I’m obsessed with Richard Nixon. He’s the wonk’s president – the political artist who knew how to manipulate voters and articulate their deepest hopes and hates. He towered over American politics for three decades, as a McCarthyite Vice President in the 1950s, the voice of the Silent Majority in the 1960s and the symbol of bureaucratic corruption in the 1970s. He attracts people who see politics as a game worth winning; he repels dreamers and losers. At the last CPAC I went to, I bought and wore a Nixon ’72 button.  Several young Tea Party hotheads told me to take it off. Dan Hannan didn't look too impressed, either.

At the heart of Nixonism was a blend of idealism and realism. That was reflected in his foreign policy. He wanted world peace, but Nixon thought he had to use maximum force in Vietnam to achieve it. Most of all, he always hoped to build a conservative public service ethos that would appeal to the young (see this hopeful 1968 ad). Ironically, his involvement in the break in at the Watergate Hotel (site of the 1972 Democratic Party’s headquarters) destroyed his reputation and forever damaged public confidence in government. It might seem obvious, but that's really not how Tricky Dick would have wanted it.

The narrative of the Watergate scandal needs challenging, if only to respect the memory of man who deserves to be remembered for more than just corruption. And the narrative does have holes. Orthodoxy says that after he narrowly won election in 1968, Richard Nixon decided to use all the power of the imperial presidency to smash his liberal opponents and win re-election in 1972. He used police state tactics to destroy the antiwar movement, covered the White House in bugs, employed dirty tricks to undermine his Democratic opponent and burgled the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg to dig up dirt on the man who leaked papers that displayed the full mendacity of the Vietnam War project. In June 1972, Nixon ordered a break in at the Watergate Hotel that was presumably a fishing expedition to see what the Democrats had by way of intel. The thieves were caught and the administration’s crimes were investigated by a Senate committee chaired by Sam Ervin. It found evidence of a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Rather than face impeachment, Nixon resigned the presidency and took his incriminating Watergate tapes with him.

In a major feature in the Independent last week, Woodward and Bernstein – the Washington Post reporters credited with breaking this story - increased the list of Nixon’s crimes to include racism, silencing the free press, subverting democracy and rewriting history. The irony is that in trying to prove that they brought down an evil genius, Woodward and Bernstein make Nixon sound far more competent and Machiavellian than he really was. It begs the question, if Dicky was this tricky, how did he get undone by a “third-rate burglary?”

Based on what we do know (and, crucially, we lack a lot of evidence for Woodward and Bernstein’s allegations – be they true or false) here are a few corrections to this narrative.

1. The bugging system wasn’t as bizarre as it sounds. Nixon got the idea of taping what went on in the White House from Lyndon Johnson. The idea wasn’t to spy on his staff (although it had that effect) but to provide an accurate historical record of what went on during Nixon’s time in office. Historians are secretly glad he did it, because they leave a remarkably unedited and honest account of White House life.

2. Nixon’s dirty tricks were nothing unusual. Consider that in 1960 the Democrats almost certainly cooked up enough votes in Illinois and Texas to steal that year’s Presidential election. Nixon’s staff saw dirty tricks as a natural part of the “game” of politics, and when they made a fearsome defence of them before the Ervin committee the issue was dropped.

3. We can’t prove that Nixon had anything to do with the Ellsberg burglary. What we do know is that he actually stood to profit from the publication of Ellsberg’s papers, because they exposed the inept decision making of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

4. Nixon did wage a war against the antiwar movement, and that was probably no bad thing. The country was close to civil war and the antiwar folks were turning violent: From September 1969 to May 1970, there was at least one bomb threat in America every day. On May 9, 100,000 demonstrators occupied Washington DC. They slashed tires and started fires; nearly 12,000 were arrested in the largest mass arrest in US history. But what brought this anarchy to an end wasn’t the intense surveillance campaign that Nixon authorised, it was his decision to end the draft. As the rate of body bags returning to the US from Vietnam dropped, interest in the antiwar movement petered out. It was basically a spent force by 1972.

5. We have no evidence that Nixon ordered the Watergate burglary or knew anything about it. It is true that we have a recording of him asking an aide to tell the CIA to advise the FBI to drop its investigation. This is the so-called “smoking gun” tape, and it certainly suggests that Nixon tried to pervert the course of justice. The CIA and the FBI declined to accept this request (indeed one of Nixon’s problems was that justice officials would consistently ignore his demands). Nixon did not pursue the idea any further. Nonetheless, this is the one crime on which we can definitely nail him, and it’s the crime over which he was urged to resign by his own staff.

6. Nixon was terrible at covering things up. If Nixon was truly the grand conspirator that Woodward and Bernstein portray him to be, he wouldn’t have made so many mistakes. He failed to destroy the tapes, he (albeit reluctantly) allowed transcripts to be printed that showed him in all his verbal ugliness, he relied too heavily on the loyalty of Senate friends and he failed to use the military or CIA to defend himself in the way that his more paranoid opponents feared. What he did try to do was continue to be a good President. In the midst of the Watergate crisis, he helped prevent World War III starting in the Middle East.

7. The Watergate hearings were a very partisan affair. Historically, that’s always been the case with impeachment processes (consider how Bill Clinton was hounded by the Republican Congress). In this instance, the partisanship started when Democrats on the Judiciary Committee decided to expand the grounds of impeachment from something related to criminal charges to what they dubbed “a constitutional safety valve” – essentially a wide-ranging Congressional judgment on the ethics of an incumbent president. Hence, the committee decided to investigate the conduct of foreign policy as well as internal security. It is true that, over time, partisanship broke down as the administration’s crimes became obvious. But be in no doubt: for some in Congress this was a chance to bring down a Republican who they never liked.

Finally, just how non-partisan were Woodward and Bernstein? The Washington Post was effectively a Democrat newspaper; it was published by Katharine Graham, who was an avid New Deal Democrat and friend to both the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson. Aside from the liberalism of much of the Post staff, Russ Baker, author of Family Secrets, claims that Woodward himself was an Agency man. Baker’s story reads like a lot of conspiracy minded foolishness. But he has a fair beef with Woodward that, far from being an anti-establishment liberal, the journalist has used his credentials and access to write books that tend to be sympathetic towards the Agency or the US military complex. He’s not quite the idealist his Watergate endeavours suggest.

One way of seeing Watergate is an alignment of anti-Nixon forces in politics and the press that conspired to oust a man who had proven unreliable. Or, even worse, rather too good at his job. Although Nixon’s crimes were real, his greatest crime in the eyes of many of his opponents was that he had brought peace to Vietnam, went to China, stolen power from the FBI and CIA, broken the antiwar Left and won re-election. Thanks to Watergate, however, he’ll be forever known for that third-rate burglary. That’s not fair.

It’s a dull grey June here in Los Angeles. Mercury is in retrograde, everything is going wrong. I failed my driving test on Monday for a (record breaking?) seventh time. I didn’t even make it out of the parking lot. Within five seconds of pulling away from the DMV, a truck drove into the side of the car. The examiner was ruder than necessary. I sucked up the abuse for a good five minutes before I lost my cool and said: “The only reason why I couldn’t see the truck, madam, was because your enormous gut was blocking the view.” That was harsh but true. I rode home with my driving instructor in an angry, embarrassed silence. My chauvinist, fatist outburst means I can never return to the Hollywood DMV again. I’ve officially given up trying to drive anyway. I am to spend the rest of my life on buses or on foot, like some juvenile environmentalist.

I spent some time in New York last week. Manhattan is fantastic for underground bars and seedy places that still mix Negronis. But above ground it was stifling hot, with a watery jungle heat that turned every afternoon into a warm bath. My friend, El, lives in a decayed old block in the West Village with marble floors and peeling paint. She described coming home one night to find a water beetle the size of her fist asleep on the bathroom floor. She was too drunk to be frightened, so she gently cupped it in her hands and slipped it back down the plug hole. We spent hours sitting by the air conditioning; watched a few South Parks, had a few laughs.

I was lucky to break out for an afternoon to interview the actor Robert Vaughn at his house in Connecticut. Get out of New York and you are suddenly in New England proper. The temperature dropped, the grey asphalt gave way to green woodland. For miles and miles my train chugged through tiny villages called Hobart’s Corner or Widdlefield St. Martin. I had to get out at something unpronounceable beginning with “K” and take a cab another thirty minutes into the woods. How wonderful it was to see landscape that was made green by God rather than by the Los Angeles Municipal Sprinkler System! How nice to smell something other than petrol and weed!

I arrived early and strolled up the drive in a pale blue jacket and bowtie. Mrs. Robert Vaughn spotted me from the kitchen window and thought I was a salesman. She sent her husband out to accost me.
“Can I help you?” he asked from the porch. He couldn’t hear my reply and shouted back, “We don’t want anything today thank you.”
“I’m here to interview you,” I said. “I’m early.” He smiled and clasped my hand and led me into the house.
His wife’s voice echoed from the kitchen: “Why have you let him in, Robert? We don’t want to buy anything.”
“He’s my guest, honey,” said Robert.
“Is he religious? Is he a Mormon?” she replied, apparently too deaf to understand.
“No, it’s my guest,” Robert repeated, a little louder this time.
“Why do you let these people in? Can’t you tell him you’re a Presbyterian?”
“Please excuse me,” said Robert, and he disappeared into the kitchen.

That left me to do what I always do when alone in famous people’s houses: I ran round the room checking out every book, antique, and photo possible. A couple of surprises on the bookshelves, including a book by Glen Beck. But it was the photos that really caught my eye.

These past few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time discussing great, dead men. Many of them were framed on Robert Vaughn’s wall, shaking the actor’s hand and looking just as star-struck as he. Their politics is immaterial; their character is what still leaps off the wall forty years hence. Their names have come up time and time again in interviews, usually as sources of inspiration. And I wondered, as I later nursed my coke and listened to Robert Vaughn expound upon the origins of the Vietnam War, where have all the good men gone?

This week has been an uninspiring one for politics junkies. Newt Gingrich’s campaign collapsed under the weight of his own impossibility. Anthony Weiner admitted to sending women pictures of his genitalia. Sarah Palin couldn’t identify who Paul Revere was. The Republican field looks wide open only because the current options are so poor. “Why don’t you write something positive about Ron Paul?” a friend asked today. The answer: because he can’t and won’t win, and my editor would rightly be angry if I wasted copy pushing an unsellable product. The good guys are all at 2 percent, the frontrunners are largely goof-offs. Barack Obama is no better. He’s worse than awful because he once looked quite good. Now he’s little more than the Bore-in-Chief. [O how my toes curl whenever he opens his mouth! I have been insulted by professionals in my time as a student and an academic. I am trained to spot the scornful look of a “superior intellect” as it spies a lesser being handing his essay in late. It’s the same look Obama gets when someone tells him he might be wrong about something. The man is the barbed boredom of the academy personified.]

Cast your imagination back to 1968 and survey the talent on display on Robert Vaughn’s walls: Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, Gene McCarthy, Ted Kennedy, George Romney, and Ronald Reagan. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in a hotel in Memphis; Bobby Kennedy was murdered in a parlor in LA. William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal debated police violence during the Chicago convention. Norman Mailer and Pat Buchanan watched the chaos from a hotel balcony. The politicians of that age were flawed men, no doubt. But they had eloquence and wit that is sorely lacking today. They had an aura of the epic – like they carried the weight of history on their shoulders. All of these men damn-well knew who Paul Revere was. Presumably, none of them mailed photographs of their wieners to young ladies they had never even met.

Perhaps interesting times produced interesting leaders. But today is interesting too. Indeed many of the issues of ’68 are germane – an unpopular war, a poor economy, a sense of decline. Perhaps those men were moral weaklings and the sympathies of the establishment press only made them look good. There’s something to that argument, after all biographers have alleged that even Martin Luther King Jr. was unfaithful to his wife. But I could take Bobby Kennedy’s dirty tricks and wandering eye in exchange for a little of his compassion for the poor and his ability to silence a crowd of thousands with a few word of Aeschylus.

Last month was the centenary of Hubert Humphrey’s birth. Humphrey was ridiculed by many formidable people during his lifetime. He often seemed like the weakest of the men I listed above. The right thought he was a spokesman for outdated ideas, the left saw him as a shallow careerist. To Hunter S. Thompson he was the Great Windbag – “Martin Bormann in Drag”. Had I lived in 1968, I might have hated him for his refusal to oppose Johnson’s policy in Vietnam. Now, we can look back on Hube and sigh wistfully for a “better-man-than-I”. It was Humphrey who pushed through the Civil Rights plank at the 1948 Democratic Convention, who kept up the momentum for the Great Society in the 1960s, and who tried to commit the Democratic Party to a full employment economy in the 1970s. He was a real person – gabbing on in his endless, joyful way about peace and jobs and a chicken-in-every-pot. In the black-and-white photos on the wall, you can smell the cigarettes of the union label heavies standing behind him and feel the sweat of the crowds of poor-folk crowded round to hear Hube’s gibble-gabble about ideas and ideals that seem hopeless dreams now.

Robert Vaughn gave me a ride back to the station in his black limousine. “You may recognize the car,” he said. “It’s the exact same model that President Kennedy was shot in.” I trembled appreciatively. “Of course, it’s too expensive to park. So you’ll have to jump out when I shout.” He swerved into the station beginning with “K” and I leapt onto the train and hurtled back home to the hot, grey world of the here and now.