For sheer rottenness, though, none of Summers' revelations can touch his new information that Nixon was probably involved in a scheme to derail the Paris peace talks in 1968. In my opinion, no revelation about anyone who has ever held public office in this country equals it. Nixon's plot to keep South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu away from the talks has been rumored for years. LBJ had FBI information on it which he passed on to Humphrey in the days leading up to the 1968 election. Fearing that it wasn't solid enough, and that it would look like a last minute attempt to sway the election, Humphrey backed off.

That must be counted among the most tragic miscalculations in American politics because only a fool would doubt Nixon's involvement. Some writers, most recently Robert Dallek in the second volume of his LBJ biography, have made strong cases for it. Summers' is the strongest, not just because of recently declassified FBI files but because of his interviews with Anna Chennault, a well-known lobbyist for the Nationalist Chinese. Nixon and John Mitchell instructed Chennault to tell Thieu he should hold off on joining the talks to help Nixon get elected to the presidency, after which he would get a much better deal. Nixon's public stance during all this was one of committed patriot, refusing to make political capital by commenting on Vietnam during LBJ's announced bombing halt which, Johnson hoped, could lead to a break in the war.

Of course, there were plenty of reasons for Thieu to back out of the peace talks even without Nixon's encouragement -- most of all, the fear of his government's collapse. And even had he agreed to the talks, there was no guarantee that the talks would have led to an end to the war or even to a Humphrey victory. All that is irrelevant. What is relevant is that Nixon, as a private citizen, conspired to affect the course of American foreign policy by sabotaging peace talks that could have prevented the deaths of thousands of American soldiers (not to mention hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, civilians as well as combatants). In other words, Nixon committed treason. And it's a pity -- for the nation as well as for the families of the soldiers who were killed during the four subsequent years of the war (nearly a third of all Americans killed in Vietnam) that the son of a bitch didn't swing for it.

This is a revelation that diminishes even Watergate. And it may lead someday to the book that has yet to be written about the farcical notion of Nixon as a master of foreign policy. This was Nixon's foreign policy: prolonging Vietnam and illegally expanding it into Laos and Cambodia, not to mention his support for the Greek military junta and his almost-certain support for the CIA-backed coup that installed Pinochet in Chile. Someone may even ask what no one has asked about what is still regarded as Nixon's indisputable moment of glory: his opening of relations with China. If China has been opened to the West, why does it now routinely ignore, even refuse to consider, the complaints of Western governments?

Nixon's real legacy is the cynicism toward government that has become a mainstay of American political discourse since Watergate. Even Summers ends the book by saying "Because of what they learned at Watergate, Americans are perhaps less ready to trust blindly in their leaders ... The downside, however, is that Richard Nixon's abuses and deceptions may have led many citizens not to trust their leaders at all."

It didn't have to be so. Post-Watergate cynicism has become such an accepted part of life for more than a quarter-century now that it's easy to forget the exhilaration of Watergate itself. Mary McCarthy compared it to a national town meeting. As McCarthy wrote, "Everybody has been fully participating, and nobody, in principle, given the equality of opportunity available, is more of an expert than the next person." That's a definition of the democratic ideal, people behaving as if the fate of the republic depends on their participation.

So the cynicism that resulted is immeasurably sad. And it must be said that the press has to bear some responsibility. Watergate elevated the investigative reporter to almost mythic status, but the reporting that followed has often shown an inability to distinguish between nefarious acts that are truly newsworthy and the minutiae of everyday corruption. That's why the accusations of wife beating in Summers' book are getting the most coverage. The logical conclusion of that kind of scandalmongering is to treat Whitewater and Monicagate as if they were serious stories.

Clinton's impeachment saga was the negative image of Watergate, not only in its demonstration that the democratic process could be used to subvert the very meaning of democracy, but in the spectacle of a press corps so hungry for dirt that they failed to do their job as reporters. We have gone from the Washington Post bravely backing Woodward and Bernstein when few other press outlets cared about Watergate, to the Post's Susan Schmidt running unchecked allegations that were probably leaks from Kenneth Starr's office.

Summers trades a little bit in this with his reports of Nixon's wife beating and drug abuse. But he is blessed with a sense of proportion. He knows where the real story lies. In detailing his findings, I have perhaps given short shrift to the verifications he provides. Some of these allegations may never be nailed down beyond all doubt. But that doesn't mean that Summers is trafficking in a type of journalism he disdains, in which vague connections are offered as proof of guilt. There is a world of difference in triangulating responsibility based on chains of commands and who met with whom on what dates, on making reasonable, substantiated supposition, and spinning conspiracy yarns.

But even if Summers were an unscrupulous journalist, what could he or anyone else possibly do to defame Richard Nixon? What obscene fantasy could make Nixon's hands any more blood-stained, his mind any more a cesspool of deviousness and prejudice, his actions any more the product of conscienceless cunning? Summers' book is an example of how the revelations of investigative journalism can awaken rather than inure. It suggests that to be wary of Nixon's ability to rise again and again and again, even from the dead, is a form of patriotism. We haven't seen the last of Dick Nixon. And we should be waiting with garlic and crosses -- and most of all the stake.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"