WATERGATE AT 25: FACTS FADING AWAY.

Byline: Francis X. Clines The New York Times

On the 25th anniversary of Watergate, G. Gordon Liddy, a felonious conspirator in that historic scandal, took a commercial break on his radio talk show Tuesday and was immediately enveloped in audience applause and cheers, demonstrating once more that there is little dishonor without profit in this city.

``Another 25 years and nobody will have a clue about it,'' Liddy contended boldly, happily of the infamous burglary that undid the Nixon administration.

He celebrated the anniversary with a rousing broadcast, heaping blame for the Watergate crisis of corruption not on the disgraced President Nixon, but on the White House counsel, John Dean III, who ultimately helped break open the stunning West Wing conspiracy to undermine the 1972 election process.

``I'm thrilled, feel like I'm a part of history,'' said Ken Rubin, an advertising executive from Cincinnati who checked into the Howard Johnson Premier hotel used by the burglars 25 years ago, only to find Liddy broadcasting live from the lobby with an adoring claque arrayed before his microphone, relishing his reworking of infamy.

Across town, some of the surviving principals who drove Nixon and his conspirators from office could only rue Liddy's resilience in public life and hope the well-documented and taped facts of the Watergate scandal do not fade entirely before generations to come.

``How quickly the past recedes,'' said Elliot Richardson. He had resigned as Nixon's attorney general rather than fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor delving into the White House cover-up of the break-in at Democratic headquarters by Liddy and other agents of the Nixon re-election campaign.

`Another myth'

``Only in America,'' said Sam Dash, chief counsel for the Senate Watergate committee, of the Liddy radio show. And of Liddy's effort to portray himself as heroically tight-lipped in going to prison as an overseer of the Watergate debacle, Dash's response was: ``Another myth.

``When he kept his mouth shut, he had been paid,'' Dash said. ``It had nothing to do with courage.''

And Cox, slow moving, hard of hearing, but sharp in recollecting the lesson of Watergate, paid as much attention to the present moment as to the old scandal. He pointedly warned that modern campaigning's ``evil of soft money'' could prove to be as dangerous and pervasive in its own way as Watergate.

The legacy of Watergate in politics is not ``enduring cynicism about government,'' Cox insisted. ``The present cynicism has much more to do with the system of election finances and countless instances of political gimmicks and political posturing on Capitol Hill,'' he declared, finding Congress too well rewarded under the current campaign law to have the will to change it.

As Liddy was broadcasting revisionist entertainment about Watergate, Cox, Richardson and Dash joined forces with Common Cause, the nonprofit reform lobby, to call for stronger laws against the threat of government corruption they find looming in the growth of big-money politics.

In the process, they decried the repeated use of the ``-gate'' suffix in any and all of the accusations and suspicions of modern politics. There has been no scandal close to the self-inflicted demise of Nixon, they contended.

``Before Watergate and after Watergate, there is no comparison to Watergate,'' Dash said. Of the Whitewater inquiry afflicting the Clinton administration, Dash said that, thus far, ``it never never came close to the danger and threat to our constitutional government'' posed by the Watergate conspiracy.

`Political sleaze'

Richardson said Whitewater was ``characteristic of political sleaze, certainly,'' but questioned whether it deserved the naming of a special prosecutor, because the 10-year-old Arkansas events do not touch on Clinton's responsibilities as president.

While the Watergate veterans beat the reform drum, Liddy was waxing triumphalist at his microphone, delighting partisans in the Ho-Jo lobby. At his back loomed the familiar crenelations of the Watergate office and hotel directly across the street.

Six floors above Liddy, Mohammed M. Ishan Jr., an executive of the Premier hotel, proudly displayed Room 723, where the Watergate conspirators kept a nefarious lookout on June 17, 1972, on the break-in at the Democratic campaign headquarters in the Watergate.

``I put together the concept,'' Ishan explained of the newly designated $200-a-night suite known as the Watergate Room. It is furnished with ``Nixon collectibles'' ranging from campaign buttons and ``Nixon's the One!'' posters to screaming resignation headlines and a telescope aimed at the Watergate office across the way.

Listening to Nixon

A guest can even don an Air Force One jacket, pop in a copy of White House tapes regarding Watergate and listen to various Nixonian mutterings and schemings. (``On the other hand, maybe we're not so smart,'' Nixon once allowed in muddy intonations amid the folly of his self-recording system. The president also was taped describing Liddy as ``nuts.'')

``People kept asking about the lookouts' room, so I figured, wow, why not build something around it to show America we really want to preserve this political history,'' said Ishan, a marketing strategist. ``We have over 195 reservations for this room. People are responding tremendously. Last night we had four busloads of tourists from China crowding in here.''

Down in the lobby, Liddy reached another commercial break, drawing laughter as he cast aspersions on the veracity and sexual potency of John Dean. ``That's it for this hour,'' the Watergate burglar bid contentedly to his public.

Upstairs, Ishan beamed in Room 723 at the legacy of Watergate. A copy of Nixon's nobly worded resignation speech lay on the desk in ludicrous juxtaposition to a display of Liddy's break-in paraphernalia. ``May God's grace be with you in all the days ahead,'' read the fallen president's parting hope.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: (Color) Associated Press

G. Gordon Liddy, ex-counsel to the financial arm of the Nixon re-election campaign, broadcasts his radio show Tuesday from the hotel facing the Watergate complex.