(3 of 3)
Nixon seems to destroy himself every so often in order to keep fighting. Able to live without friends, but not without enemies, he needed Helen Gahagan Douglas, the cloth coat, the Checkers speech, the 1960 defeat -- and maybe even Watergate. It is not the desire to scale great heights that gets Nixon up in the morning and sends him to his New Jersey office, where he waits for the phone to ring and tries to peddle op-ed pieces on geopolitics; it is the need to claw his way out of a dark hole of his own digging.
While other former Presidents are content to do good works, serve on boards and play golf, Nixon, like the Energizer bunny, just goes on and on and on. At the Nixon library in Yorba Linda, Calif., beside the small, white frame farmhouse where Nixon was born, a movie called Never Give Up: Richard Nixon in the Arena runs continuously in the 293-seat theater. It's a reel he plays over and over in his own mind.