Those who lived through Watergate remember that defense in all its permutations. We heard it, of course, from Nixon loyalists, and from people who thought that perhaps he had done something wrong but that he still deserved the respect of his office. And we also heard a variation of "But he is the president" from the veteran journalists who were certain that the Washington Post was making a fool of itself by placing any trust in the suspicions of two young police beat reporters named Woodward and Bernstein.

"But he is the president" survived Nixon's presidency, and it took on various new permutations over the years: "But he is a master of foreign policy," "But he is a commanding intellect," and, finally, "But he is dead." A great sick joke if it weren't such an appalling spectacle, Nixon's funeral was an extraordinary feat of posthumous ass-kissing. Not just by the cronies you'd expect -- Bob Dole, Henry Kissinger, Billy Graham -- but by Bill Clinton, flanked by his wife, who had worked on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee during Nixon's impeachment hearings. The only journalist who avoided the sickening piety that carried the day was Hunter S. Thompson. Writing in Rolling Stone, Thompson spared no one's feelings; he wrote to draw blood. His obituary for Nixon descended directly from a line of American journalism that included H.L. Mencken's obit for William Jennings Bryan, a piece whose words could have easily applied to Nixon: "a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses." Those who deigned to acknowledge Thompson's piece tut-tutted about its inappropriate tone. "After all," more than one person said to me, "the man is dead."

But is he? Will Richard Nixon ever be dead? He rose from losing the presidential election in 1960 and the California gubernatorial election in 1962. He even recovered from being the only president to resign from office, rising to the level of elder statesman, thus joining whores and ugly buildings as one of the three things that gets respectable with age. On "Saturday Night Live" Dan Aykroyd played Nixon as an impossibly oily ghoul, rising again and again, vulnerable only to a wooden stake driven through his memoirs.

We should be thankful then to the British journalist Anthony Summers, who, in his new "The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon," tramps the grave dirt down. Simply by telling us, in his prologue, who attended Nixon's funeral and who didn't, Summers ties Nixon to: huge payoffs from Howard Hughes, the laundering of the profits of a Bahamian casino, illegal campaign contributions from the likes of Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and the military junta that took over Greece in 1967, access to U.S. arms given to the Shah of Iran without the consultation of the American government, the illegal derailing of the Paris peace talks, and, of course, the host of crimes contained under the umbrella of Watergate.

Summers offers a wealth of skulduggery and deceit that, you might imagine, would keep journalists busy for weeks. But instead the advance reports on Summers' book illustrate the debased nature of what currently passes for political journalism. They have almost all focused on just one of his allegations: that Nixon beat his wife, Pat. "The most provocative charge in the book," reported the New York Times last Sunday. More provocative than Nixon's almost-certain interference with the Paris peace talks? Than his probable involvement in schemes to assassinate Castro that predated the Bay of Pigs? More provocative than the charge, confirmed by Nixon's Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, that the president was so unstable during the final days of his administration that Schlesinger instructed the Joint Chiefs of Staff not to react to any military orders from the White House unless they were first cleared with him? Even Vanity Fair, in the excerpt it ran from Summers' book, went with the section on the Paris peace talks. What kind of alternate universe are we living in, where Vanity Fair understands what the important news is better than the New York Times?

As it turns out, the wife-beating charges are the least substantiated in the book. The abuse may very well have happened, but Summers can't do better than "The doctor who treated [Mrs. Nixon], [Seymour] Hersh told the author, corroborated the story." An endnote informs us that Woodward and Bernstein also heard the story but were unable to corroborate it for inclusion in "The Final Days." Perhaps Summers simply couldn't resist relaying it, but it's certainly not his fault that the reports on "The Arrogance of Power" have barely scratched the surface of the intrigues that Summers corroborates so damningly.

The challenge facing the biographer who takes on Richard Nixon, Summers writes, is having to chart "a careful passage through a minefield of lies." There's another challenge: the unacknowledged seductiveness of Richard Nixon. That notion may sound funny to those of us who hear the name Nixon and see the familiar caricature of sweaty jowls, stooped gait, beady eyes and ski-slope nose. But Nixon, perhaps more than any other reviled figure, was always remarkably adroit at getting his observers to see him in his terms.

Nixon's hatred for the privileged Ivy League tenor of the Eastern establishment was real despite, Summers demonstrates, the fact that Nixon's own upbringing was nowhere near as deprived as he liked to paint it. But some writers have seen Nixon's feelings of class resentment sympathetically, rather than as the root of a pathology. Perhaps they have been swayed by the opening cadences of Nixon's autobiography ("I was born in the house my father built"), promising a story of greatness rising from humble origins and deliberately invoking the myth of Lincoln raised in a log cabin. Or they may be moved by the lack of affection in Nixon's family. "Can you imagine," Kissinger is quoted as saying, "what this man could have been had somebody loved him?"

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"