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Richard Nixon, having left the presidency in disgrace, cannot very well fall any lower in history's regard. He may have trouble improving his rating, however, if new tidbits keep coming from the famous tapes. For unreconstructed Nixon-haters it must have seemed like old times when the New York Times recently ran a front-page story quoting Nixon and H.R. Haldeman as planning to use "thugs" from the Teamsters Union to beat up on antiwar demonstrators. There was the further bonus in the transcript of a flagrantly anti-Semitic innuendo from Nixon.
Nixon's big moves in foreign policy were the most spectacular in a quarter-century. He and Kissinger made the historic opening to China, proclaimed detente with the Soviets and negotiated SALT I, and broke through the Arab front to do business with Anwar Sadat. At the least, these will always be remembered as bold initiatives, whether for long-term good or ill we cannot be sure—the returns are not in yet.
It is doubtful that historians will ever take a more kindly view of Watergate than Congress and the public did in 1974. But the sheer passage of time should do something for the man—the occasional chance for a speech or interview, a dignified mission like the Sadat funeral, a newspaper photo with his attractive children and grandchildren.
Aging was wonderful medicine for one President who left office widely despised: Herbert Hoover. He was 59 in 1933; the Depression shantytowns all over America were called Hoovervilles. By the time he died at 90 he was a Grand Old Man. Harry Truman, for all his fierce partisanship, had done much to rehabilitate Hoover, appointing him chairman of a well-publicized commission on Government reorganization. Historians would never come to credit Hoover with effective measures against the Depression, but people had long since stopped thinking he had caused it. On into his 80s, pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, he gave stout Republican speeches at Republican conventions, puffed on his pipe and wrote some rather mellow reminiscences, including a volume on trout fishing.
Professor Henry Graff of Columbia points out that in the 19th century most Americans had only the vaguest idea what their President looked like. Today everyone can "see" the President practically every day. We now know so much about the man while he is in office, and about his career before he got there, that it might seem there is nothing left for "history" to say. But in this age of paper and microfilm, Government and its officials are generating documentation at a prodigious rate. As scholars mine all this material (some of it under security restrictions for 20 years or more), as reminiscences of presidential intimates become available, as diaries and letters come to light, presidential ratings will continue to fluctuate.
Above all, new events, new conditions, will impose new judgments. A greater awareness of the stubbornness of some of the national problems, of the tendency of so many solutions to breed new problems, can lead to a kindly view of those Presidents who, all in all, leave things slightly better or at least no worse than they found them. But it takes decades before it can be certified that this was indeed the effect of somebody's presidency.