Richard Nixon: Victory in Defeat

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Still, Watergate was the dark monument Richard Milhous Nixon built for himself. No other President in American history had been forced to resign the office. No other President in American history had been revealed to be so cynically, so selfishly breaking the law to preserve his own power. Other Presidents may have acted as ignobly, but none was caught so nakedly. More than 30 of the men who were closest to him went to jail for their roles in Watergate. Nixon himself was pardoned by his successor. But John J. Sirica, the judge who presided over much of the Watergate case, concluded later that Nixon too should have gone to jail.

It was always easy to be angry with Richard Nixon. He had an unerring instinct for the divisive thrust in politics. He succeeded over and over again by making personal attacks on those who opposed him. His own childhood sufferings were transposed into a powerful need to win at all costs. It began with his first campaigns in California and ended with his famous enemies list when he was President.

The anger that trailed after him, which always intensified after his victories because he was rarely a gracious winner, obscured his accomplishments. He was perhaps the most practiced American statesman to occupy the White House in this century. He understood the world in a deep and subtle way. He also had a fine sense of his own country, exploiting the disgust of the "silent majority" as the social and intellectual elites turned first against the war in Vietnam and then against anything vaguely bourgeois.

For a man who used ideology early and often in his political career, he was an astonishingly pragmatic domestic leader. He loathed the Eastern monied establishment that ran the Republican Party as he was rising in it, but his presidential agenda was quite moderate by contemporary G.O.P. standards. He realized that the Great Society programs of the Lyndon Johnson era had failed, but he believed that they were aimed at real problems and that the government should try to solve them.

When he left Washington in disgrace, Nixon retreated to his home in California. It is almost impossible to imagine the pain of his fall, and equally impossible to imagine the strength that kept him going. He nearly died after an attack of phlebitis and thought of taking his own life. Instead, he began a patient and calculated climb back to respectability. When he was still too much the pariah to be seen with sitting Presidents, he consulted quietly with their aides. And by the time Bill Clinton came to the White House, Nixon had virtually cemented his role as an elder statesman. Clinton, whose wife served on the staff of the committee that voted to impeach Nixon, met openly with him and regularly sought his advice. After his death, Clinton agreed to speak at the 37th President's funeral in California. It was a generous act. Nixon had been pardoned again.

To the end, it pained Richard Nixon that his ideas and advice were always diluted by the shame of his fall. "Oh, they say, this is the Watergate man and we're not going to pay any attention to him," Nixon lamented. But America had always paid attention to Nixon. For good and ill, he defined American politics and policy for a half-century, defined it by his successes and by his failures.