ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Nixon’s Final Trip Home

Former President Richard Nixon, born poor in Yorba Linda and hewed in the conservative politics of his day, makes a final homecoming today to Orange County. His body is scheduled to arrive at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station before lying in state at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda, with the funeral Wednesday.

Nixon and the county of his birth had a long association that brought world attention to San Clemente during the White House years and thereafter, and renewed interest with the opening of the library and more recent announcement of plans for a think tank. When you consider the length of his life, Nixon did not spend a great deal of his time in Orange County, but there was an important relationship renewed at key turns. It was the place that met Robert Frost’s test of home after Nixon resigned the presidency: the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Nixon’s place of origin, his sanctuary and now his final resting place was--over his years on the world stage--in the end as transformed as he was. It became a place of suburban tracts and office complexes, of people and firms thinking and acting globally.

In his final book, Nixon said that “the art of national unity” must be practiced in the United States; today that it is as much a challenge for the once-homogenous county, now a place of many nationalities, as for any place on the American landscape. The man and point of origin had by a life’s end evolved beyond the limited perspectives of earlier decades.

And so, by the conclusion of Nixon’s life, both he and Orange County defied the easy political stereotypes and categorization. Each had been changed from a striking national symbol of arch-conservatism into something more complex, if not quite yet completely defined.