Two Eulogies

The passing of historian Stanley Kutler, at 80.

Despite the range of his work, he acknowledged in a 1998 interview with The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "I guess it's my lot in life to be identified with Nixon."

That was an unanticipated result of the 1992 suit Kutler and Public Citizen filed against the National Archives, which held over 3000 hours of Oval Office tapes. Until the plaintiffs won, only 63 hours had ever been made public (at the time of the Watergate hearings and prosecutions).

Although the unvarnished conversations reverberated with incriminating observations by Nixon and his inner circle, Professor Kutler said his lawsuit had as much to do with securing access as revealing culpability.

"This is all about establishing further precedent, to make things more transparent," he said in 2011.

Still, the tapes provided Professor Kutler with grist for a book that became a standard reference on Watergate, "Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes"; a play that he wrote, "I, Nixon"; and a television program that he created with the comedian Harry Shearer, "Nixon's the One" a series of vignettes that enacted transcripts from the tapes verbatim. Mr. Shearer described it as "dark comedy."

The tapes, Professor Kutler said, "alternately amused and appalled" him.

"Here, we have both exceptional candor and a practiced level of deceit; the display of a constant calculus of political considerations; the exhibit of raw, human emotions; and, above all, the revelations of extraordinary, illegal, seemingly unprecedented presidential behavior and power," he wrote in "Abuse of Power." "These tapes are the bedrock in laying bare the mind and thoughts of Richard Nixon."

"In the end," Professor Kutler wrote, "Nixon's tapes convicted him.

From Harry Shearer, tributes to "two Stanleys."

Shearer on his collaboration and friendship with Kutler, "a historian who made history"—

Courage is a virtue we're taught to associate with generals, and athletes... Stanley Kutler, history professor in the little college town of Madison, Wisconsin, had the balls to stand up to the former president of the United States and his financial supporters, and to see the battle through to victory. ... What Stanley Kutler gave us is a gift that will keep giving, not just to comedians, and historians, but to anyone curious about those with powerful really act, and talk, and think.

The other eulogy was for Stan Freberg.

Who was not a professional historian, yet among his accomplishments—