Stanley Kutler, Watergate historian who helped obtain Nixon tapes, dies

National
By Emily Langer April 8
@emilylangerWP

Stanley I. Kutler, a noted Watergate scholar who became part of the history he studied by filing a lawsuit that spurred the release, beginning in the 1990s, of hundreds of hours of President Richard M. Nixon’s secretly recorded conversations, died April 7 at a hospice in Fitchburg, Wis. He was 80.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son David Kutler.
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Defenders of Nixon faulted Dr. Kutler for the elisions he made in order to fit the sprawling conversations into a 700-page book. “What additional exculpatory material lies on the editor’s floor?” John H. Taylor, Nixon’s post-White House chief of staff, wrote in the American Spectator, describing Dr. Kutler as “dean-for-life of the Nixon-haters.”
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“I am quite convinced that had it not been for Stanley Kutler’s efforts in the 1990s, the Nixon tapes would have stayed unreviewed a lot longer,” Timothy Naftali, the first federal director of Nixon’s presidential library, said in an interview. “It is rare that a single, determined scholar can move a government to reveal materials that don’t put it in a good light,” Naftali continued. “It’s rare, and it’s a wonderful thing in a democracy.”