THE NIXON YEARS: DOWN FROM THE HIGHEST MOUNTAINTOP

(11 of 11)

shrewdness and intelligence. He consistently misjudged or underestimated the impact of the scandals—as if they were a malevolent illusion summoned up by his enemies. In an extraordinary interview last May with one of his last-ditch supporters, Rabbi Baruch Korff, Nixon indicated that he still had not comprehended his own desperate condition—or even that he had done anything very wrong. "If I were basically a liberal by [the press's] standards, if I had bugged out on Viet Nam, which they wanted," he said, "Watergate would have been a blip."

Nixon's critics, like Nixon, have tended toward overstatement. Poirier sees Nixon as Moby Dick—"a kind of frightening and tantalizing blank (though elemental force) in the political sea." Some think of Hannah Arendt's formula of the banality of evil—which, since it is an echo of her Adolf Eichmann thesis, is an ugly comparison. On the other extreme, Nixon likened himself to Abraham Lincoln. All of that, again, is propaganda—politics as P.R.

History will be forced to "watch what Nixon did." History, of course, has often reversed the verdict of contemporaries. The present verdict, unripened by perspective, is very sharply split. On one side Nixon as a visionary of foreign policy (with Kissinger's indispensable assistance). On the other, Nixon as a strange and solipsistic figure who confused self and office, aggrandizing both to the point that both were ultimately demeaned.

The American dream encouraged Richard Nixon to seize what he could, and what he sought was political power. A difficult and intensely private public man, he performed important services for the U.S. He was a patriot by his own lights but also something of a subversive, for he overstepped the limits of the U.S. Constitution in ways that no President had done before. The Constitution, no more, no less, eventually had the slow, reflexive power to punish him for it.