Then there is the opposite approach, to focus too greatly on the character flaws which drove Nixon from office in 1974, and ignore all subsequent events and interpretations.

This extreme is common to websites which only offer audio, visual, or photographic records of Richard Nixon, with little surrounding explanation. An example is the History and  Politics Out Loud website, which offers streaming audio of Watergate recordings, including the "Smoking Gun" tape of June 23, 1972. This is the famous recording where Nixon implicates himself in the coverup of the Democrat Party headquarters burglary. Historians are able to sit at home at their laptops and instantly be transported into the Oval Office in 1972, hear Nixon plot with chief of staff Haldeman to coverup the Watergate burglary, listen to White House Counsel Charles Colson talking to E. Howard Hunt, the CIA officer who took part in the break-in, and listen to Nixon discuss the bugging of his Democrat rival George McGovern. Beyond the briefest explanations as to their content, History and Politics Out Loud makes no attempt to fit these recordings into an historical context, or to show where each piece fits in the ensuing Watergate scandal. In some ways, a contemporary interpretation would seem irrelevant alongside such a powerful primary document. This is both the great promise and recurring limit of internet history: by providing direct access to primary documents, previously hidden in archives, web history empowers anybody to be a historian. So now there is a proliferation of these primary documents, on Webcorp, Earthstation, and the Paperless Archive, all providing a similar primary source to History and Politics Out Loud. Yet none of these sites provide anything but the most basic context.

It seems, then, that we are caught between isolated context, as in the National version of Richard Nixon, and isolated primary sources in the Disgraced version. Perhaps the solution is to link them together in an interactive hypertextual framework, as the Didactic websites attempt to do. Perhaps also we can approach the subject of Richard Nixon from the periphery, and find context from both primary and secondary sources which seem at first to have little to do with Nixon himself.