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Listen to 1968 Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey talking about the 'new' Nixon

In the wake of Watergate and Nixon's subsequent rehabilitation, many of those memorialising the President on his death drew attention to his political longevity and ability for reinvention in his later years. But in the years leading up to his successful bid for the presidency in 1968, Nixon demonstrated a similar capacity for survival and reinterpretation.

Quite literally, in 1968, Nixon was the only candidate left standing in the race for the presidency. Within the space of five years, John Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy had both been assassinated, the younger brother during his campaign for the '68 election. The Republican party tore itself apart in 1964 between the opposite ideological directions of Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater. Four years later the Democrats committed the same act, with Lyndon Johnson crippled by the war in Vietnam, and the McCarthy, Humphrey and extremist George Wallace voters further splitting the traditional Democrat bloc. Outside party politics, social upheaval was even more widespread. As Haynes Johnson says, "The 1968 presidential year was the most destructive in American history."

Nixon himself took lessons from 1960 and 1962, and instituted a campaign apparatus that was far more professional and media-savvy than that which produced the infamous defeats of a few years earlier. Far from the unshaven, brooding, resentful candidate of 1960 and the embittered loser of 1962, the "new" Nixon: "had come to office in a time of chaos and promised calm. After a period of irrationality, of wars and riots and assassinations, he pledged reason and peace and stability."

Viewed from this 'new' perspective, as many of his obituaries do, Richard Nixon's presidency seems a successful six years. As many observers now acknowledge, Nixon made great advances in both foreign affairs and domestic policy. Michael Beschloss, although simplifying the points for his mass-audience, notes that "Scholars sensitive to the constraints on the powers of the modern president now give Nixon high marks for his ability to form coalitions to get bills passed in a Democratic Congress", and "in recent years, one of the growth stocks among historians and political scientists has been Nixon-as-domestic activist. In the light of his party's later shift to the right, such Nixon first-term innovations as the Environmental Protection Agency, food stamp reform, the 18-year-old vote and ending of the draft have won him admirers..." And of course his greatest achievements were in foreign policy: "Now few will quibble with the notion that as a foreign policy leader, Nixon was far more creative than Eisenhower or Bush, far more knowing and consistent than Kennedy or Carter, far more in command than Ford or Reagan."

But the black-mark on all these achievements, the persistent negative in all this adding up of Nixon's successes, remains Watergate. His death has seen a kind of evening out of Nixon's legacy, where Watergate still exists, but is somehow balanced by his domestic and foreign policy achievements and subsequent rehabilitation. What has to be remembered is that each of Nixon's achievements was itself dogged by controversy. Certainly Nixon ended the draft, but escalated the war in Vietnam and began a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia. He may have been a 'domestic activist' at the time, but he also stacked the Supreme Court with conservative judges that continue to have an impact to this day. The 18 year-old vote seems less important when contrasted against the widespread disaffection of young people throughout Nixon's presidency, including mass protests and the killing of students by the National Guard at Kent State. 
 
 
 

Listen to 1968 candidate Nixon attack the Democrat record
 

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