37th President of the United States; His place in history

by Mel Elfin, Gary Cohen 

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        He thrust himself onto the national scene stage right, a jowly, heavy bearded, upwardly mobile young congressman whose slash-and- burn anticommunist rhetoric and battering-ram political style would quickly earn him a coterie of conservative admirers -- and a long-lingering epithet, "Tricky Dick." He strode across U.S. history for almost a half century, a brilliant, if flawed, protagonist out of a Shakespearean tragedy whose shaky moral compass presaged his inevitable fall. With almost blinding speed, he ascended the Capitol Hill ladder -- from House to Senate to the vice presidency. But his eyes were always riveted on the ultimate prize -- the White House.

        Indeed, even in our opportunistic age, the passion with which he sought the presidency was unmatched. Yet once it was his, he allowed his inner demons -- and the rampant zealotry of those around him -- to betray the office in a conspiracy so bold that in the lexicon of politics, its name would become a synonym for scandal. Still, unlike the endings of most great tragedies, this drama was to have a long and redemptive epilogue. By the time he died last week from a devastating stroke at 81, it was clear that Richard Milhous Nixon had finally gained that for which he had struggled so desperately for so long: the esteem of his countrymen. The unindicted coconspirator of Watergate had become a respected elder statesman (story, Page 34).

        Driven by more insecurities than most men, it was almost as if Nixon unconsciously felt that he had to fail before he could really succeed. Somehow the disgrace of Watergate washed away most of his unsated ambitions and many of the annoying mannerisms that made the early Nixon such an acquired taste. Gone were the mean-spirited partisanship, the debater's locutions ("I want to make one thing perfectly clear"), the self-pity and the signature V-for-victory gesture so beloved by caricaturists. What remained was the Nixon who for so long was hidden from public view -- the thoughtful man of mature intelligence, verbal skill, prodigious memory and a sure grasp of foreign policy.

        Fortunately, Nixon survived long enough to take advantage of the counsel passed along by Herbert Hoover, who also enjoyed greater success after he left the White House than he did while inside. When he was asked by Nixon what was the secret of his political redemption, Hoover, reviled for his passivity at the onset of the Great Depression, replied: "Outlive your enemies."

        The beginning. In a sense, having the right kind of enemies launched Nixon in politics. He came to public life at the dawning of the cold war, when rational fears of Soviet expansionism and espionage could help unscrupulous candidates gain comfortable electoral majorities. Nixon needed a hot-button issue like anticommunism because he possessed few of the political graces that would enable future foes like John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey to win affection as well as votes. In a profession in which bantering small talk is the essence of personal exchange, Nixon had little patience for idle chatter. On the stump, his gestures were wooden and his appearance unprepossessing, and he was afflicted with a bad case of what might be called charm- deficiency syndrome. Once, after having stood on a receiving line for hours greeting supporters, he was asked what he was thinking when he shook all those hands. His answer: "I thought I'd like to kick them in the -----."

        A virtual cottage industry of historians and psychobiographers has tried to trace the origins of Nixon's tangled personality. If there is a consensus analysis, it focuses on his mother, Hannah Milhous Nixon, a coldly nondemonstrative woman, a devout Quaker who pinched the family's pennies to provide a college fund for her three surviving sons. She urged each to work hard, be serious and grow up and become "somebody." When young Richard was 15, Hannah left him, his brothers and her husband at their modest home in Whittier, Calif., and took her eldest son, Harold -- 3 1/2 years Richard's senior -- to smog free Arizona, where she nursed his chronic tuberculosis. In author Fawn Brodie's book on Nixon, she quotes from a letter the future president wrote to his mother during her absence. The affection-starved boy signed it, "Your good dog, Richard."

        Nixon's father, Frank, barely kept the family above the poverty line.  When Richard Nixon was just 11, he answered a newspaper ad for an office boy. He plaintively wrote the prospective employer: "I will accept any pay offered." Forty-four years later, Nixon recalled the poverty of his youth: "We had very little ... I wore my brother's shoes, and my brother below me wore mine. We never ate out -- never. We certainly had to learn the value of money." It was a lesson that Nixon, who until he left public life in 1960 never earned more than $35,000 a year, would remember. Even when he was most comfortable financially, he was still nagged by anxieties over money.

        "The Dark Tower." He was always a superior student. At Whittier College, where he graduated in 1934, he was second in his class. Three years later, he graduated third in his class at the newly opened Duke Law School, where he had a full-tuition scholarship. His outstanding academic record won Nixon an interview at a New York law firm, but he was told that the best move for a prospective politician was to practice law in his hometown. So in 1937, he joined a Whittier law firm where he was paid by the case. To meet potential clients, Nixon joined the local little theater group. And it was during his appearance as a college student in a production of The Dark Tower that he met a fellow performer -- a tall, slender schoolteacher named Thelma Catherine Ryan who was called "Pat" because she was born around St. Patrick's Day. At first, Hannah Nixon discouraged her son's attention to Pat because she was not a Quaker. But after she agreed to a Quaker ceremony and converted to the faith, they were married on June 21, 1940, in Riverside, Calif. (Mrs. Nixon died of cancer in June 1993.)

        The newlyweds settled into a small apartment in Whittier, but with the approach of World War II, Nixon became aware that relatively high-salaried jobs for young lawyers were available in Washington, D.C. So they packed their few belongings into their 1939 Oldsmobile and drove to the capital, where Nixon became a minor bureaucrat in the tire-rationing division of the Office of Price Administration. Although his Quaker pacifism exempted him from the draft, Nixon may have realized that if he envisioned a postwar career in politics, military service would be an absolute necessity. Six months after Pearl Harbor, he applied for a Navy commission and soon found himself in the South Pacific.

        After his discharge in 1946, Nixon returned to Whittier to accept an offer from local Republicans: take on Jerry Voorhis, the region's incumbent five-term Democratic congressman, in that fall's election. And thanks to a massive swing that helped the GOP to capture the House for the first time in 16 years -- as well as some mild red-baiting by Nixon -- Voorhis was toppled.

        Appointed to the now defunct House Un-American Activities Committee, Nixon exploited the tide of anticommunism then beginning to roil domestic politics. His first target: Alger Hiss. Nixon was largely responsible for arranging the dramatic 1948 confrontation between Hiss, the former top State Department official, and Whittaker Chambers, the confessed ex-Soviet spy who had linked him to an espionage ring. Hiss denied all, but a jury decided he was lying and sent him to jail for perjury. It was a triumph for Nixon.

        In 1950, Nixon took advantage of his growing national reputation and the anticommunist backlash stemming from the Korean War to defeat California's liberal Democratic congresswoman, Helen Gahagan Douglas, for the Senate seat. The campaign was vicious. Nixon accused Douglas of "being pink down to her underwear." Two years later, after Dwight Eisenhower wrested the GOP presidential nomination from Sen. Robert Taft, Republican Party elders convinced him that Nixon's youth and his talent for manipulating the "soft on communism" issue would make him an excellent running mate. Ike had his doubts but agreed to put the young Californian on the ticket.

        It was a decision some Republicans came to regret the next month, when it became public that Nixon had been the beneficiary of a slush fund provided by his California supporters. He survived this crisis only after delivering a self-pitying speech on television in which he declared his personal honesty, although he admitted accepting a gift for daughters Tricia and Julie -- a cocker spaniel named Checkers. He concluded by asking the audience to make its views known to the Republican National Committee. The outpouring of letters and telegrams ran at a 350-1 clip in favor of keeping Nixon on the ticket.

        Whether it was the slush fund or the differences in age and personalities, Nixon never became one of Eisenhower's golfing cronies or a member of his inner circle. He was, however, given a few headline-grabbing assignments. The most memorable: a 1959 mission to Moscow where he engaged in the great kitchen debate with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. After Nixon won the 1960 GOP presidential nomination, Eisenhower was asked about the vice president's contributions to his administration. Ike's sarcastic reply: "If you give me a week, I might think of one."

        John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee for president in 1960, was Nixon's next debate opponent. Their initial televised confrontation -- the first in history -- would not only set a precedent for future elections but also make telegenic appeal a factor in choosing candidates. The reason: Although a majority of those who had listened on the radio thought Nixon had won the debate, it seemed far different on television, where Kennedy's glamour contrasted sharply with Nixon's stiff and haggard appearance. Charisma had come to America's electoral system.

        A high road loss. In contrast to his early in-the-gutter campaigns, Nixon ran his first race for the White House in gentlemanly style. He never referred to the subliminal issue of Kennedy's Catholicism or to the fact that his opponent's father was alleged to have been a bootlegging womanizer. In November, Kennedy pulled out a slender victory, largely with late returns from the powerful Democratic machine of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. Although he was urged to contest the results, Nixon demurred, explaining that the effect on the nation "could be devastating."

        Returning to California in 1961, Nixon joined a Los Angeles law firm, but he could not bear life away from the public spotlight. He soon set his sights on winning the governor's mansion from Democrat Edmund G. "Pat" Brown the following year. However, Brown was re-elected, and a depressed Nixon believed he had come to the end of the political road. At a press conference that night, he gracelessly snarled to reporters: "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference." Five nights later, ABC presented a TV special entitled "The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon."

        Comeback trail. For a few years, it certainly looked that way. In 1963, the Nixons moved to New York, where Nixon became a partner in the Mudge, Stern law firm and began to earn the sort of income that for the first time guaranteed his family the good life. He stayed largely on the sidelines during Barry Goldwater's futile 1964 run for president but in 1966 began collecting political IOUs by appearing in support of scores of Republican congressional candidates. In November, the GOP gained 47 House and three Senate seats. Nixon was on the comeback trail.

        By 1968, the nation was in a state of political convulsion, sundered by race, Vietnam and a growing generation gap. With the Democrats in shattered disarray Alabama Gov. George Wallace was running as an antidesegregation third-party candidate -- the contest for the GOP nomination drew a large field. But thanks to solid support from Southern delegates, and the IOUs that he cashed in, Nixon held off convention challenges from New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and California Gov. Ronald Reagan. Once more, he was the GOP presidential standard bearer.

        In a Chicago convention marked by turmoil in the streets and dissension in the convention hall, the Democrats nominated Vice President Humphrey as their candidate. At first he trailed badly, but after publicly distancing himself from Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam, Humphrey staged a late rush. By early November, he was almost even with Nixon. But in the end, he fell agonizingly short, and on November 6, Richard Milhous Nixon awoke as president-elect of the United States. He truly had become "somebody."

        The legacy. History is less concerned with the psyches of presidents than with the record they bequeath to posterity. What, then, did Nixon accomplish during his 2,027 days in the White House? The answer -- Watergate aside -- is that despite a nagging recession, his constant squabbles with the Democratic Congress and the all-but-forgotten resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew in a bribery scandal, Nixon left behind what historians probably will judge as an above average legacy. Domestically, the Environmental Protection Agency was established on his watch and he launched the war on cancer. And it was in his White House that then presidential assistant Daniel Patrick Moynihan designed a Family Assistance Plan -- in retrospect, the most far-reaching welfare reform plan ever issued by any president. It died, though, because liberals thought it not far reaching enough. And while Nixon will never be enshrined in a civil rights pantheon, during his years as president, affirmative action got a forward push and more Southern schools were desegregated than in any administration before or since.

        But it was in foreign policy that Nixon, in concert with Henry Kissinger, had short, and on November 6, Richard Milhous Nixon awoke as president-elect of the United States. He truly had become "somebody."

        The legacy. History is less concerned with the psyches of presidents than with the record they bequeath to posterity. What, then, did Nixon accomplish during his 2,027 days in the White House? The answer -- Watergate aside -- is that despite a nagging recession, his constant squabbles with the Democratic Congress and the all-but-forgotten resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew in a bribery scandal, Nixon left behind what historians probably will judge as an above average legacy. Domestically, the Environmental Protection Agency was established on his watch and he launched the war on cancer. And it was in his White House that then presidential assistant Daniel Patrick Moynihan designed a Family Assistance Plan -- in retrospect, the most far-reaching welfare reform plan ever issued by any president. It died, though, because liberals thought it not far reaching enough. And while Nixon will never be enshrined in a civil rights pantheon, during his years as president, affirmative action got a forward push and more Southern schools were desegregated than in any administration before or since.

        But it was in foreign policy that Nixon, in concert with Henry Kissinger, had United States. He truly had become "somebody."

        The legacy. History is less concerned with the psyches of presidents than with the record they bequeath to posterity. What, then, did Nixon accomplish during his 2,027 days in the White House? The answer -- Watergate aside -- is that despite a nagging recession, his constant squabbles with the Democratic Congress and the all-but-forgotten resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew in a bribery scandal, Nixon left behind what historians probably will judge as an above average legacy. Domestically, the Environmental Protection Agency was established on his watch and he launched the war on cancer. And it was in his White House that then presidential assistant Daniel Patrick Moynihan designed a Family Assistance Plan -- in retrospect, the most far-reaching welfare reform plan ever issued by any president. It died, though, because liberals thought it not far reaching enough. And while Nixon will never be enshrined in a civil rights pantheon, during his years as president, affirmative action got a forward push and more Southern schools were desegregated than in any administration before or since.

        But it was in foreign policy that Nixon, in concert with Henry Kissinger, had his greatest impact, playing the international chessboard as adroitly as a grand master. Nixon, for example, realized that while his Democratic predecessors in the White House had been frozen into unrelieved hostility toward Communist China -- ironically, out of fear of attacks from Republicans like Nixon -- as president he had more freedom of action. In 1971, Kissinger secretly went to Beijing to prepare for Nixon's own journey there almost seven months later.

        Republican conservatives were outraged, and Democrats snickered that it was simply an election year publicity ploy. Now, however, it is clear that when Nixon went to China, it not only reopened relations with one of America's most historic and important friends but also shook up the leaders of the Kremlin, who worried that they were witnessing the formation of a powerful new anti Soviet bloc. It was, as Nixon observed in his toast in Shanghai celebrating the end of his visit, "a week that changed the world."

        Nixon's next move was a meeting in Moscow with Soviet Chief Leonid Brezhnev. On the table: negotiations over the first nuclear arms reduction treaty. For most of the week, the Soviets would not yield on a critical aspect of the proposed pact, and it looked asif the Americans would be forced to leave empty handed. Still, Nixon hung tough. It was the Soviets who blinked. The pact was signed.

        In Vietnam, Nixon had fewer pieces on the board, but he made the best of those he had. Although sharply criticized for a Christmas 1972 bombing assault on Hanoi and a brief invasion of Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia, Nixon nevertheless withdrew the last American troops from South Vietnam and authorized Kissinger to sign a face-saving peace accord that brought the U.S. prisoners home. In sum: Nixon probably produced the most deft and creative foreign policy performance by a president in this century.

        Yet in the end, there is always Watergate, the gravest political crisis since the Civil War. It was not just the invasion of the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate complex that persuaded the House Judiciary Committee to take the momentous step of voting two articles of impeachment against Nixon. That was just one of a whole series of wiretaps, break-ins, tax harassments and campaign dirty tricks perpetrated by thugs hired by the White House or its operatives. What still shocks, even after two decades, is that many of the Watergate associated crimes and misdemeanors were planned in the office of then Attorney General John Mitchell, supposedly the chief law enforcement officer of the United States. The even sadder fact is that if Nixon had opened up -- instead of covering up -- after the arrest of the Watergate burglars in 1972, he might have salvaged his presidency. As he discovered too late, Americans are a forgiving people.

        But as the memory of Watergate fades, a new generation may remember not the Nixon of the quivering jowls, but the one who addressed the 1992 annual encampment at the Bohemian Grove outside San Francisco. As one prominent academic who was there recalled last week: "The subject was Russia, and Nixon talked for more than 40 minutes without a note, without misspeaking and without any hemming or hawing. His arguments were logical, his point of view was clear and he was altogether convincing. When he finished, I found myself thinking: `You know, this guy would make one helluva president.' But then I realized that he already had been president. It's a shame that he couldn't have started over." That, in fact, may be the real tragedy of Richard Milhous Nixon.

        THE EARLY YEARS  Nixon's hardscrabble youth made him tough-minded and forever suspicious of the privileged. He battled for every early achievement, including playing on his college football team, winning his Navy commission and launching his political career in Washington.

        FIGHTING BACK  Nixon defined himself by his political crises. They began with his probe of suspected spy Alger Hiss and escalated with his "Checkers" speech to save his place on the 1952 GOP ticket and his efforts to beat back a "dump Nixon" drive before the 1956 election.

        DOWN, OUT, COMEBACK  Nixon's 1968 election marked the biggest political recovery in American history. He was written off after his 1960 loss to John Kennedy and his defeat by Democrat Pat Brown in the California governor's race in 1962. Nixon himself vowed to bow out of public life after that, but he later relented.

        ULTRASTATESMAN  No modern president played the game of statecraft with as much verve and as much sensibility for power politics as Nixon. Even as he prosecuted a war in Vietnam, he relished the secrecy and stunning impact of his surprise opening to China, which he orchestrated with his diplomatic soulmate, Henry Kissinger.

        ULTIMATE SHAME  The Watergate scandal never stopped mushrooming. It galvanized Congress; it produced incredible, comedic moments; it consumed most of Nixon's closest aides, and it brought down the president himself.