But the overwhelming impression left by listening to the tapes is of a man who is not clever, who is all too human—who rambles, gets lost, changes his mind, knows too much and too little all at once.55 Nixon the brilliant political analyst is nowhere to be seen. His judgment is clouded by human frailty. One moment he sounds cold-blooded and ruthless. The next moment he is naïvely idealistic, prattling on about the lesson of the Hiss case as related in Six Crises—the cover-up is worse than the crime!—while plunging into an ever-deeper cover-up. Perhaps he was being cynical and manipulative. Or
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