What the Media Have Neglected to Point Out Joan Hoff is the director of the Contemporary History Institute at Ohio University, where she is a professor of history. To respond to this article click here and send us an e mail. Subsequently, the National Archives, which controls the tapes, began releasing select batches every six months.
Most historians think so.
This latter aspect escaped public notice as journalists made headlines with what they asserted out of ignorance or deliberate deception were fresh insights into the nefarious ways of the Nixon administration. Yet, Nixon had mentioned this in his Memoirs , as had other Watergate participants. Thus, the distinct impression was conveyed that such criminal action had actually taken place when, in fact, some of Nixon's advisers had at the time pointed out the futility of taking any action against Brookings at the very time when Pat Buchanan and Charles Colson, the originator of this cockamamie fire bomb plot, were urging illegal activities. Also ignored in the lack of collective memory that characterizes the re-reporting of the White House conversations about Brookings is that they occurred in the immediate wake of the publication of the Pentagon Papers in June 1971. Nixon had been cajoled by Henry Kissinger to take the strongest possible action first to try to prevent their publication and then to take punitive action against Daniel Ellsberg, a former student and academic colleague of Kissinger's at Harvard, and others involving in this leaking of classified information about the military and diplomatic conduct in Vietnam through the Johnson administration.