First-person accounts of history, whether in print or in interviews like those former president Richard Nixon gave British television personality David Frost in 1977, are invariably self-serving. That's been true in America since Capt. John Smith wrongly portrayed himself as a larger-than-life hero in his 1624 General History of Virginia.

Nixon/Frost, the new movie based on those interviews, depicts a president who, until the very end, painted himself in the best possible light. But in his final interview with Frost, the disgraced president acknowledges that he had "impeached himself."

Nixon denied any role in the Watergate cover-up but admitted to acting not as the nation's chief law enforcement officer but as defense counsel for his friends, the conspirators who ordered the Watergate break-in of Democratic Party headquarters.

"I let down my friends, I let down the country, I let down our system of government and the dreams of all those young people that ought to get into government but will think it is all too corrupt and the rest," Nixon told Frost. "Most of all I let down an opportunity I would have had for 2½ more years to proceed on great projects and programs for building a lasting peace."

That final interview revealed Nixon as a man with a conscience and a sense of right and wrong. He came across as a tragic figure deserving of a modicum of sympathy. But this month, 36 years after the fact, the National Archives released 200 hours of tapes of Nixon's White House conversations.

The Nixon whose words just became public is not a sympathetic character. He is revealed in the tapes as even more scheming, venal, cynical and profane than even popular mythology holds.

Here are a few examples.

• May 18, 1972 - Nixon is talking to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger about an upcoming meeting with the presidents of Ivy League colleges to discuss the war in Vietnam.

"The Ivy League presidents? Why, I'll never let those sons-of-b--- in the White House again. Never, never, never. They're finished. The Ivy League schools are finished . . . . Henry, I would never have had them in. Don't do that again. . . . They came out against us when it was tough . . . . Don't ever go to an Ivy League school again, ever. Never, never, never."

• Dec. 14, 1972 - Nixon in a conversation with Kissinger:

"Never forget. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it."

• Dec. 9, 1972 - Nixon in a conversation with aide Charles Colson about the appointment of a union leader as secretary of labor:

"The idea, they finally think the appointment of a working man makes them think we're for the working man."

Colson: "That's precisely it."

Nixon: "They talk about all the tokenism. We appoint blacks, and they don't think we're for blacks. Mexicans. They don't think we're for Mexicans. But a working man, by golly, that is really something."