The Prodigal President: Nixon’s Lasting Hurrah

As a boy, he heard the whistles from passing trains and dreamed of the distant places they could take him. The rhythm of the rails, he said years later, produced “the sweetest music I ever heard.” Living on the edge of the desert in Yorba Linda in 1920, how enchanting the real world must have seemed to the dark-haired son of Frank and Hannah Nixon.

Seventy summers later, Richard Milhous Nixon is coming back to Yorba Linda for an event that to a generation of Americans may finally symbolize the end of his penance. On July 19, 16 years after he left office--after the library openings for successors Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter and barely beating the scheduled opening next year of the Ronald Reagan Library--Nixon will get his very own library, to be dedicated on a nine-acre site that includes the house in which he was born.

It will be but another step in Nixon’s fight for his place in history, a knock-down, drag-out affair for which Round 1 rang 44 years ago when Nixon first ran for Congress.

Today, Nixon has his second wind. Or is it his 102nd? Whatever, he clearly is carrying the fight again. Instead of the fallen figure buried under the wreckage that was Watergate, the public now sees a Nixon hailed as a foreign policy genius. When he returned to Capitol Hill in early March, he was mobbed in the hallways. One congressman called him “the world’s paramount foreign policy intellectual.” Two weeks later, he was on the cover of Time magazine. His latest book, his eighth, is in the bookstores. By his sheer survivability, he has become his own Nostalgia Channel, a walking, talking 20th-Century newsreel.

Thus, there will be certain symmetry to it all this summer, when his friends canonize him just a few hundred feet from where he was born. Out of the dust and rubble of the construction site at the corner of Yorba Linda Boulevard and Eureka Avenue will rise a permanent monument to the only President to resign from office.

“The library is a metaphor for his life,” says a former associate who has known Nixon for 20 years. “It’s the phoenix rising from the ashes.”

For those who remember the Watergate caldron of 1973-74 and the revulsion that Nixon eventually generated from many supporters as well as longtime enemies, to picture the jowly old warrior being hailed and toasted is to believe totally in political rehabilitation.

“He’s like a cork; you can’t keep him down,” says Stephen Ambrose, a professor of history at the University of New Orleans and a biographer of both Nixon and Dwight D. Eisenhower. “He’s in the last campaign of his life--the campaign for elder statesman--and he’s done it. He made it. He continues to amaze.”

That might sound hyperbolic to anyone under the age of 30, who might have a hard time picturing what American political life was like during the late 1960s and through the Watergate scandal of the ‘70s. As a young reporter for the Omaha World-Herald in 1973, I spent most lunch hours with a half-dozen or so colleagues, our journalistic lives a relatively tasteless stew of local government, police and school beats. If we drew the short straw, we had to miss our daily noontime klatsch to cover the Kiwanis Club or the Rotarians. Often, lunch was just a lot of grousing about how dull our jobs were.

But in March of 1973, lunch started getting a whole lot more interesting. Over the next few weeks and months, the Watergate story became at once more implausible and more credible for an entire nation. Names of people we’d either never heard of or had paid little attention to--Sirica, McCord, Liddy, Dean, Colson, Magruder, Ehrlichman--became juicy characters for many of us in a great mystery we were all reading. Seemingly with each day’s lunch, a new chapter had been read and we couldn’t wait to get to the end of the book so we’d know whodunit. I’ll never forget the Time magazine cover with all the President’s men pointing fingers at each other.

The end finally came in August, 1974, when Nixon, much like a fighter who’d been battered for 15 rounds but was still standing, signaled the referee that he’d had enough. Once and for all, it seemed that Nixon’s 1962 line about not having him to kick around anymore would stand the test of time. The man responsible for Watergate, Spiro T. Agnew and the bombing of Cambodia surely would be laid to political rest.

It’s hard not to think of the defeated Nixon while now anticipating the return this summer to Yorba Linda of the triumphant Nixon.

I asked Ambrose, who has published two books in his Nixon trilogy and is working on the third, what makes Nixon tick. “I don’t know what makes him tick,” he said. “You put it all together and it doesn’t come out with 2 plus 2 equals 4. With him, 2 plus 2 equals 5. He’s bigger than his life, bigger than his background. He’s a unique human being. In a way, we’re all unique, but you and I aren’t Dick Nixon. He can’t be explained, it seems to me.”

Ambrose has read the other Nixon books that attempt to psychoanalyze him. “Add all those up, and you still don’t come up with the explanation,” he said.

What’s left unexplained? I ask. “His insecurity. He was nominated by his party five times for national office. Four times he won and still he feels mistreated and unappreciated by the American people. How do you put that together? Henry Kissinger has a line, not often quoted, that I think is worth pondering: ‘Think what this man could have done if anyone had ever loved him.’ I don’t have any trouble believing that Hannah loved him, and in his own way, Frank, but their way of loving is not enough for Nixon.”

After all the research, had Ambrose come to like Nixon? “I don’t think he wants to be liked,” Ambrose said. “He wants to be admired and respected, and I have come to do that.”

If there’s ever been a safe port for Nixon, it has been Orange County. And certainly Yorba Linda. In May, 1973, as Watergate began unraveling, the New York Times assigned a reporter to see how Nixon’s hometown was reacting. He found the Yorba Linda Weekly Star hadn’t printed anyWatergate stories because, as the editor said, “We print only news of particular interest to our readers.”

Although in the public’s mind Nixon may not be linked with Orange County, the area does serve in a sense as convenient bookends--from his birth on Jan. 9, 1913, to his post-presidential exile in San Clemente.

“He’s a hometown boy in many ways,” says Roger Morris, author of a Nixon biography published last November. “A lot of the key speeches he delivered early on in his career, the attacks on Helen Gahagan Douglas and Adlai Stevenson, he delivered in Orange County in front of some very favorable and partisan audiences. It’s very much home territory for him. That whole area from L.A. south is Nixon country. Many of his closest supporters live and come from there.”

Indeed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam asserted in his 1977 book, “The Powers That Be,” that the Los Angeles Times “invented” Nixon by bestowing the newspaper’s favor on him in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. And while Nixon later persuaded large segments of the public that he waged a lifelong fight against the media, that wasn’t always so.

In its Page 1 editorial endorsing Nixon over John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, the Times headlined it: “Are You a Thinking American?”

It went on to say: “You are not marking your ballot for your favorite comedian, the most fast-tongued orator, biggest giveaway sponsor or best-dressed fashion model. . . . By a man’s company, he is known. Seeing the bobby-socks swooners, some of the off-beat personalities in the entertainment world, the utopian political schemers surrounding their dream boy (Kennedy) is frightening. As a thinking American, mark your ballot for Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge.”

Halberstam theorized that The Times’ patronage of Nixon hurt him. “It bred in this most fragile of egos a sense that he could attack others without being attacked in return,” Halberstam wrote. “It allowed him to rise to higher and higher levels in politics without ever testing his ability to take the normal strain and criticism of politics. . . . Few other major politicians came out of a metropolitan area so pampered. . . . It all created in Nixon a sense that he could get away with things, that the press was crooked and could be bought off.”

Although Nixon built his national reputation as an ardent anti-Communist, he had his limits. In June, 1962, Nixon received a letter from Orange County’s Walter Knott, founder of Knott’s Berry Farm and later eulogized as the county’s “Mr. Republican.”

The letter, now among Nixon’s pre-presidential papers stored in the federal archives in Laguna Niguel, read: “We will do everything we can to help you win in November (against Gov. Pat Brown), but it would make our work much easier in Orange County if you would lay off the John Birch Society and refrain from depreciating the conservative movement.”

Nixon had received a similar entreaty earlier that year from ultraconservative Orange County Congressman James Utt, who wrote: “It looks to me like (incumbent Gov.) Pat Brown is running your campaign by persuading you to denounce the John Birch Society.”

In a reply letter, Nixon thanked Utt for his candor but said he feared “the disastrous effect which the John Birch Society, because of its totalitarian makeup and acknowledged leader, can have on Republican candidates.”

Lois Lundberg is a former Orange County Republican Party chairwoman who remembers standing right in front of Nixon when he gave his infamous concession speech in the 1962 gubernatorial race. Twelve years later, she said, “I sat in front of the TV and cried all day long” when Nixon resigned the presidency. She remains an unabashed Nixon admirer and said only “an isolated few” Orange County Republicans abandoned Nixon after Watergate.

By 1977, Nixon was ready to do his first Orange County fund-raiser, although pockets of resentment still existed among some party members, Lundberg said. It was scheduled for socialite Athalie Clarke’s Corona del Mar home, and Lundberg was nervous. “It was a private event where we screened everybody,” Lundberg said. “I remember waiting for his limo that night, thinking, ‘What if he decides he isn’t going to do this?’ ” But Nixon had a good time and told Lundberg he’d do another fund-raiser if she wanted him to.

He did another one in April, 1982, at the Disneyland Hotel, Lundberg said, and was even more the object of near-adulation. But again, Lundberg was nervous because “I didn’t want anyone who didn’t like him to get in and cause him trouble.” Again, the night passed without incident.

Such worries seemed much removed from Nixon’s presidential heyday, when the entourage would show up at El Adobe restaurant in San Juan Capistrano. Elias Meza, then a 21-year-old assistant but now the restaurant’s general manager, remembers the hubbub that would precede a Nixon presidential visit. Nixon, who always wore a suit to dinner, preferred a table in the restaurant’s elevated portion, Meza said. Without exception, Meza said, restaurant patrons respected Nixon’s privacy, and he would generally conclude his stay by toasting the customers and perhaps signing autographs.

The restaurant usually would be given 20 minutes’ notice that the presidential party was en route. That prompted everyone to spring into action, especially to make sure a mariachi group was on hand. “He’d call the mariachi trio over and have them play ‘Maria Elena,’ ” Meza said. “He’d have a margarita. He’d say, ‘It’s good to have a margarita again.’ ” Dinner often stretched over two or three hours, Meza said.

On one of Nixon’s first post-election visits, the restaurant used a banquet room to set up about 40 telephones to accommodate the presidential press corps. A special “hot line” phone to the Kremlin was installed in the wine cellar, Meza said. Eager to get a feel for how history was being reported, Meza eavesdropped on reporters phoning in their stories. “ ‘Now he’s having his enchiladas, now he’s having his taco,’ ” Meza says now, playfully mimicking the stories being called in. “Here we were, the center of the world, and they’re saying, ‘He’s having a taco.’ ”

Meza recalls catering one affair at the Western White House, which was just minutes away in San Clemente. The late Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko was there and “everybody was lining up. There was Cesar Romero, John Wayne, all these celebrities, and Gromyko was meeting them. They took him along pool-side and Chuck Connors was standing there, the Rifleman. Gromyko says, ‘This is my favorite man’ and puts a bear hug on Chuck Connors. He went bananas. Everybody cracked up.”

But on the heels of those heady days, when seeing Kissinger or the Soviet ambassador come in with Nixon made everybody’s juices flow a little faster, came the crashing stillness of Watergate. The scandal, Meza said, “crushed us to death to see that. We all felt really deeply hurt and my thought was, ‘That’s the end of that.’ ”

Although the exiled leader would still come to the restaurant occasionally while in San Clemente, including a 65th birthday trip in 1978, Meza said, “he was not as happy as when he was President. But he didn’t show much emotion. It was just a little more private then.”

Unlike a lot of armchair psychologists who love to analyze Nixon, Kenneth L. Khachigian doesn’t have to--he worked in the Nixon White House from 1970-74 as a speech writer and researcher and then joined the ex-President in San Clemente to help write his memoirs. Khachigian, 45, now is a lawyer in San Clemente who also does political consulting.

He spent much of the first month after Nixon’s resignation with him at San Clemente. “When he was President, when you’d come into the compound you’d come down an access road to a guard gate, full of Coast Guard, guards, Secret Service. You’d get through that gate and come down a stretch of about three-quarters of a mile into the compound itself. As you entered you’d see two gleaming presidential helicopters. . . . After he resigned, when I made that same drive for the first time, the first thing that struck me was the helipad where the helicopters normally were had been converted into a tennis court and there was this net strung across it and two Coast Guard guys were playing tennis in sort of a desultory fashion. And I thought, ‘Oh, geez, this is horrible.’ ”

Khachigian soon learned lots of things had changed. “Anytime I was around the President in the White House, since I was a fairly junior member of staff, he was always surrounded by people, and just to see him was a big thing. Now within a day or so of my getting there (to San Clemente), I was ushered in to see him, by myself, and given these chores by him to do. He was just so alone, that was the main thing.”

Khachigian helped Nixon prepare for the interviews with David Frost in 1977. It marked Nixon’s return to wide public view and was done largely, Khachigian said, to help stem the ex-President’s “monumental financial obstacles.”

In one session with Frost, Nixon described his exile in San Clemente. “I never think . . . in suicidal terms, death wish and all that,” he said then. “But on the other hand, I feel myself that life without purpose, I feel that life in which an individual has to . . . is forced to go against his intuitions about what he ought to do, that life then becomes almost unbearable. And so resignation meant life without purpose so far as I was concerned.”

However, Harry Jeffrey, a Cal State Fullerton history professor who worked on the school’s Oral History Program of Nixon during his presidency, said Nixon’s comeback that seems to be in full bloom now was probably planned “on the plane back to San Clemente (the day he resigned). He’s very much concerned about his own place in history,” said Jeffrey, who also worked in the Nixon Administration in 1973 as chief historian and archivist for the Cost of Living Council. “He planned a comeback both for public opinion and, probably more important, for future historians of future generations.”

Over lunch in a Dana Point restaurant, I asked Khachigian about Nixon possibly thinking of a “comeback” during his darkest post-presidency hours.

“Well, it wasn’t by accident,” he said. “If it didn’t happen on the flight back, it happened in the first week.”

He does not say it cynically. “I say it in admiration from someone who from the time I got here to San Clemente was already looking ahead. . . . While others say this is the old Dick Nixon conniving and calculatingly plotting a comeback step by step, what it really is is an individual for whom everybody feels there is a dark side and who gets extremely little credit for this sunny side which allows him to look forward whenever there’s adversity.”

I asked Khachigian if, given the milder climate of the 1980s, a Watergate-like scandal would generate the same heat. Or, put another way, could Nixon have survived if it happened today?

You have to remember, Khachigian said, that Nixon was embroiled in controversy from his first day in office because of the Vietnam War. “You can remember 1968; it was an extremely turbulent year. The war did dominate things. You had Robert Kennedy killed, Martin Luther King killed, you had Johnson out of the presidency, you had riots on campuses. The law school where I went (Columbia) was shut down; you had takeovers and bombings all over the place. Then Nixon gets the nomination and makes the fundamental decision with regard to the Vietnam War, that the way to end it is to wind it down. . . .”

But it didn’t wind down before more casualties and bombings and the spread into Cambodia. As a result, Nixon took a pounding over his conduct of the war. “A lot of Democrats deserted Lyndon Johnson (over the war), but a lot did not out of loyalty to the party,” Khachigian said. “With Nixon in, they not only had no party loyalty but now they had that great target of the middle of the 20th Century sitting right in front of them and they could beat up on him and not only be true to their ideology but enjoy doing it.”

Khachigian said he takes some personal satisfaction out of the “rehabilitated” Nixon. “Absolutely, especially having been there right after he resigned and seeing that enormous low. I was thinking when he was back in Congress (in early March this year) and he gave that talk to the House Republicans and he went over to the Senate and he was mobbed in the halls of Congress. I was going to tell his staff guy that I was really envious of him being able to be there with him when there was this warm feeling about him again. In the mid-’70s, Nixon could not go into a situation like that without a Bronx cheer out of the back, so I was sort of envious that I was not able to see that.”

Harry Jeffrey specializes in 20th-Century American political history. “I’ve been living with this guy for 20 years,” he says, referring to his work with the Nixon Oral History project, in which he and Cal State Fullerton students interviewed about 200 Nixon friends and associates.

Even today, Jeffrey can fill a coffee table with 35 to 40 stacks of newspaper articles and other materials relating to the former President. Now 52, Jeffrey spent 1973 in Washington and “I’d run out every morning and hear the plop of the Washington Post on the doorstep and pick it up with trepidation.”

I asked him about Nixon’s place in history. “As a historian, you realize Presidents’ reputations are cyclical. For example, Kennedy was lionized for about a decade. Then all sorts of critical works came out. I think Nixon’s overall record is not known and misunderstood, and I think he will have to go down as one of the more towering figures of 20th-Century politics.”

Jeffrey also said that Nixon’s domestic policy wasn’t as conservative as people might think. “With the exception of Teddy Roosevelt, every Republican President of this century was more conservative than Nixon, relative to his time. As people put Watergate into perspective, they’re going to see that his presidency, much less his life, was much more than Watergate.”

But while many Americans may welcome Nixon’s current revival, others remain skeptical.

One of them is a central Watergate figure, jailed along with other of the President’s men chronicled in both book and film. I reached him by telephone and told him that Nixon supporters expected the dedication to be a “festive” occasion and that they expected many former staffers to attend.

This Watergate figure didn’t want to be identified by name, but said: “I don’t feel very festive about Richard Nixon. Not only will I not be there, but I’m not very interested in it.”

I asked him about Nixon’s return to what seems a state of grace. “I don’t feel Richard Nixon has attempted in any sense to deal with the redemptive issues of Watergate, with the abuses that occurred during his Administration. I haven’t read the latest book, but in his appearances and public pronouncements, he dumped it off on his staff.”

The Watergate figure said he doesn’t dwell on that clamorous period but will talk about it if people ask him. And Nixon could have salved his feelings a long time ago, he said.

“What I think he should have said, and he could have done it very easily, especially after getting the pardon, was to apologize to the country and to staff people who got involved; not that it was not our fault. We were bright people, we could have reneged on his tendency to want to chop up his enemies. The analogy I use is the naval captain. Nixon was in the Navy so he should understand it. If the captain in the Navy is under fire when the ship goes down, the first thing the captain does is make sure the crew gets off, and if he has to, he goes down with the ship. The exact opposite happened with us. He had us go down with the ship, and he got off.”

I said that Nixon had taken some responsibility by saying that although he didn’t know what was going on, he should have set a higher standard. “But he did know what was going on,” the Watergate participant said. “He loved that stuff, he ate it up, it was his bread-and-butter stuff. Did he know we were getting information from here and there? Of course, he did. And he knew you don’t get information without breaking the law or doing things unethically.”

That’s the frame of reference that John Hanna will have when he takes his children through the Nixon Library. A lawyer and former Orange County Democratic Party chairman, Hanna said he’ll have to be convinced that Nixon supporters will create a balanced view of Nixon in the library.

“You can never put aside the fact he resigned in disgrace. . . . Some things stick with you, and no matter how many years go by and how many generations from now, even after I’ve had my day in the sun, people will remember Nixon, in large part, for having lied to the American people and obstructing justice and resigning in disgrace.

“The interesting thing about all of that is that many Democrats had real problems with Nixon that we felt were more serious than that--his no controls on environmental destruction and his expansion of the war in Vietnam and the resulting casualties.”

I mention to Hanna that some Nixon supporters cite the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency as a major accomplishment of his Administration. “It’s not so much that he formed it as it was formed over his objections. Richard Nixon fought every environmental bill that came up through Congress. He ended up signing some. Many times people look back 10, 12 years later, if someone was in office when something good happened, and take credit for it, even though they opposed it time after time.”

Nixon fell, Hanna says, largely because the public couldn’t rally behind him. “He had no reservoir to run back to, no deep feeling of appreciation, love or affection that some other President might have had in a similar crisis. If Nixon had been President during Iran-Contra, he would have been impeached. Ronald Reagan had a reservoir of support in the American public. I think they believed him.”

I ask Hanna about Nixon as a major force in foreign policy. “He had been Red-baiting Democrats for two decades and said recognizing Red China was a pro-Communist step, and you’d be a Communist supporter if you did. Then he recognizes Red China. It kind of makes you squirm a bit, but the bottom line is we developed a forward-looking policy with (China) that was long overdue. To coin a phrase, you have to give the devil his due.”

It’s a cool, cloudy day and Hugh Hewitt is taking me on a quickie tour of the still-under-construction library and birthplace. “I love this room,” he says, ducking his head in the small upstairs quarters that served as the young Richard Nixon’s bedroom. “It gives you a sense that anything is possible in the United States of America.”

Hewitt is the library foundation’s 34-year-old executive director, an Ohio native and Harvard graduate. His dyed-in-the-wool Republicanism and admiration for Nixon, he says, grew out of a contempt for communism that he dates from reading Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” as a teen-ager.

He first went to work for Nixon in 1979, when he was hired to do research on Nixon’s book “The Real War.” Before that, Hewitt had worked for six months as a research assistant for David Eisenhower.

“That this library is being built, that he’s on the cover of Time magazine, that Nixon is quote ‘hot’ unquote, it’s not at all surprising to me,” Hewitt says, talking to me in his 16th-floor Irvine office. “There’s a handful of people in the world who have done what Nixon has done. There are a handful of people in this century who have been as pivotal in the history of the world as Nixon has been.”

I ask Hewitt how he’s going to sell a Nixon Library. Unlike all the other presidential libraries dating to Herbert Hoover, Nixon’s will be be maintained by a private foundation instead of supposedly impartial government archivists. “To quote ‘Dragnet,’ ” Hewitt says, “ ‘just the facts.’ ” The task for Hewitt is to come across as Joe Friday and not Joe Isuzu.

If the public sees the Nixon Library as a sham, attendance would suffer. The foundation plans to charge $3.95 admission for visitors 12 and over. Presidential libraries annually have attracted anywhere from 100,000 for the Hoover Library in Iowa to 500,000 for the Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, Hewitt said. And even some Nixon supporters suggest it might be more appropriate to think of the project as a museum.

There is a business aspect to the library, but its agenda is not about money. Nixon’s backers are united in their belief that his overall record of achievement has been obscured. Hewitt pledges that the library will give an impartial accounting of the ex-President’s career. While the foundation will run the library, there are plans to hire a curator and archivist.

“Credibility is an enormous concern,” Hewitt says, “It’s an enormous concern for Nixon. The not-smart thing to do would be to glorify your career and ignore the rough spots and the down spots. That would not be smart; it would enjoy no credibility. Media reviewers would cut it to pieces. Even if we pulled it off, and right now would be the time to pull off a big con job, because he’s so hot right now, and twist the history and twist everything around our way. But it would not endure. You’ve got to have something that’s going to tell the story and educate people. And besides, Nixon’s supremely confident of his reputation and his role in history, and he’s very aware of it. There’s no need to do anything with his career but explain it and lay it out.”

On the drawing board, the library looks good: over here, Nixon’s early years in the House and Senate; over there, the vice presidential years; in another room, you can watch the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy TV debates; in another room, a re-creation of the Lincoln Room where Kissinger first told Nixon of the China breakthrough; in another chamber, you can trace the “Silent Majority” speech from a few handwritten notes to the final version; another room will be devoted to Watergate, including excerpts from some of the tapes.

For many people, Nixon spent his last dollar of credibility a long time ago. They will remember the Watergate denials, the prolonged fight over the tapes and the eventual resignation. Biographer Roger Morris says, “There’s always going to be distance between Richard Nixon and the rest of America, because there’s a distance between Richard Nixon and the truth. And that’s too bad.”

Thus, just as the burden of proof eventually fell on Nixon during his presidency, so will it in the case of the library. Will it be hailed as a library in the purest sense or be dismissed as a monument erected by friends to honor a man they feel has been wronged?

The library will not include authentic Nixon presidential papers, which have remained in the federal government’s possession since Congress, fearful about what Nixon might do with the papers after his resignation, passed a law in 1974 that prevented him from taking them.

That set the stage for an ongoing fight between Nixon and the National Archives. Hewitt says Nixon’s papers essentially were “stolen” from him; indeed, in perhaps the best characterization of the temper of the times in 1974, the law made Nixon the first President not allowed to cull what he considered his personal papers before turning over the others to federal archivists.

The Nixon presidential papers, about 44 million pieces, are being prepared for public view by government archivists in Alexandria, Va. Since 1978 when the processing began, 5 million pieces of the papers have been released and are available, along with other Nixon artifacts and 12 1/2 hours of Watergate tapes, with the remaining 12,000 hours still being processed, according to a National Archives spokeswoman. While the government is donating some artifacts to the Nixon Library and the papers can be reproduced, the originals will remain under the control of the federal government.

“The idea that a man with as remarkable a sense of history as Nixon has would destroy papers . . . is incredible,” says Hewitt, who promises that all “key presidential papers” will be copied at the National Archives storehouse and be on display by next year. I asked Hewitt what Watergate meant to him. He termed it a “tragedy” and added: “The library is going to have to put Watergate into the context of the 1970s and also into the context of Nixon’s career. Before Watergate, in 1972, there was the McGovern campaign, the war--I grew up 30 miles from Kent State. I had a cousin at Kent State when the shootings occurred (in May, 1970). . . . You don’t escape the 1960s if you’re over the age of 10. You’re very aware of the political currents. You’re very aware of Nixon. Watergate can’t be separated from Vietnam. It can’t be separated from Nixon’s longtime antagonists both on the political left and in the media, and it’s just part of one chapter in a long, long career.”

I asked if he thinks all the tributes to Nixon have been based on cold assessment or some twilight tribute. “Look at Paul Conrad (the Times’ editorial cartoonist). Conrad hates Nixon and he will never stop hating him. The aberration is not that this is now unfolding. The aberration was ’74 to let’s say ‘85, those 10 or 11 years, when the significance of Nixon’s career was obscured temporarily. All of these people, his critics, they desperately desire to avoid history. They don’t want to do it. Their focus is continually on Watergate, because as soon as you let history in the door, Nixon’s importance in world history becomes so overwhelming that you can’t deny it.”

Hewitt’s certitude about Nixon’s rightful place in history reminds me of something Ambrose told me a couple weeks earlier. “Think about it,” Ambrose said. “In history books a hundred years from now, when Nixon will only get a paragraph, it will say, ‘Richard Nixon, the only President ever to resign the office.’ ”

Something else stuck: “Don’t get too carried away with this Nixon resurrection,” Ambrose said. “You’ll find half this country still hates him passionately. About a quarter always admired him, even during the worst times. Now it’s about half. If he ran for President, he’d have a good shot at it.”

You can’t be serious, I said. “Absolutely,” Ambrose replied. “On the other hand, he’s as much hated today by the half that always hated him as he always was.”

I posed that to Hewitt. Why is Nixon so roundly disliked by so many people? Hewitt believes the enmity stems from Nixon’s battle with liberals that dates to the late 1940s, when as a young congressman Nixon was among those pressing the case against Alger Hiss, a former State Department official accused of being a Communist sympathizer.

“Nixon was doomed to be the enemy of the Left from the day they discovered Alger Hiss. Period. Alger Hiss was everything to that Establishment.” Then, Hewitt said, Nixon unwittingly became the “opponent for the martyred President. Nixon was the enemy in 1960, he was the enemy forever.”

If Richard Nixon has any sense of the poetry in a man’s life, he’ll hop a train this July near his New Jersey home and ride it cross-country to the dedication. He could start along the New York-Washington axis, where if he closed his eyes he could conjure up rough-and-tumble politicking with Hiss and Kennedy and Sam Ervin. As the train rumbled through the South, he could reflect on its modern-day Republican politics he helped create. Speeding through the heartland, he could look out the rattling train window and remember as vice president taking Nikita S. Khrushchev through an Iowa cornfield and explaining why the American system of government was better than theirs.

And when he finally reaches his journey’s end in the small Yorba Linda farmhouse where he was born 77 years ago, you have to wonder if he won’t recall those trains he heard in the night 70 years ago and marvel at the places he’s been.

Of course, Nixon won’t take the train. In fact, says his personal assistant John Taylor, the former President probably won’t even get all dewy-eyed at the occasion. If Nixon follows his normal pattern, Taylor says, about a week before the dedication he’ll hole up and stay largely out of sight while working on a draft of the speech. When Nixon speaks in Yorba Linda, it will be without notes.

Khachigian says: “Probably not enough people read (Nixon’s) memoirs to understand where he came from. You really do have a simple, pretty quiet, almost agrarian upbringing in a populist-tinted family whose dad used to get angry at all the big oil companies. For Nixon, who always felt, and I think justifiably, that people in the East and the gentry and the old wealthy sort of looked down their noses at him, I think he probably sees this as a real nice tribute to his upbringing, to his roots.”

Hugh Hewitt has a spirited view of dedication day. “It’s supposed to be a celebration; it’s supposed to be a party, and that’s really what it’s going to be. The entire opinion elite is going to trot out for this thing. It’s going to be a real hoot.”