Richard Nixon: Victory in Defeat

The significance of any person in history, no matter how complex, can be captured in one sentence, Clare Booth Luce once told Richard Nixon. "You will be summed up: He went to China," she declared.

Her estimation came before Watergate. "Now," Nixon said a few years ago, "historians are more likely to lead with 'He resigned from office.' The jury has already come in, and there's nothing that's going to change it. There's no appeal. Historians will judge it harshly."

He was right of course, as hard-eyed and tough about himself as he had been about other people all his life. It was the same sort of ruthless judgment he had applied to opponents as well as friends, to opportunities and risks, to domestic politics and international diplomacy.

But by last week, as he lay dying in a stroke-induced coma, the verdict on his life and career was becoming, if not softer, at least more complicated. Messages from around the world poured into the hospital in New York City from the statesmen who admired his reach and strength, from the politicians he had dominated and from the citizens who loved him despite his gaping flaws. By the time he died at 9:08 Friday evening, something close to affection, born of such long familiarity, could be discerned, even from his enemies.

Other politicians came and went, but Nixon was always coming back. By sheer endurance, he was the most important figure of the postwar era. Nixon put the country through some of its worst times, leading the red-scare politics of the 1950s, escalating the war in Vietnam in order to end it, trying with all his enormous energy and guile to defeat the legal processes that closed in on him during the Watergate scandal. Yet an outsize energy and determination drove him on to recover and rebuild after every self-created disaster that he faced.

To reclaim a respected place in American public life after his resignation, he kept traveling and thinking and talking to the world's leaders. After leaving the White House nearly 20 years ago, he produced nine books. Just a month before his death, he was in Russia trying to get a current sense of the bizarre politics of the nation he fought against for so long. On his return from that trip, he stopped in Washington, where he lectured a room packed with members of America's foreign policy establishment. He spoke for 90 minutes without notes and drew a standing ovation for his lucid presentation. On the day that an embolism struck him mute, page proofs for his last book arrived at his office.

In this issue TIME publishes excerpts from that book, titled Beyond Peace. It is a kind of last testament from Richard Nixon. It is a tartly apt critique of American foreign policy. His timing was uncanny. The book arrives just as a welter of post-cold-war crises, from Bosnia to Korea, have thrown American policies into deepening disarray. And, as always, his focus on foreign affairs was designed to draw attention to the area of his presidency in which his accomplishments outweighed his failures.