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Just as Nixon's obituary writers show great admiration for Nixon's reinvention in 1968 as a presidential candidate, and gloss over the defeats and miscalculations that created the need for a 'new' Nixon in the first place, so too do they write glowingly of Nixon's post-Watergate rehabilitation, with little mention of the scandal itself.

From the perspective of 1994, Nixon's twenty year battle to secure a positive assessment from history seems to be an unmitigated success, as many of his obituaries self-fulfillingly describe. Bill Clinton notes the way Nixon apparently rehabilitated himself through the reinterpretation of his own history, in effect pre-empting any assessment of his life by others: "remarkably, he wrote nine of his ten books after he left the Presidency, working his way back into the arena he so loved by writing and thinking and engaging us in his dialogue."

Billy Graham quotes a Time Magazine article on Nixon's death as saying "by sheer endurance he rebuilt his standing as the most important figure of the post-war era."  James M. Perry similarly describes the final reinvention of yet another 'new' Nixon, this time as "a world-traveling author and statesman who in the end softened the memory of the original old Nixon."

But it is also important to note, as some of these obituaries do, that Nixon's rehabilitation was neither steady, nor certain, nor successful for much of his life. Beschloss notes the great irony that the historical documents Nixon had originally planned as the crucial documents in his legacy-making operation - the hours of audio records produced from his wiring of the White House - became "the ticking time bomb of 3,900 hours of White House tapes". As Beschloss points out, against those who laud Nixon's rehabilitation as inexorable and inevitable, "A mid-1970s poll of scholars found Nixon tied with scandal-brushed Warren Harding as the worst president in American history."

According to Haynes Johnson, each time Nixon reappeared in the public eye after Watergate, he "stirred fresh discord" and he was forced to "depart from view" again. Each of his attempts at rehabilitation were dogged by the taint of Watergate, "In June, 1991, for example, The Washington Post's Sunday Outlook section published a lead article by Nixon on U.S.-Soviet relations that showed him most favorably in the role of international savant" but two days later "the National Archives released hours of once-secret tape recordings from the Nixon White House that showed a vengeful, paranoid Nixon lashing out privately at enemies, real or imagined." With more tapes still to be released, the rehabilitation of Richard Nixon, contrary to the beliefs expressed at his funeral, is far from complete.
 
 
 
 

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