Nixon

WASHINGTON -- Richard M. Nixon's heirs plan to continue his 20-year-old fight to control more than 3,000 hours of White House tapes and 150,000 pages of presidential papers, his lawyer said yesterday.DTC But legal experts said Mr. Nixon's death may speed the release of the records, which are locked away at the National Archives and have never been made available to scholars or journalists.The tapes and papers were a crucial battleground in Mr. Nixon's struggle to re-establish his reputation.

WASHINGTON -- President Richard M. Nixon considered nominating Spiro T. Agnew for the Supreme Court in late 1971 to get him out of the vice presidency, but decided he could not be confirmed, according to John W. Ehrlichman, the Nixon White House counselor convicted of conspiracy and perjury in the Watergate cover-up.The Supreme Court nomination, Mr. Ehrlichman said in a telephone interview this week with The Sun, was to induce Mr. Agnew to resign the vice presidency.That would have cleared the way for Mr. Nixon to nominate his secretary of the treasury, John B. Connally, to the post and put Mr. Connally rather than Mr. Agnew in the line of succession for the presidency.

WASHINGTON -- The National Archives released a 50,000-page grab bag of long-classified documents from President Richard M. Nixon's White House yesterday -- no smoking guns, but fascinating fragments, from a slew of favor-seeking memos by Sen. Bob Dole, Republican of Kansas, to an early draft of a plan for spying on left-wingers.Letters from Mr. Dole, some quite stern, poured into the Nixon White House, sometimes daily. They sought scores of patronage jobs for friends and constituents, political favors ranging from executive clemency to 100th-birthday telephone calls, and support for Mr. Dole's favorite causes, such as the corn-based gasoline additives made by a longtime sponsor, the agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland.

WASHINGTON -- Twenty five years after the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon on Aug. 9, 1974, the saga of the man and his downfall continue to hang over the political life of the country.Yet another movie, a comedy entitled "Dick," in which his misadventures involving the Watergate break-in and cover-up are examined once again, is about to be released.At the same time, topping the best-seller lists in the New York Times and the Washington Post is the new book by Watergate sleuth Bob Woodward entitled "Shadow."

WASHINGTON -- The just-published diaries of Nixon White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman reveal the telling saga of the rise and fall of Vice President Spiro Agnew within the Nixon administration even before his forced resignation in October 1973.Haldeman's diaries paint Agnew as a man who first won praise by President Richard Nixon as hard-knuckle point man against Vietnam War protesters, liberal critics and the news media, but then got so out of hand that Nixon wanted to dump him even before the 1972 election, in favor of John B. Connally, his Treasury secretary.

WASHINGTON -- President Richard M. Nixon considered dumping Vice President Spiro T. Agnew long before the 1972 re-election campaign and replacing him with Treasury Secretary John B. Connally, to put Connally on track for the presidency later, according to the late H. R. Haldeman, Mr. Nixon's chief of staff.Mr. Nixon, Mr. Haldeman wrote in his diaries just published posthumously, wanted to get Mr. Agnew to resign before 1972 so he could invoke the new 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which provides for a president to nominate someone to fill a vice presidential vacancy.

Some major figures from the Nixon era and where they are today:* Alger Hiss, former State Department employee accused in 1948 of providing classified information to the Soviet Union and charged with perjury during House Un-American Activities Committee hearings that made major national figure of then-Representative Nixon: Convicted in 1950, served three years in prison, re-admitted to Massachusetts bar in 1975; retired, living in New York.* Whitaker Chambers, Time magazine editor, who testified that Alger Hiss was a fellow Communist who gave him State Department secrets to pass to the Soviet Union (Nixon sided with Chambers against Hiss)

WASHINGTON--Maybe one reason it doesn't seem like 20 years since Richard Nixon resigned the presidency to avoid impeachment in the Watergate scandal is that the man, far from fading into obscurity, continued to hold the public's fascination until and even after his death 3 1/2 months ago.Even in the early years of his exile at his home in San Clemente, Nixon stories and speculations kept him in the nation's consciousness. Would he finally acknowledge his wrongdoing? Would the ignominy break him?

WASHINGTON -- "Some compassion on health and welfare issues will be useful politically as well as being right philosophically," the longtime adviser counseled Sen. Bob Dole before the Kansas Republican began his presidential campaign.But "don't let them get the impression that you are no longer tough," he quickly added."Being tough with a smile is the best posture for you."If the mixture of political positioning and philosophy -- as well as the emphasis on toughness -- sounds familiar, it should.

WASHINGTON -- Nothing comes through more clearly in the && diaries of former White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman than the respect approaching awe President Richard Nixon felt for his secretary of treasury, John B. Connally of Texas.Beyond claiming that Nixon wanted to push his vice president, Spiro Agnew, out of office in 1971 and replace him with Connally, the diaries report that Nixon had other, bold ideas about making the smooth-talking, jut-jawed Texan his successor in the presidency.