The death of Richard Milhous Nixon, the most controversial and paradoxical of all American presidents, occurred 20 years after he became the first American chief executive forced to resign his office under threat of impeachment. And that historic resignation came less than two years after Nixon, the 37th president, won one of the greatest electoral triumphs in U.S. history.

Nixon's name will be forever linked with the series of scandals known as Watergate. They ended his presidency on Aug. 9, 1974, and continue to inspire countless retellings of the impeachment crisis that crippled America and the world during 1973 and 1974. 

They also have become the standard by which political scandals, real or fancied, have been measured since. Nixon's long, turbulent career was filled with great achievement and political disgrace. His paradoxes could be seen sharply during his presidency: vigorously prosecuting an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam while trying to end it; seeking new diplomatic openings to the Soviet Union and Communist China while championing anti-communism; imposing wage and price controls after campaigning as the voice of free enterprise; and, ultimately, becoming involved in crimes that led a House committee to vote articles of impeachment, ending a presidency that had been based on a program of restoring "law and order." 

Yet from the perspective of a generation later, Nixon can also be seen as a relatively progressive leader who sought to reform the nation's welfare system and move America toward broader health care for every citizen. 

No less contradictory was his personal life. 

A shy, brooding man, he could be painfully awkward and ill-at-ease before crowds and individuals. But as Lyndon B. Johnson once famously described Nixon, he also was that "chronic campaigner" -- and no American politician ever campaigned so long, so tirelessly, and with such single-minded devotion to victory. 

He was capable of bitter resentment, deep insecurities, nursing old grudges and seeking to destroy his "enemies" by almost any means necessary. At the same time, he was capable of acts of personal kindness and generosity that inspired deep loyalty and affection among followers, even among those who later saw him as a man who had let them down. 

Nominated Three Times 

Now his death ends a period of torment capped by years of struggle to restore his public standing. But his passing leaves many unresolved questions about his place in history. 

Richard Nixon was the great polarizer of American politics. No politician in U.S. history stood at the center of major national debates so long. None was so persevering in pursuing his political goals. None was so controversial.

Three times he was the Republican Party's presidential nominee. Twice he was elected to the highest office, twice to the vice presidency. His political career as congressman, senator, vice president and ultimately chief executive spanned a fateful era in American life. 

Nixon came to Washington immediately after World War II when American power and prestige reached their zenith. He left at a time of perceived American decline at home and abroad. For all the achievements during his nearly six years in the White House, most notably in foreign affairs by reopening relations with China and offering hope for detente with the Soviet Union, it was Nixon's fate to see his record besmirched by the Watergate scandals. 

Though time softened the bitterness of that episode and Nixon enjoyed a prosperous and peaceful retirement during which he was treated with something of the respect accorded an elder statesman, he was never free of Watergate -- what his presidential successor, Gerald R. Ford, called "our long national nightmare." 

When Ford first spoke to the nation as president on Aug. 9, 1974, in an emotional moment, he offered a personal plea. With tears in his eyes, Ford said: 

"In the beginning, I asked you to pray for me. Before closing, I ask again your prayers: for Richard Nixon and his family. May our former president, who brought peace to millions, find it for himself." 

Whether Nixon found inner peace after his political shame cannot be answered. But within a decade of his resignation he achieved a measure of public acceptance that would have been thought impossible in the summer of 1974. 

Like much else in the Nixon story, those retirement years added another surprising twist. 

After he left the White House, ill and depressed, former associates feared for his life. Nixon then began the long process of rehabilitation. 

Step by step he began to surface. First came a highly publicized trip to China as a private citizen in February 1976. Television interviews with David Frost attracted wide attention in May 1977. These were followed by publication of his memoirs in 1978. His trip to Cairo in 1981 as part of the U.S. delegation to the funeral of the assassinated Egyptian leader, Anwar Sadat, marked his first official public function since leaving office. He also began making occasional speeches at Republican fund-raisers. In 1982, on the l0th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, his presidency and his role in the Watergate scandal were widely reexamined. And year after year his presidency attracted new scrutiny from the writings of journalists, biographers, historians and members of his administration. Collectively, they created a cottage industry that capitalized on the works and deeds of Richard Nixon. 

Invariably, these stirred fresh discord. Then Nixon again would depart from view. 

But as Watergate and the problems it represented receded, Nixon gradually emerged from political limbo. He continued to write books. He lectured on television. He even took bows to applause (and also performed on the piano) at a formal Washington banquet in 1983 honoring himself and two other former presidents, Ford and Jimmy Carter. 

In the spring of 1986, in a moment that symbolized the success of his final political comeback, Nixon again was on the cover of a national news magazine, this time, favorably. Newsweek's May 19, 1986, issue featured a smiling, confident photograph of the former president under the headline: "HE'S BACK: The Rehabilitation of Richard Nixon."

By then, Nixon's books were best-sellers and were earning him millions. His opinions were sought by President Ronald Reagan and later President George Bush. His op-ed articles were published in influential newspapers. The process of historical revisionism -- or, at least, reappraisal -- was fully at work. Even books by his son-in-law, David Eisenhower, about the Eisenhower presidency, and by his daughter, Julie, ostensibly about his wife, Pat, but actually a defense of Nixon's record, were well received by critics. To all appearances, his life seemed normal and pleasant. 

In the last years of his life Nixon took a special interest in encouraging the development of democracy in Russia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he lobbied avidly for more American aid to Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the non-communist Russian republic, and was credited with helping persuade Congress to grant such aid. Just last month Nixon visited Russia and angered Yeltsin by paying a call on Alexander Rutskoi, the former Soviet army general who had been Yeltsin's vice president, but then led a concerted effort to topple Yeltsin from power last year. 

Yeltsin angrily canceled a scheduled meeting with Nixon, saying the former president had insulted Russia by meeting his opponents. Nixon turned the other cheek, telling reporters the next day, "I came here as his [Yeltsin's] friend, and I remain his friend. I wish him well." 

Though he was able to play the role of elder statesman for most of his last years, Nixon could never fully escape his past. 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. 

The next day New York Times columnist William Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter, praised Nixon's article by noting approvingly: "If the writing of Richard Nixon can proudly be featured in The Washington Post, the liberating idea of private property can be embraced in the Soviet Union." Yet the very next day 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. On these tapes, Nixon expressed deep-seated distrust of nearly everyone: Jews, bureaucrats, the press, even people he appointed to high office. This hate-filled Nixon of the 1970s stood in sharp contrast to the statesmanlike Nixon of the 1990s. 

Reaction to the tapes was a reminder that few people responded neutrally to Nixon. He was both America's most familiar political face, and the object of its strongest political emotions. 

Richard Nixon became a figure of public parody, the model for the man in the Nixon mask: a dark brooding character of pronounced ski-lift nose, prominent jowls, and receding hairline instantly recognizable the world over. That sense of inspiring the strongest of emotions, of admiration and hatred alike, was the story of his long political life. 

His forced resignation, announced to the nation from the Oval Office on Aug. 8, 1974, was a sad television drama in which the entire country participated. It came only days after the House Judiciary Committee, sitting in judgment of his presidential acts, approved three articles of impeachment against him. 

He was cited for obstructing justice, abusing the powers of his office, and contempt of Congress. Only once before, a century earlier, had articles of impeachment been adopted against a president, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, who came to power upon Abraham Lincoln's assassination. 

The aftermath of Nixon's resignation brought further acrimony. The pardon granted by President Ford exactly a month after Nixon left the White House ignited a national storm. Polls showed the Nixon pardon was a major factor in Ford's decline in popularity and in his narrow defeat by Carter in 1976. 

Other controversies flared over control of Nixon's presidential papers, documents, and tapes. Bitter wrangling broke out over the size of the public appropriation to assist his transition from president to private citizen. 

Even as Nixon left Washington, the drumbeat of criticism against him continued. 

Across the country, Democrats were campaigning against the immorality of his administration. His Republican Party was headed for an election disaster that resulted in Democrats gaining 43 seats in the House of Representatives, giving them a majority of 290 to 144; three in the Senate, making their advantage 61 to 38, with one independent, and five governorships, leaving the Democrats controlling 37 of the 50 states. In Washington, the criminal trials of his former lieutenants proceeded. The lawyer of one of Nixon's closest White House aides, John D. Ehrlichman (later one of those who wrote critically of his erstwhile chief), publicly accused Nixon of lying about the Watergate cover-up "to save his own neck." Nixon faced the greater humiliation of being called as a witness to explain the crimes committed in his name. 

Six weeks after resigning the presidency, Nixon was admitted to a hospital in Long Beach, Calif. He was suffering from a potentially fatal blood clot. The venom directed against him was so poisonous that even his hospitalization brought cries of anger after the public hospital cleared 19 rooms for him and his family to accommodate the Secret Service detail assigned to him for life. 

Time has stilled those passions, but they are worth recalling as evidence of how extraordinarily divisive was Nixon's career. It helps explain too how difficult it was for Nixon and the country to realize Ford's wish of "closing the book" on Watergate. 

Characteristically, Nixon's actions created new controversies, and so did those of some of his aides. Walter Tkach, the physician who treated Nixon during the White House years, said Nixon feared entering the hospital because he did not think he would emerge alive. There was also speculation, discussed publicly, that the former president had a death wish. 

This is not to suggest the need to engage in amateur analysis of Richard Nixon. That he was a tense, insecure man is not a matter of speculation. The record abounds with examples: 

#His long preoccupation with confronting crises, real or imagined ("The tougher it gets, the cooler I get"). 

#His secret tape recordings that revealed his hostilities ("Just remember, no one is a friend of ours," and "l think we are going to fix the son-of-a-bitch. Believe me, we are going to"). 

#His sudden shifts in course (from staunch anti-communism to espousal of peaceful coexistence with communism; from pledges to keep the federal government out of the free enterprise system to a position of wage and price controls; from repeated assertions that he would never resign the presidency to his sudden departure from it). 

Then there were the rare, but public, comments from his family about his moodiness and need for seclusion and release. 

His daughter, Julie: "The pattern has been ... maybe wake up once during the night and take notes for an hour or so and go back to sleep. He doesn't usually sleep through the night." And: "Sometimes, all alone at night, you'll hear this music in the hallway." 

His wife, Pat: "It relaxes him to come home late at night and at the spur of the moment sit down at the piano." 

And there was Nixon himself, speaking out repeatedly, about how he was able to handle intense pressures so well. 

His last reference to that familiar Nixonian theme was made two weeks before he resigned. At a dinner party in California, he briefly addressed a group of old friends and supporters. 

Confident of Vindication 

"You wonder sometimes," he said, "and I am often asked, how do you take the burden of the presidency, particularly when at times it seems to be under very, very grievous assault. Let me say it isn't new for us to be under assault because since the time we came into office for five years we have had problems. There have been people marching around the White House, when we were trying to bring the war to an end, and we have withstood that and we will withstand the problems of the future. People wonder how does any individual these days, when we have very high-pressured campaigns in usually the media and the rest taking on public figures, how does an individual take it, how does he survive it, how do you keep your composure, your strength and the rest? 

"Well, there are a number of factors. First, you have got to have a strong family, and I am very proud of my family. But second, you have got to have also a lot of good friends, people that you have known through the years; people who write you, who call you, or who see you and say, 'We are sticking by you!' I can assure you that no man in public life -- and I have studied American history rather thoroughly -- has ever had a more loyal group of friends." 

That is vintage Nixon, rambling, rhetorical, defensive, proud, but withal a Nixon who possessed the inner resources to overcome immense challenges, a Nixon always confident that history would vindicate him. 

Those traits explain Nixon's ability to survive his humiliation after he resigned. 

They also provide an example of the quintessential Nixon enigma. How was it possible that a politician of such high position could utter such revealing remarks over decades and still remain a man few felt they knew or understood? 

Not only the public found it had misjudged or misunderstood him. Those close to him also expressed bewilderment. 

Magnet for Controversy 

After devastating secret transcripts that proved his participation in the Watergate coverup were made public in the spring of 1973, men who served him intimately voiced shock at what was revealed. 

That wasn't the Nixon they knew, they said. One of those men, then serving at the highest echelons of the government, spoke privately to this reporter about the Nixon he had known and the Nixon exposed by the White House tape recordings. In all of his encounters with the president, often dealing with momentous public questions, he never encountered the Nixon of the secret tapes. Not the language, not the style, not the vindictiveness, and not, certainly, the indecisiveness. 

It was as if he dealt with President Nixon and others knew Dick Nixon, the rough-and-tumble political gut-fighter. 

In all of American history no politician was subjected to such public scrutiny for so long. And Nixon hardly was a quiescent type. Controversy always surrounded him. He attracted it. He reveled in it: Jerry Voorhis, the Hiss case, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Checkers and the Nixon fund, McCarthyism and "traitors," all these created intense controversies in the 1940s and 1950s. 

Everyone knew him, and reacted to him. He was either "Tricky Dick" or the hope of the future. He inspired passion, loyalty and hatred. He took -- and gave. 

His life was a study in adversity and tenacity. And something else: at Nixon's core lay a deep resentment at lack of family advantages and a fierce determination to rise above his early environment by any means and at any cost. 

The Nixons were poor and, in Nixon's mind, plagued with bad luck and failure. He was born Jan. 9, 1913, in Yorba Linda, Calif., where his father, Francis, was trying to scratch out a living on a lemon grove. Later, when his father decided to leave the grove to become a grocer and gas station operator in Whittier, Frank Nixon looked at two pieces of property that were for sale. A year later drillers struck oil on the one he didn't buy. To Nixon, it was symbolic of future ill fortune. Months before he earned his law degree from Duke University in 1937, for example, Nixon applied for a job with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington. He was turned down not for lack of ability but for budgetary reasons and forced to return to California. There he met and married a local teacher, Thelma Catherine ("Pat") Ryan, and harbored ambitions about becoming involved in Republican state politics while beginning his law practice. Those plans were scrapped when World War II intervened. 

"My service record was not a particularly unusual one," Nixon remarked years later in a national TV address. "I went to the South Pacific. I guess I'm entitled to a couple of battle stars. I got a couple of letters of commendation, but I was just there when the bombs were falling." 

That statement was typically Nixonian. It was not entirely false but it gave an entirely false impression. As such, it was another of many examples of Nixon's character that aroused suspicions about him. 

During his law school days, for instance, a story circulated that he had broken into the dean's office at night to check files showing his grades before they were made public. For years that tale, never resolved, came back to haunt him. 

The same was true of his war record. 

In the fall of 1945, after returning from the Pacific, he was interviewed by California Republicans looking for a congressional candidate. Nixon gave them the impression he was a hardened combat veteran, one who knew, as he put it, what it was like "in the foxholes." His campaign literature furthered that impression. Leaflets described him as a "clean, forthright young American who fought in defense of his country in the stinking mud and jungles of the Solomons." 

The truth lies elsewhere. He was a naval operations officer, not a combat one. His job was to see that supplies reached the front lines. He was in the combat zone, and served conscientiously and well. But he was no war hero and battle-scarred veteran, as he led others to believe. 

That impression, of course, was helpful to a young, unknown candidate running in the first postwar congressional campaign. 

Nixon's first race set a pattern for all the others. It was bitter, filled with accusations of dirty politics, character assassination, falsehoods, and appeals to fears. It was also victorious. 

His opponent in 1946 was Rep. Jerry Voorhis, a respected and popular Democrat who had served 10 years in the House of Representatives and earned a record as one of the nation's better-known New Dealers. Although Nixon began his campaign claiming to favor "practical liberalism," he turned to the far right wing for support and attacked Voorhis for being soft on communism and "communist-supported." 

In Washington, Nixon's rise was meteoric, and accomplished by the same tactics he employed in California. He exploited fears about communism to advance his career. 

Only two years after entering Congress, Nixon achieved national prominence for his role in the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigation of Alger Hiss.

The Hiss case began in 1948. It centered on charges that Hiss, a former State Department official, had passed government information to Soviet agents in the 1930s. But the Hiss case occurred against a more complicated background. America suddenly found itself fighting a global Cold War, threatened by a Soviet Union that had developed an atomic bomb. Fears of communist spies operating at top levels of the U.S. government were rampant. Hiss, convicted of perjury after intensely publicized congressional hearings and a criminal trial, became Nixon's springboard to the U.S. Senate in 1950, only four years after coming to Washington. 

His opponent was Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas, once a Broadway star, but a member of Congress. The race typically began with Nixon disclaimers. "I am confronted with an unusual situation," he told voters. "My opponent is a woman... . There will be no name-calling, no smears, no misrepresentation in this campaign." 

Nonetheless, smears dominated that campaign. Even an admiring Nixon biographer, Earl Mazo, later described it as "the most hateful" political campaign California had seen in years. 

'Pink Lady' vs. 'Tricky Dick' 

Nixon attacked Douglas as "the pink lady." He put out campaign broadsides printed on pink paper that damned her voting record. In speeches, he coupled her name with that of Alger Hiss. She replied by calling him "Tricky Dick." Nixon won and became a U.S. senator. 

Two years later, he was General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower's running mate, in part because he was suggested to Eisenhower by GOP operatives as the ideal choice to wage a hard-hitting vice presidential campaign. The race was barely under way when it was disclosed that Nixon had benefited from an $ 18,000 campaign fund provided him by a group of California businessmen. Some GOP leaders urged that Nixon be dropped from the ticket. Eisenhower himself seemed to be wavering. 

Nixon saved himself by using the new medium of television in his own defense. His nationally televised address, delivered from Los Angeles on Sept. 18, 1952, became known as the "Checkers speech." 

None of the money in the fund went for personal use, he said, all was for political expenses. After itemizing his financial assets and liabilities, Nixon said he was proud that "every dime we've got is honestly ours." 

In a line that became part of the Nixon legend, he told the voters that his wife Pat did not wear a mink coat. She wore a "respectable Republican cloth coat." Then he described, in confessional tones, how his family had received a gift from constituents, a little black-and-white cocker spaniel that the children named Checkers. "And you know the kids love that dog," Nixon said, "and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're going to keep it." 

In the Checkers speech, Nixon used a device that became a staple of his career: he accused his critics of being either communists or tools of communists. 

"You folks know the work that I did investigating communists in the United States," he said, looking into the TV lens. "Ever since I have done that work the communists and the left-wingers have been fighting me with every possible smear. 

"When I received the nomination for the vice presidency I was warned that if I continued to attack the communists in this government they would continue to smear me. And believe me, you can expect that they will continue to do so. They started it yesterday. They have tried to say that I had taken $ 18,000 for my personal use." 

Having saved his place on the Republican ticket, Nixon eagerly returned to assailing the Democrats for corruption and communism. He accused Secretary of State Dean Acheson of suffering from "color blindness, a form of pink eye toward the communist threat in United States." He said Democratic presidential nominee Adlai E. Stevenson got a "PhD from Dean Acheson's College of Cowardly Communist Containment," and in language that was bitterly resented by President Harry S. Truman, Nixon said that Truman, Acheson and Stevenson were "traitors to the high principles in which many of the nation's Democrats believe." Truman went to his grave insisting that Nixon had impugned his patriotism by using the word "traitor." 

At 39, Nixon became the second youngest vice president in American history and soon was one of the busiest. He traveled widely at home on political missions that were distasteful to President Eisenhower and made goodwill trips to 56 countries. 

On Sept. 25, 1955, Eisenhower suffered a heart attack, the first of several serious illnesses during his presidency. Three times Eisenhower was hospitalized and each time public attention focused strongly, and favorably, on Nixon as his successor. He easily won the Republican presidential nomination in 1960. 

The 1960 campaign was one of the most memorable of the century. It pitted two young men -- Nixon was only 47, Sen. John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.) a mere 43 -- of notably differing backgrounds against each other: Nixon, the poor son of a failed father, was a scion of an old Protestant American family that had never distinguished itself; Kennedy, the rich son of a powerful father riven with ambition for himself and his Irish Catholic family. But differences notwithstanding, they were alike, these young World War II naval veterans who went to the Congress in the same year of 1946. They were both driven by ambition, and by a determination to win at any cost. 

Nixon set out to counteract the public impression of Kennedy's already publicized "vigor" by promising to become the first presidential candidate to campaign in every state. It proved to be a mistake; an infected knee forced him to enter the hospital and forgo campaigning for two weeks, an ailment that left him physically weakened for the remainder of the campaign. 

That was only the beginning Nixon's problems. His campaign organization was a shambles, largely because Nixon would not entrust anyone else to make decisions. Bitter about the generous press treatment given his rich, handsome opponent, Nixon was overworked and defensive. 

The high point of the campaign was a series of four televised debates. On the first debate, Sept. 26, Nixon looked pale, tired and so ill at ease that his own mother called from California after the program to ask if he was feeling all right. Kennedy, tanned and rested, glowed with health and confidence. In the battle of TV images Kennedy appeared more "presidential" than a rival who had spent eight years as vice president. Kennedy gained an advantage that he never lost. 

On Election Day, in the highest voter turnout of the century for presidential election, Nixon received 49.55 percent of the popular vote and carried 26 of the 50 states. His electoral vote was 219. Kennedy was elected with 49.71 percent of the popular vote and 303 electoral votes from 23 states. 

Two years later Nixon ran for governor of California. Again he lost. Pollsters found voters thought he was more interested in running for president again than governing California. The day after the election, at what Nixon said was his "last press conference," he delivered probably the most embittered, self-pitying farewell remarks ever made in American politics.

"As I leave the press, all I can say is this: For 16 years, ever since the Hiss case, you've had a lot of -- a lot of fun -- that you've had an opportunity to attack me and I think I've given as good as I've taken. It was carried right up to the last day," he told reporters and the TV cameras. 

"... I leave you gentlemen now and you will now write it. You will interpret it. That's your right. But as I leave you I want you to know -- just think how much you're going to be missing. You won't have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference... . " 

After that, Nixon was written off by the political experts. With him, that always was a mistake. He was certainly America's most tenacious politician, and he proved it in those long years out of power in the 1960s. 

His political comeback was spectacular. That he triumphed after the violent deaths of two Kennedy brothers, John and Robert, and the destruction of President Johnson in the bitterness over war abroad and racial strife at home is not the point. Nixon, alone among Republican politicians, positioned himself perfectly and awaited his chance. When his time came in 1968 he was ready, and he prevailed. 

The 1968 presidential year was the most destructive in American history. Before it was over, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated, Johnson was forced to announce that he would not be a candidate for reelection, dissent against the war in Vietnam triggered violent demonstrations on American campuses, and U.S. cities were turned into armed camps where racial riots flared. Nixon capitalized on the feeling of national disintegration by promising to restore peace at home and abroad, but without specific discussion of how he would achieve it. 

Gap Closes in 1968 

Through 115 rallies, and more than 50,000 miles of travel, he gave the same litany: "When the strongest nation in the world can be tied down in a war in Vietnam for four years with no end in sight; when the nation with the greatest tradition of respect for law is torn apart by unprecedented lawlessness; when the richest nation in the world can't even manage its own economy; when respect for the United States falls so low that a fourth-rate military power like North Korea dares to seize an American naval vessel on the high seas" -- he would lean back, gesturing with his arms -- "and when the president of the United States cannot travel abroad or to a major city in this country without fear of a hostile demonstration, then it's time for new leadership for the American people, and that's what you're going to have." 

He started far ahead of Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, nominee of the bitterly divided Democratic Party, but the race narrowed dramatically to a virtual dead heat by Election Day. Nixon won with 31,785,000 votes, 2 million fewer than he received in 1960, and 301 electoral votes. Humphrey received 31,275,165 votes and 191 electoral votes. Former Alabama governor George C. Wallace, a strong third-party candidate, polled nearly 10 million votes and took 46 electoral votes. 

Nixon's percentage of the popular vote, 43.4, was the lowest for a successful presidential candidate since Woodrow Wilson's election in 1912, another year when a third party candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, attracted significant support. 

In one of the countless ironies involving Nixon, on the morning after his narrow victory he announced that his aim as president would be to heal the divisions and animosities in American life. "We want to bridge the generation gap," he said. "We want to bridge the gap between the races. We want to bring America together." On Inaugural Day, he enunciated another goal: "To lower our voices, muting the vehement argument and passionate dissent." 

This was evidence, some thought, of a "new Nixon." He 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. He said he wanted to be the kind of president who listened to the quiet, inner voices of America, "voices that speak from the heart and the conscience." Instead of uniting America, however, the Nixon years produced further deep divisions and animosities. They were years of constant crisis. In the end, they left a legacy of deepening cynicism about the political process and national leaders. 

The tragedy was that the Nixon years were also marked by significant successes. In foreign affairs, Nixon largely fulfilled another first-inaugural promise to begin a new "era of negotiation" replacing the "period of confrontation" that characterized the Cold War. It was here that his presidency left its strongest mark. He dispatched his foreign policy adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, on global expeditions of secret diplomacy that sought gradually to wind down American involvement in Vietnam while simultaneously opening new initiatives with mainland China and the Soviet Union. 

It took nearly three years of careful and secret negotiating to arrange Nixon's visit to Peking in February 1972 to reinstitute diplomatic relations with China that had been severed for nearly a generation. That May, Nixon was in Moscow where he and Soviet Communist Party chief Leonid I. Brezhnev signed a strategic arms limitation talks agreement that was generally regarded as a major step in easing nuclear arms competition between the superpowers. 

His domestic record was more mixed; but, viewed from the perspective of another generation, was more progressive than it seemed at the time. Nixon led attempts to eliminate poverty and end job discrimination. He took the lead in emphasizing environmental problems and pressing for national health insurance reform. His "Family Assistance Plan" represented an attempt to give Americans a guaranteed annual income; his "Philadelphia Plan" opened greater opportunities for blacks to enter construction jobs long controlled by unions dominated by whites. He also broke with conservative orthodoxy and imposed a national wage-price freeze in August 1971, followed by controls that were not completely removed until nearly two years later. 

Like President Ronald Reagan after him, he attempted, without much success, to reverse decades of continuing federal government growth and power. Nixon embraced the concept of revenue sharing and sought to return money and decision-making from Washington to states and local governments. This was praised as an impressive beginning toward a new federal-state relationship, but the effort was later killed by Reagan. 

In two other areas, Nixon left an even greater imprint. First was the Supreme Court. He made four appointments to the nine-member bench. He sought to move it away from the judicial activism that preceded it. 

The second area involved the armed services. In the wake of the Vietnam War, with the military emerging from that long conflict with lowered morale and public esteem, Nixon abolished the draft. Its place was taken by the all-volunteer military service that proved its worth a generation later in the Persian Gulf War. 

All these were marks of a strong president not easily labeled liberal or conservative. The public responded to that record, especially his growing stature as a world statesman, and elected Nixon overwhelmingly to a second term in 1972. 

Ironically the issue that finally destroyed him -- the June 17, 1972, break-in of Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate, secretly ordered by Nixon reelection operatives -- never took hold among voters that year. It was largely ignored by major elements of the American press, and thus the voters as well. 

Watergate symbolized the dark side of Richard Nixon. Ever present with Nixon the public statesman was Nixon the private plotter. Conspiracies hatched inside Nixon's Oval Office. 

With peace in his grasp and history waiting to vindicate him, Nixon saw himself as beleaguered and besieged. To Nixon and his aides, they were surrounded by enemies, within and without; they took steps, secretly and in the name of "national security," to counter these perceived threats. Out of fearsome, conspiratorial cast of mind grew the events that destroyed them. 

It began with Watergate -- a bungled break-in attempt of still unclear purpose -- and spread to other areas. Eventually it encompassed a series of acts, either criminal or unethical: surveillance operations, bugging teams, surreptitious entries, "deep sixing" of evidence, obstruction of justice, perjury, blackmail, hush money, enemies' lists, fabricated polls, doctored documents, falsification of presidential records, using the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, and the Justice Department for political purposes, the Pentagon spying on the White House, the White House spying on itself. 

  A Powerful Man Destroyed 

Watergate, at heart, betrayed an attitude rather than a collection of criminal acts. And it was Nixon who set the tone and example for the attitudes that led to the commission of crimes. His rise and sudden fall in disgrace are without parallel in U.S. political history; the seeds of his destruction lay within himself. 

The intriguing question concerns Nixon's own state of mind as his political doom drew near. Had he lost the will to live? Why didn't he, when the inevitability of impeachment and removal from office became certain, follow his own prescription, often voiced in the privacy of his Oval Office meetings, and cut his losses early by destroying the tape recordings, acknowledge a share of personal responsibility, fire a few aides, and then see if the country wouldn't permit him to tough it out? Even now, a generation later, what more in the Watergate story remains untold, and will that full record ever be made public? 

These and other questions await the judgment of the historians. What comes through the admittedly still incomplete record, however, is the sad picture of a talented and powerful man destroyed, by himself and by events. 

When Nixon was admitted to the hospital after leaving office, for instance, his physician pointedly said that Nixon may have contributed to the seriousness of his illness. 

On at least two occasions over a three-month period, John C. Lungren said, Nixon refused treatment despite warnings about the consequences. In June, while still president and preparing for his last Middle East trip, Nixon developed swelling and pain in his lower left leg. His physician urged immediate treatment, but the president "decided there were more important things, and he went on his trip." 

That final Nixon foreign trip was a strange mixture of triumph and melancholia. The president was greeted by massive crowds that were both gratifying for their acclaim and frightening for their size and intensity. They were cheering the most powerful leader in the world, a president who, no matter what damage he had done to the country at home, was applauded for his achievements abroad. 

In different times, such acclaim would have sustained Richard Nixon. All his political life he sought and was denied the emotional approval of the masses. Even when he won, be was not held in the personal esteem and warmth of a Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy or, later, Reagan. 

Nixon Wins and Loses 

Then, when public response to him was greatest, he was unusually subdued. Those who traveled with him on his final presidential overseas journey commented on what seemed to be his sense of personal sadness. They did not know that he was ill. Nor did they know the other terrible burden he was carrying. 

Before leaving for the Middle East and Moscow, he listened alone to the fatally incriminating tapes of June 23, 1972, that had been secretly recorded inside the White House six days after burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters. 

Nixon knew those tape recordings clearly contained evidence that could destroy him, for they proved beyond the doubt of even the most loyal Nixon supporter that he was personally involved in ordering the initial Watergate coverup through secret instructions he gave his key presidential aides in private White House conversations and that he had lied repeatedly to the American people about his true role. 

Richard Nixon kept that knowledge to himself. Some of his most trusted aides, and even his family, were not given that information until the very end. 

He returned, not to the cheers of his countrymen, but to further problems. His phlebitis had flared up when he was on his tour, and his Watergate difficulties were ever pressing against him. In retrospect, there were hints long before the final presidential denouement that he was fully aware of the potential dangers he faced. 

One of those came on the night of his greatest political victory. On that November night in 1972 the voters had just reelected him in one of the most overwhelming landslides in American history, a triumph in which he carried every state but Massachusetts and overwhelmed his Democratic rival, Sen. George McGovern (S.D.), by taking 61 percent of the votes cast. 

A reporter encountered the president walking alone between offices in the West Wing of the White House, and offered his congratulations. Somewhat startled by the chance meeting, the president accepted them with a faint smile. He seemed preoccupied, somber instead of elated, and somewhat sad. 

But that was when, on the surface at least, everything appeared to be moving in his direction. He had finally won the great victory that had eluded him. It had been no hair-breadth defeat or triumph as in 1960 and 1968. He had carried 49 of the 50 states. Not even Franklin Delano Roosevelt had accomplished that. 

But Watergate swiftly engulfed the reelected president. By the summer of 1974, Nixon had to face one harsh fact: his only chance of survival lay in not being forced to reveal what remained hidden on those tape recordings. As impeachment pressure mounted and his own popularity plummeted in the public opinion polls, he fought his last political battle. Richard Nixon, the lawyer, carried his case to the Supreme Court. 

On Wednesday, July 24, he lost. The court, in a unanimous decision read by Warren E. Burger, the chief justice Nixon had appointed, ruled the president must turn over the tape recordings. That night the House Judiciary Committee began its televised impeachment inquiry. 

Three days later, the committee voted the first of three articles of impeachment accusing Richard Nixon of high crimes and misdemeanors against the Republic. 

That first article dealt with the most powerful case against the president: obstruction of justice. In its final report, the Judiciary Committee spelled out its findings: 

"... Richard M. Nixon, using the power of his high office, engaged, personally and through his subordinates and agents, in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede and obstruct the investigation of the unlawful entry into the headquarters" of the Democratic Party. 

"The committee," it went on, had obtained "clear and convincing evidence" that the president had caused action to cover up the break-in. It added: "This concealment required perjury, destruction of evidence, obstruction of justice, all of which are crimes: It included false and misleading public statements that are part of a deliberate, contrived, continued deception of the American people." 

It was the first time in 106 years -- and only the second in our history -- that a committee of the Congress had approved an article of impeachment against a president. In the next few days the committee adopted two other articles against the president, citing him for abuse of powers and contempt of Congress. 

It was over. 

His release of the June 23, 1972, tape transcript on that Monday, Aug. 5, 1974, showing that he had personally approved plans for the Watergate coverup only six days after the break-in, virtually assured that Nixon would become the first president to be impeached and removed from office. By the end of that week his resignation added a definite first to the public record of American presidents. 

The public was given two final personal views of this most complex and contradictory president. His televised address -- coincidentally, the 37th time the 37th president had spoken to the people from his Executive Office -- on the night of Thursday, Aug. 8, showed Nixon as cool and calm under stress as he ever had been. He spoke, without a tremor or display of undue emotion, and without the old bitterness and hostility that had so often marred his career. 

But the next morning, in his farewell remarks in the East Room, another Nixon came before the public. His face was puffy, he was perspiring profusely, he was gulping and stammering, and wearing reading glasses he never used in public. He was mawkish, maudlin and embittered. 

All his old anxieties poured forth: about the press, the hardships his mother and father had endured, the deaths in his family, the feeling the cards had been stacked against him. There was even an allusion to the Kennedys, those old foes whom he seemed to resent, yet whom, it appeared, he wanted to emulate. 

"Nobody'll ever write a book, probably, about my mother," he said. "... My mother was a saint. Yes, she will have no books written about her, but she's a saint." It was an unmistakable reference to Rose Kennedy, mother of the Kennedy brothers, whose own book had been published during the year. 

Then he was gone. 

His wife of 53 years, the former Thelma Catherine Ryan, died on June 22, 1993. Survivors include two daughters, Tricia Cox and Julie Eisenhower.