Related Link  Obituary, Wisconsin State Journal

University of Wisconsin-Madison historian Stanley Kutler wasn't content to merely write about history.

He made it, too.

Kutler waged a successful legal battle to make public the bulk of Richard Nixon's secret White House recordings and shine an even brighter light on Watergate, the scandal that brought down Nixon's presidency.

"I guess it's my lot in life to be identified with Nixon," Kutler said in a 1998 interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "I have had a life apart from Nixon."

Kutler, who had series of health setbacks in the last two months, died Tuesday after a brief stay in a hospice. He was 80.

"He was productive up until the last few days of his life and really giving," said his son David Kutler.

Nixon was an important part of his scholarship, but Kutler was noted as one of the country's pre-eminent American legal and constitutional historians, with a focus on the 20th century. Before taking emeritus status, Kutler was the E. Gordon Fox Professor of American Institutions at UW-Madison and also professor of law.

"My dad was a walking, talking human Wikipedia," his son said.

State Supreme Court Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson said Kutler "was a marvelous historian, a very popular teacher."

"He loved life and lived it to its fullest and was eternally young in spirit," she said. "He was interested and curious. He was an intellectual."

A prolific author, Kutler wrote the widely read book, "The Wars of Watergate." His work "Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes" was the result of a successful lawsuit brought by Kutler and the group Public Citizen against the National Archives and the Nixon estate to force the release of Watergate tapes that had long been held out of the public eye....