Like more than a few Americans of my generation, I learned to despise Richard Nixon around the same time I learned to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
Yet now, nearly 40 years later, an America without Richard Nixon seems inconceivable and unimaginable, an emptier place. When his stroke hit, it was possible not only to root for him to live but to feel genuine loss at the prospect of his imminent death.Not because he can be likened to his hero, Theodore Roosevelt, or even his unenthusiastic ticket mate, Dwight Eisenhower. Far from it: Nixon was the historical black hole into which the higher dreams of the assassinated Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr. disappeared.
But as a cultural archetype who inspired and inflamed the American imagination for a half century, Richard Nixon was a giant, right up there with Billy the Kid, Citizen Kane and Moby Dick.
No wonder he drove major writers such as Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and Robert Coover to imaginative feats. Reading Gore Vidal on Nixon is akin to reading Shaw on Shakespeare.
"In Nixon we are able to observe our faults larger than life," Vidal wrote in 1983. "He turned being a Big Loser into a perfect triumph by managing to lose the presidency in a way bigger and more original than anyone else had ever lost it before."
The faults that defined the Nixon character include hypocrisy, paranoia, cynicism, spitefulness and self-pity.
Open Bartlett's to the Nixon entry and you will not find many patriotic epigrams but lines like "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore" and "Well, I'm not a crook" and "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."
A tour through "Safire's New Political Dictionary" reveals the extraordinary Nixon legacy to American politics, from the dawn of spin doctoring to the apocalypse of dirty tricks.
His name is cross-referenced with such entries as firestorm, inoperative, bug, chronic campaigner, cover-up, CREEP, enemies list, play in Peoria, plumber, Saturday Night Massacre, slush fund, smoking gun, stonewalling, used car salesman, "nobody drowned at Watergate" and "twisting slowly, slowly in the wind."
So enormous were the passions he provoked that Nixon became an almost geographical pole in the American psychic landscape, analogous to the rootless Southern California that spawned him. He was the darkest doppelganger against which we measured ourselves.
And not just in weighty matters of ethics or conscience. A generation of American boys learned the importance of a close shave thanks to his famous debacle in the first 1960 debate.
Nixon's legendarily hapless escapades in romance (courting his future wife by driving her to dates with other beaux) and comic self-promotion (his "Sock it to me!" cameo on "Laugh In") defined the antithesis of cool.
When Nixon left the White House in disgrace in 1974, he said: "Those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself."
But his hatred of his enemies was precisely what led to the self-destruction of Watergate. Did a final new Nixon emerge in retirement, mellower and wiser than the disgraced politician? Let history decide.
What is certain is that many of his foes finally surrendered their own hatred - if not to forgive, then at least to respect his remarkable persistence and towering size.
For an American who came of age with him in the second half of the 20th century, making peace with Richard Nixon proved in the end an essential part of growing up.