NEW YORK -- Former President Richard Nixon, in an excerpt of his memoirs released Sunday, described the Watergate scandal that brought down his presidency as 'worse than a crime -- it was a blunder.'
Nixon, 77, continued to assert he was the 'victim of dirty tricks,' saying it is wrong to compare the Watergate affair to other notorious government scandals such as the Teapot Dome affair and the Grant whiskey scandals.
'No one in the Nixon administration profited from Watergate,' the former president wrote in his book 'In the Arena,' excerpted in this week's Time magazine. 'No one ripped off the government, as in previous scandals.
'Wrongdoing took place, but not for personal gain,' he wrote. 'In retrospect, I would say that Watergate was one part wrongdoing, one part blundering and one part political vendetta by my enemies.'
In the book, Nixon accepted blame for making the 'inexcusable error' of asking the CIA to derail a criminal investigation of the Watergate break-in.
The former president, who resigned April 9, 1974, says he poorly handled the aftermath of the break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee, but was not responsible for many of the 'myths' of Watergate.
'In retrospect, while I was not involved in the decision to conduct the break-in, I should have set a higher standard for the conduct of the people who participated in my campaign and administration,' Nixon said.
'I should have set a moral tone that would have made such actions unthinkable. I did not,' he said. 'I played by the rules of politics as I found them.'
Adding that as a student of history, 'I should have known that leaders who do big things well must be on guard against stumbling on the little things. To paraphrase Talleyrand, Watergate was worse than a crime -- it was a blunder.'
One of the myths Nixon said he wanted to clear up was that the CIA, under his orders, tried to prevent the FBI from pursuing its criminal investigation of the June 17, 1972, break-in at the Watergate apartment complex in Washington.
Nixon said he did ask for such intervention -- because of bad advice from subordinates -- but CIA director Richard Helms and his deputy, Vernon Walters, ignored the request.
'I made the inexcusable error of following the recommendations from some members of my staff -- some of whom, I later learned, had a personal stake in covering up the facts,' Nixon wrote.
Nixon also said he wanted to set the record straight on 'the most widely believed myth ... that I ordered massive illegal wiretapping and surveillance of political opponents, members of the House and Senate, and news media reporters.'
'All of those charges were false and no evidence was presented to substantiate them,' Nixon wrote.
The former president said he paid a high personal price for his Watergate errors and at one point, after a severe illness caused by blood clots in his system, 'I could see no reason to live.' But he said he slowly recovered and was determined not to concede defeat to the 'enemies' who brought him down.
Nixon wrote that he regrets the damage done to the American political process by the Watergate affair, adding that while 'these actions were clearly illegal' they were 'not unusual' in politics.
'Over the years, I had been the victim of dirty tricks and other kinds of vicious tactics in the cut-and-thrust of political warfare,' he wrote. 'What happened in Watergate -- the facts, not the myths -- was wrong.'
