With the death of Richard M. Nixon, it's time for some national forgiving and forgetting. In fact, this healing process should have been completed long ago.
In fairness, many Americans have indeed done just that. But a hard core of rancor and bitterness persists because too many Americans still think of Nixon almost entirely in terms of the Watergate scandal.Witness the many obituaries and commentaries that insist on rehashing and reanalyzing Watergate at great length as if there were anything new to be said about it. This despite the kind remarks about Nixon on his passing even from members of the former Senate Watergate Committee. This despite the observation of Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor whom Nixon fired, that Nixon's death "does not merit getting back into any of that."
Yes, it was a scandal of historic proportions, having forced him to become the only U.S. president to resign his office to avoid impeachment. Yes, Watergate brought this nation to the brink of a constitutional crisis. Yes, its end result was to alter the balance of power between Congress and the White House by weakening the presidency. Yes, Nixon could have speeded the healing process himself if only he had publicly admitted his mistakes and apologized.
What's more, the burglary of Democratic national headquarters was bred in a malignant atmosphere of paranoia fostered by Nixon. The subsequent efforts at a coverup reflected shamefully on Nixon's character as well as his judgment.
But all this should be well-known by now, and dwelling on it serves no useful purpose. What's appropriate is a calm and balanced assessment of the nation's 37th president, one that takes into account Nixon's many strengths and accomplishments as well as his well-known weaknesses and failings.
Foremost among his strengths was the resiliency that enabled Nixon to rebound from election losses and other setbacks throughout his career, including the one that nearly deprived him of the vice presidency during the Eisenhower administration. To a surprising extent, he also rebounded from the political exile that followed Watergate.
Foremost among his accomplishments were a number of Nixon-engineered breakthroughs in foreign policy that helped make the world a safer place.
Having inherited the no-win war in Vietnam, he finally managed to drag America out of that quagmire without a victory but at least with some of its integrity intact.
As the first U.S. president to visit both China and the Soviet Union, he helped end Beijing's long political isolation and started the promising process by which Washington and Moscow are reducing their overgrown nuclear stockpiles.
His appointment of four justices to the U.S. Supreme Court helped move that tribunal away from verdicts that reflected its members' personal preferences rather than the principles of the Constitution.
After leaving the White House, he eventually became one of the world's leading elder statesmen - one whose advice was valued by Democratic and Republican U.S. presidents alike as well as by leaders in Europe and Asia.
In the last years of his life, Nixon took a special interest in encouraging the development of democracy in Russia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he lobbied avidly for more U.S. aid to Moscow and was credited with helping persuade Congress to grant such aid. Just last month Nixon visited Russia and started building bridges between the U.S. and those who might one day replace Boris Yeltsin as leader of the former superpower.
Much more could be said about this highly accomplished but deeply flawed man, Richard Milhous Nixon. Suffice it to say that two decades is much too long to keep reviling him. Through his long period of disgrace and through his many acts of public service, Nixon has gone a long way toward paying his debt to society. There's ample reason to think history will judge him much more kindly than some of his contemporaries did.