PERSPECTIVE ON RICHARD M. NIXON : A Major Leader, a Double Standard : Nixon’s profound achievement, for which he should be celebrated, was breaking the back : of the Cold War.

The man seemed to me so awkward, even insecure. We did a box-step as he welcomed me into his office and I wondered if he was one of those who felt that a proper distance from others would prevent catching the common cold. He was friendly enough, speaking about his daughter, whom I knew, and mentioning surfing in California, which neither of us really cared about.

Clearly, the preliminary chitchat was not his thing, and so we soon settled into an intense discussion, for almost three hours, about what ails the world. Suddenly, Richard M. Nixon was brilliant and in every way self-assured.

That was 1984, 10 years after he was hounded out of office, but boy, could he hold forth. Pick a spot anywhere on the map, from Beirut to Kansas City, and he knew the players, the issues and the likely result. Even more obvious, if surprising to his critics, was how consistently reasonable and moderate he was. He had been around the block more than a few times, and whatever venom might have once been suggested, say in his earliest campaigns, was long gone.

Now, of course, there will be no shortage of people to praise Nixon, but I have long had a soft spot for the man, thinking him attacked more for quirks of personality than for errors of policy. Indeed, the occasion of our visit was an article I had written for The Times suggesting that a revisionist view of the Nixon presidency was overdue.

He wrote, thanking me for the article--which he termed “very objective,” despite the harsh quotes from critics--and agreed to my request for an interview. I had wanted to talk with him because, in forced retirement, he had re-emerged as a force for sanity and peace in the midst of a degenerating Cold War.

He had written a book called “The Real Peace,” which defended his policy of detente with the Soviet Union and urged caution on the Reagan Administration, which was developing the potentially destabilizing nuclear-shield notion of “Star Wars.”

Nixon clearly recognized the danger in this approach. As I reported, the former President “urged the United States and the Soviet Union to share research on ‘Star Wars’ missile systems because otherwise, such defensive systems could fuel fears that they might be used as a ‘shield’ for a nuclear first strike.” It did not bother him that this was also the Soviet position at the time. But then again, being soft on communism was not an easy charge to level against this onetime ally of Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Say what you will, Nixon was also a statesman who knew that in the end there was no recourse but diplomacy, since there was no such thing as winnable nuclear war.

You have to recall the nuclear-war-fighting climate of the early 1980s to understand why I wanted to cheer when he said, speaking of nuclear warheads, “When you have 10,000 of these damn things, there is no defense.” Not everyone, President Reagan included, seemed to grasp that.

At the time, Nixon looked good not only to me but to George McGovern, his Democratic opponent in the 1972 campaign who had as much right to hold a grudge as anyone. But McGovern was always a serious person, and as he told me then: “In dealing with the two majorcommunist powers, Nixon probably had a better record then any President since World War II.” Nixon, added McGovern, “Put us on the course to practical working relationships with both the Russians and Chinese.”

Because of the back-channel negotiations, Henry Kissinger is often given the credit for the historic opening to China. But the record is quite clear that the courageous proposal to acknowledge that the true government of China was in Beijing and not Taipei was Nixon’s. He advanced this course in an article in Foreign Policy magazine in 1967, before he had ever met the man who would end up as his top gun on foreign policy.

Little noticed for all the reporting on the voluminous documents released from the Nixon archives, which overwhelmingly stress indications of personal instability and highlight profanity, is the fact that they prove that Nixon and not Kissinger ran foreign policy. It was Nixon who decided to be the first U.S. President to visit Jerusalem, and it was Nixon who first treated Arab leaders as more than caricatures.

Nixon was a true visionary along the lines of Woodrow Wilson. But instead of projecting a messianic role for this country, Nixon understood the “limits of power” of the United States in the emerging multipolar world; he detailed this notion in his “Nixon Doctrine” speech.

Still, he made his mistakes. Some, like extending the Vietnam War to Cambodia, extracted a horrible human price. But it was neither Nixon nor the Republicans who started that war, and it was Nixon who ended it.

Watergate revealed a mentality all too willing to sabotage the spirit of democracy, but no more so than Lyndon Johnson’s persistent lying about Vietnam or Ronald Reagan’s stonewalling on Iran-Contra. Every modern President has used the claim of national security to stay in office, democracy be damned.

Nixon was subjected to a double standard, being judged much more harshly because he was, by virtue of personality, the anti-Teflon President, with every bit of the normal dirty grease of government sticking to the media perception of his essential soul.

Face it: Reporters, including many Republican ones, never liked Nixon. He was inaccessible, quirky, devious and in most of his mannerisms light years away from the breezy style and the prevalent, if not always genuine, bonhomie of our world.

Awkward he may have been, but I believe in the end he was at peace with himself. And so should we be in acknowledging one of the major leaders of our time, remembering the bold achievements and putting into perspective his contradictions.

Be charitable, not as an act of kindness, but in the interest of accuracy. Nixon had his failings, and we in the media made much of them. But remember that Franklin Delano Roosevelt betrayed European Jewry all the way to the crematories and that Lyndon Johnson dropped more explosives on Vietnam in immoral spite than were targeted against the Germans in a war that made perfect moral sense.

But they were both important Presidents because of the other things they did, like getting us out of the Depression and acknowledging civil rights. No less an achievement was Nixon’s in breaking the back of the Cold War. We may owe our lives to it.