The Ultimate Verdict Rests With History : Only in years to come may the full story of Richard Nixon be known

In the end, by his own choice, the final honors and tributes that are due a former President were rendered to Richard Nixon in Yorba Linda, in suburban America, far away from the nation’s capital, where the whole of his often tumultuous public life had been spent and where the scene of his greatest humiliation was played out.

Before his fall from office and grace two decades ago Nixon would speak often of his belief in the American dream and hold up his own success in his chosen vocation as proof that the dream was real. It was crowd-pleasing rhetoric, yes, but it was also a statement of proud conviction growing out of his own modest roots and the belief in the rewards of unremitting hard work that he had been taught from childhood. Whatever insecurities and deep hurts may have plagued his life and helped shape his character, Nixon in the end did win much and accomplish much. Whatever violence he did ultimately to his oath of office, there can be no doubt he came to that office determined to use its powers to seek a better world.

Contemporary judgments on public figures seldom prove enduring. Our Presidents especially are subjected to constant analysis and re-evaluation. As the perspective of generations changes, as new archival evidence becomes available, as posthumous memoirs fill in missing details and elucidate obscure events, reputations often rise and sink and sometimes rise again. Nixon certainly will be one of those Presidents about whom a final consensus promises to be elusive.

His life as a public man, from his successful campaign for the House in 1946 through his aborted second term as President, was almost never free from contentiousness. In all that time few politically aware Americans could pretend to be neutral on Nixon. In millions, he inspired sincere admiration and respectful, sometimes even reverent approval and appreciation. In millions of others, he aroused an almost visceral loathing. When he was driven from office in 1974 by the threat of impeachment fewer than one American in four said they still thought well of the man who had been overwhelmingly reelected less than two years earlier. But events recede and memories fade. The decades in retirement--the better part of a generation that has passed since Nixon left Washington in disgrace--saw his reputation considerably restored.

Objective assessments about Nixon are inevitably made harder by the controversy that seemed always to accompany his ascent to power and then his fall. The character of the politician, with its many grievous flaws, unavoidably casts a long shadow over the record of his presidency, with its many admirable achievements. His Administration, as the Watergate scandal and the Oval Office tapes would reveal, may have contained a higher proportion of scoundrels than any since Warren G. Harding’s. But that same Administration also enlisted a large number of gifted, patriotic, clear-thinking policy-makers and doers who were a credit to their country--and to the man who asked them to serve under him. Rightly, much attention has been given to the Nixon Administration’s global vision and its sure hand in the conduct of foreign relations. The domestic policies of that Administration, many of them far more progressive and beneficial than critics at the time were willing to acknowledge, deserve greater attention.

Had he been able to finish his second term Nixon might well have left an enviable record of domestic and international accomplishment. Instead the record was left incomplete, cut short by his own act of political self-destruction. How that came about is generally known; why it happened in many respects remains a puzzle. No doubt many answers lie in the tens of thousands of pages of White House papers and the hundreds of hours of tapes that Nixon fought for 20 years to keep from public scrutiny. With the central figure in that enormous cache now laid to rest, it’s time to open the records and let them shed what light they can on some of the most dramatic years of U.S. history.