleep inducers. Now . . . an article in Reader’s Digest a couple of months ago in regard to sleeping pills--enormous use of them . . . But, but almost any, any, uh, person who really studies sleep will tell you probably that, that, that lacking a pill . . . which . . . has side effects . . . the best thing you can do is milk. Any kind of thing, you can just, just a glass of milk. You don’t have to talk with it or anything like that. It could be warm. It could be, uh, tepid, or it could be cold, but, uh, but it has a certain soothing effect. . . . If you get people thinking that a glass of milk is going to make them sleep, I mean, it’ll do just as well as a sleeping pill. It’s all in the head.”

How about the jocular Nixon? “Matter of fact, the room is not tapped. (Group laughter) I forgot to do that. (Laughter).”

Or savor this dialogue between the President of the United States and his domestic-affairs chief, John Erlichman:

Erlichman: Your, uh, your television sense is apparently pretty good . . . we got, uh, a narcotics show on.

President: Did you?

E: Uh, called “O’Hara--The United States Treasury,” and it had a hell of a rating its first, uh, its first time.

P: I saw it . . .

E: Is it any good? It got a . . . 28 . . . in 70 cities, uh, on its Nielson (sic) . . .

P: It was a good show. It was a, like all those things. My God, they had, uh, they had guys chasing . . . people with, uh, airplanes and all that sort of thing. I don’t think it quite worked that way, but . . . it’s fascinating.

E: Well, it’s a 13-week series, opened up.

P: Yeah.

E: Be going on now.

It’s a cross-country plane ride and a trip down I-395 into the past, and damned if they aren’t talking about show business.