IN OCTOBER 1974, two months after resigning the presidency, Richard Milhous Nixon suffered blood-clot surgery that went wrong. Doctors told him that he could die at any moment. Nixon's immediate reaction was horror that he should be robbed of the chance to rehabilitate the reputation shattered by Watergate. He insisted that his wife rush out for notebook and pencil to take down a political last will and testament -- final thoughts on his life, his aborted presidency and Watergate. This would be no substitute for the memoirs he planned to write or the comeback campaign he planned to wage, but it might have to do. Scribbling until her hand ached, Pat Nixon was spelled by her husband's White House spokesman, Ronald Ziegler, and then by his young aide, Frank Gannon, who, he later said, felt privileged and terrified. 

Even before Watergate, Nixon was determined to ensure himself adoring treatment by history. Part of this ambition came from his grandiose notion of his place in the world. As a romantic and ardent champion of the Great Man theory of politics, Nixon believed that history was made by the Disraelis and de Gaulles and was determined to stand in their league. (One of the last books he read was August Heckscher's "Woodrow Wilson.") 

Part of it may have come from anxiety that he was not the great Oz after all. Henry Kissinger tells us that he gained a glimpse of the man behind the curtain in 1970, when Nixon took him for an impromptu tour of the Yorba Linda birth-house beside which he was buried last Wednesday. As Nixon spoke of his origins, it dawned on Kissinger that his boss seemed to believe that his rise to power was not the result of talent and resilience but that it "had all been accidental." Kissinger later came to feel that no matter what Nixon accomplished as president, "he was never certain that he had earned it." 

Unlike the privileged, victory-prone Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy, who each had a glittering life to which to return after the White House, Nixon had come so far from a proletarian childhood and two smashing defeats that he was horrified by the prospect of the oblivion that awaits most ex-presidents. He remembered what it was like in 1961, only three months after losing the closest presidential election in history, to be heating TV dinners alone in a furnished bachelor apartment in Los Angeles. Nixon's fear of falling off the mountaintop surely helped compel him to resort to Watergate tactics during his 1972 reelection campaign and to cling to the White House until the 11th hour during the worst political scandal in our history. As early as his first term, Nixon mulled over extraordinary plans meant to extend his political life beyond the presidency and ensure his historical reputation. He daydreamed of founding a new political party comprised of moderate-conservative internationalists, with himself as its Lenin, writing doctrine, hand-choosing presidential nominees. The Nixon Presidential Library would be not a passive repository of papers, but the roaring engine room of Nixon's post-presidential career, sponsoring books, lectures and television films that conveyed the Nixon message on current issues. He was determined to be as contemporary a political figure on the day of his death as on the day he had announced for Congress in 1945. 

All of this required that Americans view the Nixon presidency in the warmest possible light. In the 1960s, Nixon had watched Eisenhower's presidential reputation depressed by aides who wrote critical White House memoirs and by historians, whom Nixon presumed to be almost uniformly liberal. Nixon intended not to suffer the same fate. This was one reason he had his Oval Office and Cabinet Room, as well as other chambers and telephone lines, wired for sound. As his first chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, has written, the White House tapes were conceived to be "invaluable as an aid to Nixon in writing his memoirs." During the Nixon post-presidency, they could be carefully edited and disseminated to the public to demonstrate Nixon's mastery of statesmanship.

Before Watergate, Nixon had planned to drive up his stock on the historical exchange to enhance his post-presidential political career. After he resigned the presidency, he strove to rebuild his political standing in the ultimate hope that the good opinion of his contemporaries would impress later historians as well.

This could be no easy job. A mid-1970s poll of scholars found Nixon tied with scandal-brushed Warren Harding as the worst president in American history. And like no other president, Nixon had to anticipate the ticking time bomb of 3,900 hours of White House tapes, seized by the U.S. government after Congress voided the sweetheart bargain struck between Nixon and Ford in 1974 that could have kept them from historians forever. When the remainder of those tapes are one day released, they will reveal vindictive attack and legerdemain alongside the praiseworthy acts toward which Nixon had hoped to steer historians' attention. During the last 20 years of Nixon's life, through interviews, lectures and 10 books, he waged a campaign for historical redemption whose passion and success was unrivaled in the history of the American presidency. Nixon was trying, directly and indirectly, to sell four ideas: He was a president of superior intellectual, rhetorical and literary skill and a wizard of electoral politics; his domestic programs were more innovative and activist than he was given credit for at the time; he was a great foreign policy president; as for presidential skulduggery (in the title of a 1977 bestseller), "It didn't start with Watergate." At the same time, Nixon spent millions to deploy battalions of lawyers against the U.S. government to keep potentially damaging tapes and papers closed to the public. 

Consensus about a president's historical standing usually begins to form only after his death. Only then does our view come more through the lens of history than politics, and do scholars have a chance of gaining the lion's share of the documents and other sources that exist. Even with Herbert Hoover, who survived for 31 years after leaving the White House, historians did their most serious work only after he left the scene. Nixon's passing allows us to assess how successful he was in pressing the four notions of himself and his presidency on his contemporaries, and where his reputation might go. 

While president, Nixon was not popularly thought of as a speaker, writer or intellect of special distinction. (In his final speech as president, he acidly referred to what he thought to be his image among the Eastern elite: "I'm not educated, but I do read books!") Thanks to Nixon's strenuous efforts to display these considerable combined gifts in retirement, he proved to be the opposite of most ex-presidents who, stripped of their first-string team of ghostwriters and handlers, appear to be something less than they seemed in the White House. Although historians will give Nixon credit for his abilities, the excitement of this discovery by the journalists of the 1980s will probably wear off. With the exception of Nixon's rich three books of memoirs ("Six Crises," "RN" and "In the Arena"), which are primarily valuable for their window on Nixon himself, his seven other books -- most of them snapshots of Nixon's foreign policy views at a given time -- are likely to prove perishable. 

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. This owes more than a little to his astonishing precinct-by-precinct mastery of the American political scene. It is nourished by comparison with the four presidents who followed him: Gerald Ford or Ronald Reagan are unlikely to have known which Pennsylvania ward captain to call in order to turn the screws on a recalcitrant congressman, as Nixon was wont to do. During the Clinton era, however, scholars may no longer find this quite so unusual. 

They will give him low marks as a party leader. Whether because he was serious about a new political movement or because he thought his minority party was too much of a millstone to endure, Nixon's circumnavigation of Republicans while running for reelection -- his refusal to share his $ 60-million war chest or campaign widely with them -- doubtless deepened Republican congressional losses in 1972 and 1974. Later evidence of this failure was the Republican Party's repudiation of Nixon's views, swinging in the late 1970s and 1980s toward doctrinaire conservatism and a hard line against the Soviet Union. 

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 especially among scholars partial to activist government. But the pendulum on the domestic Nixon is likely to swing back as other historians look at Nixon's post-reelection ambitions to impound congressionally mandated funds in order to starve New Deal-Great Society programs that he had felt too weak to attack after his hairbreadth 1968 victory. It may be remembered that presidents usually unmask themselves after winning a landslide reelection. 

The man who said that "every Cabinet should include a future president" deserves large credit for the sumptuousness of so many of his appointments. This was not a leader unnerved to have commanding personalities working for him. Like perhaps none since the New Deal, the Nixon administration brought to prominence dozens of figures who became national fixtures. Mentioning Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Simon, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Bob Dole (as Republican national chairman), William Safire, Pat Buchanan and Alexander Haig only scratches the surface. 

Until the day of his death, Nixon knew that any claim for greatness must be staked on his performance in foreign policy. Here the jury is still out. In 1974, even some serious scholars suspected that his primary role was to rubberstamp Henry Kissinger's blueprints. 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 how favorably Nixon's foreign policy presidency is viewed will depend on the success of the policies those qualities produced. 

As president, Nixon tended toward rhetorical inflation (the moon landing was "the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation"), but one cannot question his claim in 1972 that his China visit was a "week that changed the world." Future historians might gibe that if it were not for Nixon and other conservatives, the 23-year Sino-American estrangement might not have been so complete, but few will contest the notion that the opening to Beijing was an act of vision and courage that we could have expected from no other man who might have been elected president in 1968, one which probably hastened the end of the Cold War. 

For Nixon, Vietnam and detente will be more problematical. For now, a considerable group argues that some version of the 1973 Vietnam settlement could have been won four years earlier, saving 21,000 American lives, despite the rejoinder of the Nixonites that so immediate a "bug-out" (to use the Nixon parlance of the time) would have gravely damaged America's world credibility -- and that Saigon might never have fallen had Nixon remained strongly in power through a second term. A more lasting judgment awaits the opening of archives such as the Kissinger papers and Vietnamese diplomatic documents. 

The jury on Nixon as Cold War leader will rule on the basis of more evidence and perspective than we now have. If scholars decide that such policies as the Reagan defense buildup and SDI were indispensable to ending the Cold War, Nixon's detente may be viewed as treading water. If a consensus decides that a combination of strength and moderation protected the world from nuclear war while eroding Soviet power, the subtleties of Nixon's Cold War leadership, especially against the will of many of his own party, will fare much better. Nixon once said that 50 years after his resignation, Watergate would be seen as a "footnote." Throughout his campaign for rehabilitation, he encouraged the notion that the obstruction of justice and other offenses of his presidency were the final point in a direct line that ran from Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus and FDR's circumvention of neutrality laws to the abuse of the IRS by Kennedy and Johnson. Like Lincoln, Nixon argued, he had had to operate under "civil war" conditions. He sent friends copies of Paul Johnson's "Modern Times," which described Watergate as a "media putsch." Younger Americans, bred on Iran-contra, wonder what Watergate was all about. 

Historians will not. Nixon's resignation robbed the Senate of the chance to remove him from office, but in an overwhelming vote after Nixon left Washington, the House of Representatives registered its view that the 37th president had violated the Constitution. By handing Nixon a pardon without requiring him first to confess his guilt, Gerald Ford allowed later Americans of short memory to argue that Watergate was not so bad. But future scholars will remind them that Nixon violated the most basic responsibility of a president, which is to uphold the law. 

After the last death of an American president, Americans began looking at Lyndon Johnson not purely as the man who escalated the Vietnam War, but also as the champion of civil rights and other public purposes. Now that Richard Nixon is gone, the historical image of the 37th president will probably be stereoscopic, with one eye always trained on Watergate, another on the rest of his public life as it fluctuates on the historical exchange. President Clinton's call to view him not as what Nixon himself called "the Watergate man," but in the "totality" of his life will likely be honored. 

This past week has shown that the Nixon image will be enhanced by one phenomenon that few could have imagined in 1974. For many Americans, Nixon has become something of a folk inspiration to those staggered by adversity who fight their way back; his 1990 book "In the Arena" was as much self-help as informal memoir. As Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman have shown, one road to historical redemption is to become an icon of popular culture. In his careful management of his historical reputation, Richard Nixon was aware of that too. 

Michael Beschloss is the author, most recently, of "The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960-1963" and (with Strobe Talbott) "At
the Highest Levels."