PERSPECTIVE ON THE NIXON YEARS : Destiny Derailed, Then Triumphant : Without Watergate and America’s abdication of its global role, how much sooner would the Soviet debacle have occurred?

Historians will always have difficulty handling the Nixon presidency, and children learning about it in school will be hard put to know what to make of it.

It can be truthfully called both a success and a failure. Richard Nixon came to the White House in 1968 and four years later the voters signified their approval by giving him one of the biggest landslides in American history. As President, he was notable for two foreign-policy achievements. The first was to heal the breach with China that opened when Mao Tse-tung’s Communist Party “stole” (as the expression went) the country in 1949. It was a constructive move in accordance not only with America’s interests, but with the country’s deep-seated emotions. Nixon carried it through with all the skill perfected during 30 years of top-level politics and diplomacy.

Secondly, Nixon extricated the United States from a war in Vietnam that the country had lost the will to win. This was an exercise in Realpolitik , again carried out deftly and on terms that, at the time, were both honorable and offered reasonable guarantees of freedom in the areas America still influenced. It was none of Nixon’s doing that his peace arrangements were engulfed in the wash of Watergate, when Congress in effect took charge of foreign policy, bound Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, hand and foot and forced him to watch helpless as communists overran the whole of Indochina, slaughtering in the process one-third of the population of Cambodia. That was the responsibility of the legislature and of the Democrats who controlled it.

Watergate ended the Nixon presidency in what at the time looked like ignominy. And Watergate dominated political culture in the mid-1970s. Historians will downgrade its importance but they are likely to continue to argue about its exact significance. It can be seen, for instance, as yet another example of the American propensity, first demonstrated in the 17th Century, to conduct public witch hunts, which in the 20th Century are no longer launched on behalf of God Almighty but of the Constitution. There have been witch hunts against the left in 1918-19 and 1946-53. The hunt of Nixon and his staff was against the right, as was the more recent Iran-Contra hunt. These self-righteous persecutions, nominally to preserve national honor and/or security, invariably end in gross personal injustice and, to outsiders, may be the least attractive aspect of American political life. Nixon fell victim to one and that, you may say, was his bad luck. But luck is an important element in politics, in some ways the most important.

Watergate can also be seen as an episode in the battle between the executive and the legislature. America has an idealistic Constitution designed for a country protected from the world by two great oceans. In today’s conditions it is impossible, in practice, for a President to observe it in the spirit and the letter and, at the same time, protect America’s interests in a wicked world. Nixon’s wrongdoings were trivial in comparison with those of such predecessors as Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. But they were Democrats working with a Democratic Congress. If the Republicans had controlled Congress, Nixon would have completed his second term with panache and Watergate would now be a forgotten footnote.

A third way of looking at Watergate is to see it as a media putsch. Nixon and the East Coast media had been at war ever since the late 1940s, and the intervening years had merely strengthened their mutual hatred. He had popularized the term “the silent majority” and successfully appealed to it over the heads of the New York and Washington elites.

In Latin countries it tends to be the armed forces who see themselves as the custodians of national honor, with a right to act if democracy takes a wrong turn. In the United States, the media has a tendency--I put it no more strongly--to take on this role. Its East Coast mandarins saw the 1972 Nixon landslide as a historic disaster and the Watergate scandal gave them a successful opportunity to reverse it.

In my view, all three explanations have some validity, and Watergate should be seen in this trifocal perspective. But it should also be related to what happened later. After Nixon had gone, and for the rest of the 1970s, Congress effectively ran U.S. foreign and defense policy, thus breaking the spirit of the Constitution far more radically than anything Nixon had done. The result was a series of calamities not just for the United States but for the world. With America paralyzed by congressional restrictions, the Soviet Union and its allies took over not only much of Southeast Asia but great parts of Africa too and planted their standards in Central America. Washington’s staunchest ally in West Asia, the Shah of Iran, was deserted and toppled, and America humiliated in Tehran. The last straw came with the prideful Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

At that point, however, the “silent majority” that Nixon had first defined took over America’s destiny again, handsomely returned another Californian, Ronald Reagan, to the White House, reversed the drift to congressional rule and gave the new President the mandate to face up to the “evil empire” that culminated in its disintegration last year. It was one of Reagan’s merits that, as “the Great Communicator” he possessed the instinctive skill not merely to avoid conflict with the media but to make it, in many ways, his willing slave. He deserves credit for bringing the Cold War to a successful conclusion. But it is important to grasp that the Reagan presidency, at any rate in the masterful form it took, would not have been possible without the instinctive admission by the American people that there had been an overreaction to Watergate and that the nation had taken a wrong turn. The support they gave Reagan was their way of signifying, without actually admitting, that they owed Nixon an apology.

The Nixon and Reagan presidencies, therefore, should be seen as a continuum, interrupted by the Ford-Carter interregnum, in which the United States temporarily abdicated its global power only to resume it in 1980 with renewed zest. If Nixon had served his full term, the interregnum would not have occured and the Soviet debacle would have taken place several years earlier. How many innocent lives would thus have been saved is anyone’s guess. But it is some satisfaction that Nixon has survived, in good spirits, to see things come to pass. Historians may well present the Nixon-Reagan era as a unity. What will they call it? “The Age of the California Presidency,” perhaps.