Nixon was Democrat's kind of Republican. (Commentary).

THE historian Alonzo Hamby once opened 3 an essay about Richard Nixon by asking, "Why did we hate him so?" Hamby never found a satisfactory answer, and neither have I.

Hamby was writing not only as a historian but also as a liberal Democrat, and his point was that if you placed Watergate to one side -- the vilification of Nixon pre-dated the scandals, after all -- Nixon's presidency should appear more congenial to liberals than conservatives.

Nixon abolished the draft, proposed a guaranteed income, instituted the first federal affirmative-action quotas, supported school busing for racial balance, founded the Environmental Protection Agency and vastly expanded the federal government's responsibility for workplace and consumer-product safety. His proposal for national health insurance was more radical than Hillary Clinton's. His wage and price controls were the most ambitious manipulation of the marketplace by government in peacetime history.

He hugged Mao and Brezhnev with equal passion. He abandoned containment of the Soviet Union for a more conciliatory policy of detente. He opened up communist China to the West, and vice versa.

Richard Nixon: a Democrat's dream president.

Let's go to the audio tape

This isn't entirely fair, of course -- not to Democrats and not to Nixon. Hamby's question is hard to dismiss, though, especially as the nation marks the 89th birthday of the 38th president.

I myself celebrated a bit early this year, with a drive out to Archives II, a steel-and-glass outpost of the National Archives along a dreary stretch of suburban roadway in College Park, Md. There rests the entire material record of the Nixon administration: 46 million pages of documents, 500,000 photographs and 3,700 hours of the famous secret tapes that proved Nixon's undoing.

I came to hear the tapes. After the initial release in 1980 of 12 hours of Watergate-related recordings, the remainder is slowly being disgorged to the public according to a 1996 settlement between Nixon's estate and the Archives. AU 3,700 hours -- minus classified and purely private conversations -- are scheduled for release by 2005. For now, 1,284 hours are available.

I avoided the greatest hits; most are downloadable from various Web sites anyway. I wanted to wade in at random, to glimpse a Nixon as yet unexposed to history. From a gray archive box I plucked a recently released Oval Office tape recorded April 9, 1971.

Nixon's morning that day was devoted to a dull briefing from his Treasury secretary, just back from a Far East trip.

Expletives still deleted

In the cavernous Oval Office you can hear only grunts from Nixon as the secretary drones on -- until the subject of the State Department comes up (I will paraphrase some of the president's language.)

"I'll tell you, most of 'em over at State" -- Nixon's voice rises --"they went to these Eastern (gosh darn) Ivy League schools, and if you talk to these little (illegitimate children), you'll find they are not pro-American, they're not pro-business."

In time the Treasury secretary leaves, and the president is briefed by members of his National Arts Council, who are preparing to appoint a board of trustees for the Hirschorn Museum, soon to be built on the National Mall, not far from the White House.

"Now tell me," Nixon says, "is this going to be some of that, that modem art?" The word "modern" drips with poison. "I don't want this to be one of those modem (gosh darn) horrible buildings. I will not have the mall disgraced with one of those horrible (gosh darn) atrocities."

He surveys the proposed list of trustees. "Well, first, let's get all these Easterners off of here. (Illegitimate children). I don't want to expose the presidency to a bunch of jerks."

Soon he softens. "(Heck), I wash my hands of the (darn) thing. Just so long as I don't have to look at it out this window."

This is a tape, I stress, plucked at random, but it contains eruptions of the purest Nixon.

About elementary school arts programs: "Good for 'em. Otherwise they'll be sitting in front of their (gosh darn) televisions, chewing their (gosh darn) bubble gum."

About movies: "People are sick of the weird stuff they're getting from Hollywood and this" -- the poison again -- "this national intelligentsia."

I was chuckling when it hit me -- the answer to Hamby's question: They hated him because he hated them. The ill feeling between Nixon and his enemies transcended the puny questions of domestic or foreign policy; it went to the very heart of cultural disposition. Culture and class override politics and policy, always.

As to who hated whom first -- that's a chicken-and-egg question we will leave unaddressed for the moment, as we wish the old man's ghost a happy birthday, despite everything.

Andrew Ferguson is a columnist with Bloomberg News.