Nixon Dismissed Watergate As a 'republican Problem'

The voice on the tape is eerie. It is the final stretch of the 1972 elections, and in the White House, Richard Nixon is poring over the news from the campaign trail with his aide, Chuck Colson, and weighing his prospects for re-election.

"What did he say about Watergate?" Nixon's voice is heard asking. Then, when he hears that voters are far more concerned with Vietnam than the details of a break-in at the Democratic campaign headquarters at the Watergate hotel, Nixon says with evident relief. "It's mainly a Republican problem, you know."

Today's release of 78,000 new documents and some 200 hours of audio tape promises to shed new light on a presidency that remains one of the most divisive in modern American history, a generation after Nixon was forced to resign over Watergate.

The materials were released on the day that the national archives took formal control of the Nixon presidential library in California, which had previously been privately operated.

The tapes released today date from November 3-19 1972, and are steeped in Nixon's fight for re-election against his Democratic challenger, George McGovern.

Aside from strategy sessions with aides such as Mr Colson -- who went to jail for his role in the scandal - Nixon can be heard disparaging his fellow Republicans as "jackasses" and his opponent as a "prick". There is also a fawning election night phone call from Henry Kissinger, as well as a message of congratulation from Edward Heath - the only foreign leader the president spoke to on the night.

There is a lengthy dissection of how Mr McGovern's angry retort to a Republican heckler to "kiss his ass" would affect his prospects.

Some of the memos released today are also focused on politics, with a 1970 note from Roger Ailes to Nixon's chief of staff, HR Haldeman, advising Nixon that it looked unseemly to make his wife chase after him at a political event in Houston.

"From time to time he should talk to her and smile at her," the note says. "Women voters are particularly sensitive to how a man treats his wife in public."

But there are more serious discussions too of Nixon's plan to woo union members, Catholics, and white ethnic voters. The strategy gained Nixon 60% of the vote, and laid the foundation for the lasting Republican majority sought by current strategists like Karl Rove.