WHEN HE resigned as president in 1974, he flew back to California in disgrace. People who saw him in the first few months reported him as depressed and possibly even suicidal.
It didn't last long. When Richard Nixon passed away last week, the laudatory comments from both Republicans and Democrats suggested that he was dangerously close to being canonized. There is something about death that creates the need to say only nice things about the person who just died.It is human nature.
So we can forgive the temptation to speak of Nixon as if he were "the seminal figure of American foreign policy," or "the pre-eminent political figure of the 20th century."
I don't believe those exaggerated epitaphs, although I will miss Nixon, too, in my own way. I have enjoyed teaching about him in American political history courses for a generation. His legacy is fascinating because it was so contradictory.
Yet, while he was president, he made my skin crawl with his graceless style and his carelessness with the truth. I thought he was the most amazingly uncomfortable man in his own body I had ever seen.
I was amazed at how marvelously inept he was in the maudlin yet classic "Checkers Speech," when he tried to explain a political slush fund that threatened to jeopardize his standing as vice presidential nominee on the 1952 Republican ticket.
Checkers was a little cocker spaniel - a gift from a constituent - a gift Nixon said he would never return. The speech attracted the largest TV audience up to that time.
In it, he used his wife as a prop.
"I should say this, that Pat doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her that she would look good in anything."
As awkward as it sounds now, it worked. He stayed on the ticket.
I couldn't believe it when he lost the California governorship after already losing the presidency to Jack Kennedy - and pouted like a child, castigating the press with "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference."
Not quite. Six years later he was elected president.
Yes, there was no one quite like Nixon. He was the only American other than Franklin D. Roosevelt to have been nominated on five national tickets, to run for president or vice president.
But he was a tragic figure. Henry Kissinger once said to journalist Hugh Sidey, "Can you imagine what Nixon would have been had somebody loved him? . . . He would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him."
He had notable resilience. He wrote books, traveled to foreign countries and advised presidents, becoming an elder statesman, capable of dispensing legitimate wisdom.
I liked him much better that way. But his most revealing comment may be one he made in his book "Six Crises," about the president he served as vice president, Dwight Eisenhower: "He was a far more complex and devious man than most people realized, and in the best sense of those words."
Such a statement is probably more accurate about Nixon than about Eisenhower, for Nixon was described variously by associates and historians as tortured, secretive, vindictive - and uniquely lacking in a moral compass.
His political impact was stunning - but he was a deeply flawed man. We said it when he was alive. It's OK to say it when he's dead.