I'm spending the morning listening to a tape of the great (albeit not Nixon) biographer Fawn Brodie (Thomas Jefferson, Joseph Smith) interviewing Nixon's cousin, the equally famous novelist Jessamyn West (Friendly Persuasion), about his life in 1976.
Two grande dames: tough broads who wrote their way to literary fame in a male-dominated world, taking on and facing down their churches, families and communities along the way, eyeing each other over tea, circling warily, and inevitably succumbing to the irresistible mystery.
"There is a great play, a kind of MacBeth in his life," says West about her cousin.
When writing about "scoundrels" in fiction, the writer becomes the character, says West, and "once you become the evil man, you understand. You understand the pressures. And then you begin to forgive him....You forgive yourself."
The challenge of biography is different, she tells Brodie. "The purpose is for you to tell the story so truly that if he should be forgiven the reader will do the forgiving and if he doesn't merit it the reader will not be able to forgive."
Brodie and her husband were both stricken with fatal cancer as she worked on the book. She never really "got" Nixon. (As, interestingly, she confesses to West, she never got Joseph Smith.) Her book shows the effect, in tone and style, of illness and despair.
Brodie, though, has an interesting insight about one of the most famous Nixon mysteries: Why didn't he burn the tapes?
The key, she tells West, is that he felt the need to expose himself - "to let people know the worst as well as the best" - as a response to the guilt he felt, which was the legacy of his Quaker upbringing and his saintly mother's influence.
I'll go along with that, part of the way. There were a lot of practical political and financial reasons that he had to preserve the tapes too.
If Brodie is right and he did want to reveal himself, I'm more inclined to think that it was an act of vulnerability, not guilt: "See? See who I am? See what you've made me? Love me."
Oliver Stonish, I know, but there you are.