The Jury Is Still Out on Nixon’s Place in History : Politics: Writers and academicians are as conflicted in their views as was the former President’s own career.

“History will make the final judgment,” Richard Nixon wrote in his memoirs after his forced resignation from the presidency. “I do not fear that judgment.”

But the verdict of historians emerging since Nixon’s death last week has been as conflicted as Nixon’s own career.

“Everything he will be remembered for, you can take two views on,” said Stephen Ambrose, one of his biographers. “He opened the door to China, but he was the guy who kept it closed for 20 years. He ended the war in Vietnam, but he kept it going for four years and took a deal that he might have been able to get in 1969.”

Said Princeton University presidential scholar Fred Greenstein: “He was a genuinely tragic figure whose strengths were the counter-part of his weaknesses.” Nixon’s pragmatic flexibility, many scholars believe, helped him pursue the policy goals of his presidency. But the same inclination, transformed into unprincipled opportunism, led to his downfall.

Most historians agree that the clues to Nixon’s triumphs and failures are rooted in the twists and turns of his character. And they point out that Nixon compounded these complexities by continually reinventing himself, seeking to soften the harsh edges of his public profile as he climbed the political ladder.

“There was always a ‘new Nixon,’ ” said Vanderbilt University presidential scholar Erwin Hargrove, using a phrase that became one of the great cliches of American political history as journalists sought to record Nixon’s recurring metamorphoses.

“He was the classic archetype of the politician who is always looking for the main chance.”

Far from being content--as he had implied in his memoirs--to wait passively for history to assess his career, Nixon launched the ultimate exercise in self-transformation after his resignation. For two decades he churned out books on international affairs, toured world capitals and made himself discreetly available as unofficial presidential adviser, all the while trying to create one final “new Nixon,” the global elder statesman.

It was an effort crowned with triumph on the evening of his death, when Democratic President Clinton delivered a glowing tribute to the late Republican ex-President, scarcely hinting that anything untoward had occurred during Nixon’s tenure.

Nixon also did what he could to cultivate selected biographers. To a longtime British friend, Conservative member of Parliament Jonathan Aitken, Nixon granted, according to Aitken’s publisher, “unprecedented access” to his private papers.

The result: A just-published biography, “Nixon, A Life,” which views Nixon as having “a strong claim to being America’s finest foreign policy President of the 20th Century.” Aitken concludes that Nixon “has consistently charted his course toward the horizons of high ideas and great achievements that have featured in his dreams since childhood.”

“I think he has driven his stock as high as it can go,” said historian Michael Beschloss, who specializes in international affairs. “And much higher than many of us would have imagined.”

Beschloss said Nixon got a big assist from his successor, Gerald R. Ford. “Had Ford used his pardon power to extract from Nixon an admission of guilt,” Beschloss said, historian Paul Johnson would not have been able to dismiss Watergate as “a media putsch.”

As it is, Nixon’s record does not lack for praise among scholars. “I think he left the country a better place,” said Brookings Institution visiting fellow Charles O. Jones, citing Nixon’s achievements in foreign policy and his efforts to consolidate the reforms of the Great Society at home.

“He should be remembered for being the most important American politician of the postwar period,” said John Robert Greene of Cazenovia College, author of “The Limits of Power,” an analysis of the Nixon and Ford presidencies.

He praised Nixon not only for ending the U.S. role in the Vietnam War and establishing relations with China, but for shepherding advances in Southern school desegregation with minimal violence.

“In the 20th Century, no government ever survived losing a war,” Ambrose said. “The Kaiser couldn’t do it, Mussolini couldn’t do it, Gorbachev couldn’t do it. But Nixon did it. He got us out of the Vietnam War without starting a civil war.”

The theme for the Nixon presidency, in Ambrose’s view, is one of lost opportunity. After his 1972 reelection landslide, Nixon announced an ambitious program for a “new American revolution.”

“He aimed very high and was brought down by his own failures,” Ambrose said.

Nixon gained the admiration, however grudging, of some self-described political liberals such as American University historian Michael Kazin. “Nixon should be given more credit as a political innovator,” Kazin said. He argues that many prevailing conservative assumptions attributed to President Ronald Reagan really have their roots in the Nixon presidency, “with all his talk about Middle America and the “silent majority.”

While Kazin concedes that Watergate contributed to public cynicism, he contends that the scandal that brought down Nixon’s presidency is now just a blurred memory. “If you ask most people, ‘What’s Watergate?’ now, especially people under 40, they wouldn’t have much idea.”

His sentiments are shared by Ohio University’s Alonzo Hamby, who said: “As long as you have people writing history who remember Nixon, they are going to be pretty tough on him. . . . But 100 years from now, when historians rank him, my guess is they will find it hard to understand what Watergate was all about.”

But the University of Wisconsin’s Stanley Kutler, author of “The Watergate Wars,” offered a contrary view.

“History weeds out the major from the minor and makes its decision,” he said in an interview from London, where he was participating in a BBC 20th-anniversary retrospective on Watergate.

“If a history professor 100 years from now asks what was the significance of Richard Nixon, the class will have to tell him that he was the first President to resign.”

Meanwhile, Kutler is not enthusiastic about Nixon’s rehabilitation. “In the eyes of many people, Richard Nixon has recovered his reputation,” he said. “Unfortunately, the presidency has not. It still suffers from the cynicism which is the legacy of Watergate.”

Nixon’s critics also deride the contention, advanced by some of his defenders, that Watergate was simply part of the rough and tumble of American politics.

“To say that a President covering up a crime is the way politics is played is on its face preposterous,” said Franklin D. Roosevelt biographer James MacGregor Burns, who has himself run for Congress. “You do all sorts of things in politics, but you don’t cover up a crime.”

Whether or not he was responsible for the initiation of Reagan-era conservatism, as Kazin suggests, other scholars note that Nixon’s own stewardship was marked by policies far more liberal than those advocated by his party’s leadership today.

A self-described believer in Keynesian economics, Nixon strengthened the federal role in protecting the environment. And, with the aid of White House Counselor Daniel Patrick Moynihan--now a Democratic senator from New York--he proposed the Family Assistance Plan to guarantee a minimum income to all families with children.

His most severe critics fault him not so much for his policies as for his principles and his psyche. Unlike Woodrow Wilson, for whom he professed great admiration, “Nixon had no moral foundation, a set of personal beliefs that guided him,” said Vanderbilt’s Hargrove. “Wilson had a vision of a good society, but Nixon’s only vision was of himself as a great man.”

Hargrove recalled a Nixon story told to him by a friend, an official in Nixon’s Administration who met with the President to tell him he was resigning.

“ ‘What you have to do now is go out and make a lot of money,’ ” he said Nixon advised him.

“A President should not talk that way,” the official told Hargrove.

“There was something about Nixon that was coarse and vulgar, not only in his style, but in his fundamental values,” Hargrove said.

The University of Wisconsin’s Thomas Reeves, author of critical biographies of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and President John F. Kennedy, said that he gives Nixon credit for being “a rags-to-riches boy,” adding that the former President “had a good mind and he worked very hard.”

But Reeves contends Nixon’s rise to the presidency was aided early on by redbaiting and ultimately by misleading the country about his plans to end the Vietnam War. “Every step of his life was dogged with immoral and cynical conduct,” he said.

Burns and other critics contend that Nixon suffered primarily from a lack of self-esteem, a trait that contributed heavily to his downfall by leading him to excesses as he tried to defend himself against his enemies, real and imagined.

“He was interested primarily in himself,” said Hargrove, who contends Nixon’s self-absorption and sense of destiny led him to install the infamous White House taping system, which eventually sealed his doom as President.

“He was going to write his own history and use the tapes so his critics could not dispute him. That’s why he did not destroy the tapes. It was impossible for him, psychologically, because his own destiny was too important to him.”

* FUNERAL PLANS: President Clinton schedules a short visit for Nixon rites. A8