Inauguration Day for New Nixon Legacy : Policy: Former President and top deputies launch O.C. think tank to continue work started 25 years ago.

Former President Richard M. Nixon joined a team of national leaders from a previous generation Thursday to recall the achievements of their White House tenure and to launch a new policy research center that they hope will continue the work they started 25 years ago.

In a garden ceremony held between the presidential library and the tiny white clapboard house where Nixon was born, Cabinet members and officers who served in the White House described the former President as a skillful tactician who shepherded the nation through difficult times and now holds a place as a revered statesman.

The speeches, including three from former secretaries of state and another by ex-President Gerald R. Ford, portrayed the rehabilitation of the only President to resign from office as all but complete and promised a legacy that will be shaped more by achievements than by his role in Watergate.

They said the Center for Peace and Freedom, a new think tank to be headquartered at the library, will preserve Nixon’s place in history as a key player in shaping world events as well as add another voice to the debate over contemporary political issues.

Nixon, appearing healthy and relaxed during a speech he sprinkled with humor, also reflected on the highs and lows of a public career he began in 1947.

“Was it worth it?” he said. “Politics is never going to be heaven, and sometimes it’s hell. But it was worth the trip.”

Even the presence of a small but loud group of protesters, another part of the Nixon legacy, was turned into a joke. “I hope you haven’t been distressed by some of that background noise that we’ve had here,” he said. “I remind our young people out there that I’ve been heckled by experts.”

*

Nixon, who celebrated his 81st birthday earlier this month, told the audience of about 1,000 invited guests that he “is not a fan of think tanks.” But he promised that the Center for Peace and Freedom would have a unique mission.

The $25-million center is scheduled to open later this year with an office in Washington. Organizers hope to move into a permanent headquarters in a new building at the library by 1997.

George L. Argyros, a Newport Beach developer and chairman of the fund-raising effort dubbed “Legacy of Peace,” said, “The center’s goal is to ensure not only that President Nixon’s legacy is remembered . . . but that his uniquely practical approach to the vast complexities of foreign and domestic policy continues to be applied in the uncertain new world we face in the wake of the Cold War.”

While officials stressed that the center will be innovative, activist and fundamentally different from other think tanks, the specifics of how those goals would be accomplished remained hazy Thursday. Also unclear was how active a role the former President is likely to play in guiding its programs and studies.

The center’s president and its board chair are expected to be named by June, with announcements about its staffing, funding and building design to follow, officials said. A former Nixon secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger, said he would serve as an unsalaried member of the center’s board.

At a news conference after the ceremony, Kissinger said the center will be distinct because of its focus on “middle-term problems”--as opposed to short- or long-range issues. He said only government can respond quickly enough for short-term problems and traditional think tanks usually address long-term political issues.

“Our purpose is to create a place where men of ideas and men of action can interact on middle-term problems,” Kissinger said. “How exactly that is going to be done, I cannot pretend we know exactly.”

Kissinger said examples of middle-term problems include the evolving relationships in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and South Africa as well as the emerging roles of Japan and China. Literature for the center said its priority “will be to have an impact on the policy-making process rather than to establish long-term niches for experts or scholars.”

The center plans to establish eight endowed chairs, six focusing on foreign affairs in the Middle East, Europe, Japan and Russia. Two others would research domestic issues.

Thursday was also the 25th anniversary of Nixon’s first inaugural as President. As a result, much of the commentary was nostalgic. At times it almost seemed like a celebrity roast as former Cabinet members looked at Nixon seated in the front row and recalled some of the most important and difficult decisions they shared in the White House.

*

Afterward, Nixon gave a detailed and optimistic speech about the world’s future. He shed the podium used for written text that other speakers had used and talked without notes while he clasped his hands behind his back.

He made several bold predictions, suggesting that the threat of global nuclear war is over and that television’s saturation of the planet has made it impossible for dictators to retain power.

“We have had enormous technological progress,” he said. In the next century, “freedom, political freedom, will be the rule rather than the exception because the communications revolution has had the effect of making dictatorships unviable. They cannot stand having their closed societies open up.”

Nixon was enthusiastic about the rapidly changing new world, cautioning that there are still difficult challenges ahead, but also offering a promising outlook for opportunities that politics made unthinkable during his era.

Nixon almost scolded young people who say this is a hard period in which to grow up. On the contrary, he said, it is the best.

“As we approach a day, the day of a new millennium, I would say you could not possibly think of a day in which one would be more fortunate than to live in the United States of America and on this day, at this time,” he said. “The reason for that is . . . what can be achieved in the future.”

Since he resigned from office nearly 20 years ago, Nixon has been one of the country’s most active ex-Presidents. He has authored nine books and is nearly finished with a 10th. He still travels the globe, talking to foreign leaders, and he writes periodic newspaper columns.

The memory of the Watergate scandal that forced Nixon from office and still deprives his library of the presidential papers provided to other former chief executives will be diminished, if not forgotten, his supporters said. They point to the attention given to his commentary as proof that he will be remembered as a capable and vital national leader.

“I have said publicly, and I have written it, that President Nixon was punished beyond the cause,” Kissinger said. “There were big mistakes made, which he himself has admitted. I believe Watergate will be an insignificant aspect of the Nixon legacy. I believe that President Nixon will go down as one of our eminent Presidents.”

*

Among the invited guests, including many elected leaders and contributors to the library, there were some mixed feelings about the Nixon legacy.

“He is an excellent diplomat; he ended the Vietnam War. That’s what he’ll always be remembered for--right after Watergate,” said Steve Drasil, an associate member of the Nixon library. “That’s something, unfortunately, that will always be in the forefront.”

P Among those who worked in his White House, however, the memories were fond and powerful. They took credit for shaping major national policy and establishing the conditions that led to the end of the Cold War.

“America did not win by default, as some misguided revisionist historians of the Cold War are already claiming,” Ford said. “We resolved to win in this country with sound military and diplomatic policies over a period of four decades. Throughout that era . . . Americans were inspired and led by Richard Nixon. . . . His resolve was to win and the net result was America succeeded.”

Times staff writers Lily Dizon, Matt Lait, Gebe Martinez and Rebecca Trounson contributed to this report.