PERSPECTIVES ON RICHARD NIXON : Ironies Crowd the Statesman’s Bier : He embodied the best and worst of America’s era of transition; we who elected him share his honor and his shame.

In this death of our most famous--our most infamous--recent President, almost everything about him is draped in irony.

We inter Richard Nixon as the familiar fixture of a political era and an enduring, haunting mystery of American leadership.

He was our ceaseless politician for more than half a century, what Lyndon Johnson called “a chronic campaigner,” while a painfully shy human being for whom politics was compulsion and torment. To successive generations he seemed bold, commanding, ruthless, though his private passages were often spent in anxiety, doubt, vacillation.

We insisted on him as a rootless, generic figure, never a part of the landscape as Jefferson belonged to Tidewater, Johnson the Texas Hill Country, Clinton Arkansas. Yet Nixon was our most native President, quintessential son of small-town, middle-class America as it flourished in such caricature in the Southern California of the 1920s and ‘30s.

He spoke, as few other politicians had, for and to that nation in its transient moment of post-war ascendancy. He embodied its hope and intelligence, fear and ignorance, its persistence in any case. In the end, it recognized and denied him, rewarded and punished him, for the reassuring, disturbing reflection he was.

Discreet and somewhat hypocritical eulogies dwell on the cliche of Nixon statesmanship abroad, when his more historic impact was at home. It was he who revolutionized American politics and the electoral map by building the Republican Party in the South on the twin pillars of coded racism and corporate domination. It was he more tellingly than any other who led the red-baiting demagoguery that silenced generations of authentic political discourse in the country and intellectually emasculated the Democrats to this day. It was he who established the manipulative theater of the contemporary presidency, who brought to Washington, as no other chief executive before him, the fatal curse of big money.

While celebrating his diplomatic triumphs--the opening to China, detente with the Soviets--we politely pass over the rest. There was the senseless four years of prolonged slaughter in Vietnam, a plunging of Cambodia into war and genocide, human-rights tragedies from Biafra to Burundi to Bangladesh, CIA overthrow of elected regimes in favor of torturing generals, a lethal neglect of international trade and economics, all that and more. But, then, ritual memories of statesmanship are never made of spindly children or a sea of skulls.

Still, ironies crowd the burial like uninvited guests.

We remember him as a wooden, almost bloodless man. Yet he was the most human of public figures, given to drinking too much in the stress of the presidency, to sophomoric antics with his few close male friends, to both crude vulgarity and courtly evasiveness with those who worked for him. He lived a twisting 56-year love affair with the woman he cloyingly courted, married and emotionally abandoned, then eventually found again in an irreplaceable bond at the close of their lives.

He was toppled by Watergate, by his own ineffable abuses and the pursuit by partisan enemies, though also by hidden machinations in his own regime that even cynical Richard Nixon was loath to see. Our most anti-Establishment politician, he coveted and appropriated the old network and privilege, becoming before it was over an Establishment himself.

Not least, this politician who preferred such secrecy, who tried to conceal so much while hoarding a record of his every word, ended by leaving behind more of himself than any President in American history. Richard Nixon, our favorite enigma, will be pored over by historians amid thousands of hours of Oval Office tapes, millions of memoranda words--a posterity of revelation and judgment all his planning could not have imagined.

But for now, the legacies of the Nixon era seem too raw for candor. He was too much our vessel. If he was capable, so were we. If he lacked character, so did our choice of him. If his inheritance is bitter, so is ours.

He returns to Yorba Linda, where myth and pain began. One thinks of the Quaker poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, in his verse lamenting Daniel Webster’s fall from grace:

Revile him not, the Tempter hath

a snare for all;

And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,

Befit his fall . . .

All else is gone; from those great eyes

The soul has fled;

When faith is lost, when honor dies,

The man is dead!

Then, pay the reverence of old days

To his dead fame;

Walk backward, with averted gaze,

And hide the shame!