the latest installment of Nixon White House tapes shows how right Bill Clinton was, in his lachrymose funeral speech for the nation's 37th president, to insist that we look at the whole man and the whole life. From top to bottom, beginning to end, Nixon was scum, through and through. Even by our degraded standards for professional politicians, he managed to be both howlingly empty and screamingly foul. Even his choice of associates tells you everything you need to know -- about both them and him. Henry Kissinger, who sat with a crap-eating smirk on his face through Nixon's disgusting diatribes against the Jews (there are several of these charming intimacies in the new tapes), touched new lows of toadyism when he said, on April 17, l973:

"You have saved this country, Mr. President. The history books will show that, when no one will know what Watergate means."

Kissinger's second career as a deep thinking Establishment pundit probably began at that very moment.

Stanley Kutler, whose previous book, "The Wars of Watergate," is still the best general history of the subject, has performed two kinds of service to the American public with his latest work, "Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes" (Free Press). First, while researching and reporting, he continued to sue Nixon's gatekeepers and the National Archives for the right of public access to the tapes. Second, he has edited and arranged the resulting transcripts in a manner both concise and scholarly.

Apart from revealing the depth of Nixon's villainy, Kutler has also forced the mainstream press for the first time to pay some attention to a figure I began tracking in the Nation more than 10 years ago ("The Greek Key To Watergate," May 31, 1986). His name is Tom Pappas, a Hellenic tycoon who acted as a front man for the vicious military junta that ruled his unhappy country in the 1960s. Pappas' name turns up at each stage of the Watergate conspiracy. He played a part in the original fund-raising scams of the Nixon gang. His actions drew the attention of the Democratic National Committee. He was aware of the "third-rate" burglary. He provided the crucial cash to buy the silence of E. Howard Hunt and the other break-in artists. The new tapes show Pappas' footprints throughout.

To recapitulate: In 1968, Pappas delivered $549,000 in cash to the Nixon campaign. The money came from the KYP, the Greek intelligence service. Since the KYP was at the time a wholly subsidized arm of Langley, Va., United States law was being broken in two outrageous ways -- the supplying of campaign funds by a foreign dictatorship and the recycling of U.S. intelligence money into America's own electoral process. My friend and colleague Elias P. Demetracopoulos, an anti-fascist Greek journalist, had laid the essential facts before Larry O'Brien, chairman of the DNC. O'Brien had publicly demanded an explanation of the Pappas connection to the Nixon-Agnew campaign. How much the DNC knew of the Pappas connection might well have been a question on the minds of the Watergate burglars, whose boss, Charles Colson, had been bugging the Demetracopoulos telephone as well.

On June 20, 1972, the day of the legendary 18-and-a-half-minute erasure and two days after the break-in itself, the new tapes reveal, Nixon said to Haldeman, "My God, the committee isn't worth bugging in my opinion. That's my public line." Haldeman replies: "Except for this financial thing. They thought they had something going on that." Nixon says, "Yes, I suppose."

According to the tapes, on Jan. 3, 1973, the two were conversing again and Nixon asked, "What the Christ was he (Charles Colson) looking for?" Haldeman answers: "They were looking for stuff on two things. One, on financial."

On March 2, Haldeman told Nixon that White House counsel John Dean and Attorney General John Mitchell are getting money for the burglars from Pappas, that Pappas has the great advantage of dealing in cash and in return Pappas wants the retention of U.S. Ambassador Henry Tasca in Athens. The new tapes have Nixon ordering Tasca kept at his post and a few days later receiving Pappas in the Oval Office. Sounding like a cheap capo, Nixon tells Pappas: "I want you to know what I was mentioning the other night. I am aware of what you're doing to help out on some of these things that Maurie's (Maurice Stans) people and others are involved in. I won't say anything further, but it's very seldom you find a friend like that, believe me."

A little later, Nixon apparently took fright at the rather indiscreet way he had expressed his appreciation to Pappas. According to a May 23, 1973, tape, he told his confidante and secretary, Rose Mary Woods:

"Good old Tom Pappas, as you probably know or heard, if you haven't already heard, it is true, helped at Mitchell's request fund-raising for some of the defendants ... He came up to see me on March 7, Pappas did. Pappas came to see me about the ambassador to Greece, that he wanted to -- he wanted to keep Henry Tasca there. We did not discuss Watergate at that point. It's very important that he remember that."

Nixon's worry on this point goes on for paragraphs. He thought everyone was as ratlike as he was. On June 6, not having received the reassurance he desired from Pappas, he's nagging poor old Rose Mary again:

"But I just want to be damned sure that Pappas, Jesus, doesn't get implicated in this damn thing, see. And of course I don't want to have anything indicating that I was thanking him for raising money for the Watergate defendants."

We still do not know what the Watergate burglars had been told to look for, except that it was "financial stuff." And we still do not know what was on the deliberately erased section of the tape of June 20, 1972. Haldeman's memoirs hint that it had to do with the domestic politicization of the CIA. That it may have been the "Greek connection" is suggested by the fact that it touches the Watergate story at all these points, and that its mere mention was enough to make Richard Nixon, the man who had overcome at least "6 Crises" in his bottom-feeding political career, babble with nerves.
SALON | Nov. 10, 1997

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.

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