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When President Clinton stepped to the podium to give his eulogy to Nixon's turbulent life, he himself had not yet faced impeachment. Yet Clinton already identified with Nixon’s controversy-laden presidency. By early 1994, Clinton, like Nixon, had survived his fair share of falls. Clinton had been elected the youngest ever Governor in his home state of Arkansas in 1978, only to lose the next election and become the youngest ex-governor two years later. Like Nixon, Clinton remade himself, styling himself as the ‘education’ candidate, and securing a second term as governor in 1982. He won again in 1984 and 1986 and in 1992 was elected President.

Clinton clearly saw a lot of himself, the boy from Arkansas made good, in Richard Nixon, as Clinton describes the ‘humble roots’ of his predecessor, born in a tiny home ‘mail-ordered from back East’. This is a detail glossed over by many of Nixon’s eulogisers, including Billy Graham and Bob Dole, but for Clinton, born in the small backwoods town of Hope, Arkansas, it is an important symbol of rising from poverty.

Clinton makes more explicit comparisons between himself and Nixon in his emphasis of their common presidential accomplishments. He singles out for mention the smaller domestic achiements of Nixon’s presidency, “from cancer research to environmental protection”, similar to Clinton’s own preference for incremental centrist policies.

Like all the other speakers at Nixon’s funeral, Clinton avoids mentioning Watergate by name, though he approaches the topic more closely than Billy Graham, Henry Kissinger or Bob Dole: “Oh,  yes, he knew great controversy amid defeat as well as victory. He made mistakes and they, like his accomplishments, are a part of his life and record.”

Like the other speakers, Clinton also seeks to present Nixon as a single coherent figure in American history, without all the various reincarnations that Nixon created for himself: “may the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.”

For another sitting President already facing accusations of a cover-up over financial and sexual indiscretions, and for whom an Independent Counsel had just been appointed to investigate such matters, the call to judge Nixon on his whole life’s work was probably not without a degree of personal reflection.
 

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