25 Years After Fall, Nixon Still a Puzzle

Passion drew Charlotte Irons to the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station on a summer morning 25 years ago today, joining 3,000 other people who watched Richard Nixon as he stepped off Air Force One for the last time.

“I was not there for the same reason 95% of the people were there,” recalled Irons, 49, a former McGovern activist who now lives in New Mexico. “I was there to see the king fall.”

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the first--and so far, only--time that an American president walked away from the Oval Office in the middle of a term. And when Nixon walked away, he settled into the supportive embrace of Orange County, home of his childhood, exiling himself among the conservative voters and moneyed power brokers who helped launch his political career nearly 30 years earlier.

The exile didn’t last long--about five years. But it helped refresh the connections between Orange County and Nixon as he holed up in La Casa Pacifica, the former Western White House overlooking the ocean in San Clemente, to write his memoirs, walk the beach and plan his own public rehabilitation, which he embarked upon when he left Orange County for good in 1979 to return to the East Coast.

The indignity of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation still fans outrage among supporters who gave Nixon his start in politics, electing him in 1946 to Congress, then cheering him on as he moved fully onto the national stage as vice president and, finally, president.

“They still throw it in Nixon’s face, and he’s been dead for five years now,” said Jean Williams of Anaheim, who was also in the El Toro crowd the day Nixon began his San Clemente exile. “It continues to this day. They still use Nixon as a whipping boy.”

But not as often. In one sense, the shadow of Watergate has faded in the light of more recent scandals, from Iran-Contra during the Reagan administration to President Clinton’s infidelities. The emotions aren’t as sharp as they once were.

“When I hear Nixon speaking on TV [on tape], I don’t feel that passion to get up and turn the knob,” Irons said. “Looking at him, it doesn’t nauseate me the way it did. I think he has gained some of his prestige back.”

That’s been the conundrum for Nixon haters. As much a yo-yo as a politician, every trip downward for Nixon was followed by an ascent.

Despite his redbaiting tactics early in his career, history remembers Sen. Joseph McCarthy as the bully of the day, not Nixon. After petulantly declaring in 1962, after losing the California governor’s race to Pat Brown, that “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore . . ,” Nixon came back with a vengeance, winning the White House six years later.

And even after leaving the presidency in disgrace, when Nixon died five years ago, he was, in the eyes of many, an elder statesman.

But not in the eyes of all.

“Unfortunately, the things we remember are the lies,” said Mary Philipp of Scottsdale, Ariz., who spent a morning last week perusing the Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda, a sprawling testimony to what Nixon’s supporters see as his greatness--but which downplays the pitfalls of his presidency.

One room features the young Nixon’s boyhood home in Yorba Linda, in the wood-frame farmhouse preserved elsewhere on the grounds, before his father moved the family to Whittier when Nixon was 9. Nixon’s parents are believed to have bought the 900-square-foot two-bedroom home through the Sears, Roebuck catalog.

Throughout the ornate library, Nixon’s political career dominates the exhibits, a winding trail of congressional and Senate campaigns. It also shows Nixon on the national level, with the foreign trips that helped him develop the policy expertise that even some of his detractors recognize as his biggest strength.

The Normalization of Relations With China

Philipp, in fact, holds the normalizing of relations with China as Nixon’s premier accomplishment.

“He should go down as one of the best presidents we’ve had for foreign policy,” she said.

“I don’t think [Watergate] has a relevancy today, other than as a lesson in presidential morality and stupidity,” added her husband, Dr. John Philipp, citing Nixon’s political popularity at the time of the Watergate break-in, and his subsequent failure to deal with the issue in what most people would consider a forthright manner. “It was so stupid, and it destroyed the man and the presidency.”

But even memories of Watergate are starting to fade.

Two years ago, an Associated Press survey found that 25 years after the initial Watergate break-in, in which members of Nixon’s reelection campaign staff organized a burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, 53% of respondents did not feel they knew enough about the scandal’s basic facts to explain them to someone else.

Yet 59% of the respondents felt Nixon’s actions warranted his resignation, even though 69% of the respondents didn’t think Watergate was worse than scandals that have erupted since then.

Donald Segretti, who served 4 1/2 months in prison for his role in a secret campaign to discredit Nixon opponents during the 1972 campaign, believes the scandal’s role as a measuring stick grew from the “commercialization” of Watergate.

“Watergate came at a time in history where communications became so easy and interconnected and instant that it was [magnified],” said Segretti, a Newport Beach resident who practices law in Irvine. “It was really the first scandal that was in such an era, and that gave it a particularly strong impact.”

Part of Watergate’s legacy will be measured by the scandals that followed.

“There are still ardent Nixon haters, as well as supporters of the former president,” Segretti said. “More importantly, there is an entire generation for whom Watergate is not all that significant. One can’t help but wonder if the press will write this kind of article on the 25th anniversary of the voting of articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton.”

John H. Taylor, director of the Nixon Library and a vocal defender of the former president, blames liberal media and educators for perpetuating images of Nixon as a fallen man--unfair and unrealistic portrayals, in Taylor’s eye.

“We don’t yet have a clear picture what happened during those years, nor do we have a fair picture of President Nixon as a president, as a man and as a commander-in-chief,” Taylor said.

Taylor argues that the biggest legacy of Nixon’s resignation was the ensuing failure of Congress to continue to aid South Vietnam in fighting off the communist North Vietnamese, leading to the fall of Saigon in 1975.

“We tend to see that era through the haze of retro Volkswagen ads and the culture of the ‘70s, and we fail to confront our failure to have met our responsibilities in the world,” Taylor said. “What permits that generation to set aside taking a second look at its decisions is that it has a scapegoat--none other than Richard Nixon. This is not to say that Nixon made no mistakes. It is to say that there is so much focus on Watergate because it is the process by which a generation absolves itself for its own excesses.”

Others, though, argue that Watergate itself was the result of excesses. And that it underscores the argument that “there is some link between the private and public person,” said Victor Navasky, publisher of The Nation.

“Nixon made his way to the top in a particularly ruthless way that left human casualties along the way, through his playing this redbaiting game,” Navasky said. “And that had to do with questions of character in a very deep and profound way that eventually expressed themselves in his conduct of public affairs.

“To me, the [impeachment] case against Clinton was cooked up--not that he should have done any of those things--and the case for impeaching Nixon was authentic,” Navasky said. Watergate is “still relevant. When a president abuses his powers, then the people can prevail.”

Times librarians Sheila A. Kern and Lois Hooker contributed to this report.