The Frost-Nixon interviews of 1977 were the final word on Watergate figuratively, though not literally. In 1983, Frank Gannon, a former Nixon aide who went on to work as a producer for David Letterman, recorded 30 hours of interviews with his old boss. The tapes, not erased but largely forgotten, have resurfaced on the 40th anniversary of America’s only Presidential resignation. From the Associated Press:

“The segments were culled from more than 30 hours of interviews that Nixon did with former aide Frank Gannon in 1983. The sections on Watergate aired publicly once, on CBS News, before gathering dust at the University of Georgia for more than 30 years.

‘This is as close to what anybody is going to experience to sitting down and having a beer with Nixon, sitting down with him in his living room,’ said Gannon, now a writer and historian in Washington DC.

‘Like him or not, whether you think that his resignation was a tragedy for the nation or that he got out of town one step ahead of the sheriff, he was a human being,’ he said.

Nixon, who died in 1994, had hoped that providing his own narrative would help temper America’s final judgment of him.

Perhaps with that in mind, he didn’t shy away from the tough questions, commenting on everything from the threat of impeachment to the so-called ‘smoking gun’ conversation that included evidence he participated in a Watergate cover-up.

‘This was the final blow, the final nail in the coffin. Although you don’t need another nail if you’re already in the coffin – which we were,’ Nixon said in a segment about the 23 June 1972 tape.

Nixon said when he decided to resign, he faced such strong resistance from his wife that he brought a transcript of the ‘smoking gun’ tape to a family meeting to show her how bad it was.

‘I’m a fighter, I just didn’t want to quit. Also I thought it would be an admission of guilt, which of course it was,’ he said. ‘And, also, I felt it would set a terribly bad precedent for the future.’

The tone of the tapes contrasts with the sometimes adversarial tone of the well-known series of Nixon interviews done in 1977 by British journalist David Frost.”