THE FULL, FREE, AND ABSOLUTE pardon granted by President Ford, the Unelected, unto former President Nixon, the Resigned, far from putting Watergate behind has made a close examination of the ethics, behavior, and language of those in political power in the United States all the more imperative. At the risk of being accused of picking the carcass and drawing and quartering after the hanging (it is instructive to note the consistent use of the same slogans by those who defend Nixon) this article is going to focus, in some depth, on the language of the Presidential Tapes as recorded by the White House and printed as The Presidential Tapes (New York: A Dell Book, 1974). As in some crude horror movie of the 1930's, the invention that is supposed to bring power to its user ultimately brings about his downfall, but not before countless innocents have been made to suffer. The audio tape recorders used by the White House staff to record telephone calls and conversations were supposed to leave a record of presidential activities and decision making for posterity to cherish. Self-assured of his certain place in history, Richard Milhous Nixon must have comforted hinlself with the expectation that future historians would stand in awe of his legacy. But the monster turned on its user and brought him, and all of us, low. The plot was hackneyed in the 1930's and seems scarcely credible in the 1970's. But here it is and here are the tapes; and here is Nixon and here are we. Since this entire series of events was both made possible and limited by these electronic extensions of ourselves, it is worth examining the product of and audio recorder. (I trust the charge of sexism will not be raised by the use of man in the preceding sentence since the only females apparently connected with the tapes were the White House secretarial staff; their contributions would appear to consist largely of deleting expletives, omitting characterizations, and labeling some passages inaudible.) And so these tapes bring us back to the White House to witness the fall of a president. The close examination of these transcripts is neither pleasant nor enriching