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I have tender feelings for Nixon because everybody has warm feelings about their childhood. Actually, I didn't like the Watergate trials 'cause they interrupted 'The Munsters.'

Watergate was unique because it allowed the public to play its democratic role in expressing its outrage at the presidency. And as a result, for the first time in history a president resigned.

While he was president, it was popular to be a Nixon hater.

Indeed, it was largely the clubbiness of the Washington village press corps that let Nixon get away with Watergate and still win his landslide in 1972.

Of course a lot of the journalists hated Nixon, but they were always blown away by how smart he was.

Nixon represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to fear and despise.

After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon's tapes.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

I liked Nixon fine, but Nixon was not a partier.

Nixon had been to China. He had been to Russia doing arms negotiation. And so, he was on his way toward what happened in November, which was an electoral win with 49 states. And the sheer unnecessariness of the Watergate break-in is something that must have tormented him and his allies in all of the years that followed.