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Richard Nixon was written off many times as a politician, and each time he came back as a 'new' improved candidate. Even his death - the ultimate setback - occassioned yet another transformation of the man into a new historical image. In many of the obituaries, it seems that his final passing provided one more opportunity for rehabilitation, as it was an occassion for forgiveness and reflection rather than more analytical criticism.

Even Nixon's most aggressive critic, Hunter S. Thompson, finds it hard to maintain the rebukes in the face of nostalgia, "Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer for it." His obituary for the president attempts to display the greatest disrespect for Nixon, "If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles," but one gets the sense these overwrought attacks are more for old-times sake, almost a fond farewell for the years they shared as politician and journalist in national politics: "I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years..."

As Thompson admits in an odd nationalistic turn of phrase, which he also uses as his headline, for all Nixon's controversies, this was "the body of the man who was, after all the President of the United States."

The sense that Nixon was part of a larger national narrative - a member of the institution of the presidency, despite his faults - was typified in his actual funeral. As Henry Kissinger noted at the time, "Richard Nixon would be so proud that President Clinton and all living former Presidents of the United States are here, symbolizing that his long and sometimes bitter journey had concluded in reconciliation." Although there was no official ceremony in Washington, President Clinton "had made an Air Force plane available to carry the body to the West Coast" from the hospital where he died, according to R.W. Apple. The funeral itself included a series of twenty-one 105mm howitzer blasts. 

This combination of nationalistic symbols - an air force jet, a flag draped coffin, an unbroken line of living presidents, a twenty one gun salute - all represent yet another transformation of Richard Nixon into a 'new' institutionalised figure of American national history.
 
 

View pictures of the funeral at the Nixon Library and Birthplace

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