Alive, on tape.

Former President George Bush, in case you missed it, has decided not to write his memoirs. If he persists, he will become the first president since Woodrow Wilson not to write a book after leaving office. If we make allowances for Wilson, who was an invalid when he left the White House (and who had written voluminously before becoming president), and for William Howard Taft, who wrote dozens of judicial opinions as chief justice, Bush could become our least literary ex-president since Chester A. Arthur - for which literature, of course, should be grateful. Presidential memoirs rarely yield any insights, and now that most are ghost-written, such memoirs cannot even claim to open a window on the putative author's soul.

I was put in mind of all this upon reading Michael R. Beschloss's Taking Charge (Simon & Schuster, 1997), which contains portions of a much more valuable historical record. It is a compilation of phone conversations secretly taped by Lyndon Johnson in 1963 and 1964, a rare vantage point onto the events and personalities of the time. With the exception of Harry Truman (who starchily refused to do so), every president from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon recorded at least some of his private conversations. FDR and Dwight Eisenhower seem to have tried it only once or twice. But beginning with Kennedy and ending, of course, with Watergate, the practice became much more extensive.

Beschloss uses recordings through 1964 because those are the only Johnson tapes that have yet been transcribed, although archivists at the LBJ Library say there are literally hundreds of hours of Johnson tapes still in the vaults. Johnson meant to use them in writing his memoirs. But while Johnson later wrote about his struggles with deepening U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the maneuvering to win passage of the Civil Rights Act, the tapes present those battles as they raged, with a nuance unavailable elsewhere. One can readily understand how Nixon could regard his more extensive White House taping system as an improvement rather than an innovation.

In fact, Nixon's own tapes seem to be leaking out everywhere, slivering his reputation with a thousand small cuts. The most recently transcribed portions have been published in a book by Stanley I. Kutler, aptly named Abuse of Power (The Free Press, 1997). Better still, one can listen to the tapes themselves at the National Archives Annex in College Park, Maryland. Sitting in a spacious sky-lit library, it is possible to pop a cassette into a machine and hear the attempt to overthrow constitutional government in the United States. While Beschloss's Johnson comes across as a relentless schmoozer - the worst profanity, apparently, was reserved for those he addressed in person - the Nixon we hear is not so much a villain as petty, impotent, and tedious. He goes on and on about his role in the Alger Hiss investigation, and is forever telling aides to reread his self-aggrandizing book, Six Crises. Sometimes he erupts with a thunderclap of inarticulate cravenness, as when he berates his advisors for not staging a break-in at the Brookings Institute to loot its safe. "We are going to use any means!" he storms, adding as an almost farcical afterthought, "And have it done in a way that makes somebody else look bad."

Despite the crimes and venality that the Nixon tapes reveal - or perhaps because of them - one is tempted to call them Nixon's greatest contribution to history. For the immediacy and insight they offer, nothing in U.S. history can match them. And they provide useful perspective on current preoccupations, such as campaign finance reform: here is Nixon selling off ambassadorships (a $250,000 campaign contribution was a minimum).

All the recordings, of course, rest on the betrayal of confidences, which dampens our desire for more. Still, as habits of letter-writing and journal-keeping slacken, there is reason to regret the loss of such an unfiltered record of events. Historians have fretted for a decade that in the laptop age, drafts of speeches, dashed-off notes, and the like will be purged from government hard drives and lost to posterity. Hillary Clinton seemed appalled a few years ago when someone suggested she keep a diary, reminding her questioner how quickly it would end up subpoenaed by a congressional investigating committee. Needless to say, so far as we know, none of Nixon's successors has wiretapped the Oval Office.

The crowning irony is that Nixon fought the release of these tapes until the day he died but they will make him the most-studied president of the postwar era, and perhaps the best-understood president in history. And they will also insure that Richard Nixon will never be rehabilitated. No matter what praise will later be written, Nixon will obstruct justice daily, now and forever, on continuous loop. But he will live forever, too. It was quite a Faustian bargain. For history, perhaps, a better one than George Bush could have made with any publisher.

Mark F. Bernstein is an attorney and freelance writer who lives in Philadelphia.