WASHINGTON -- Sometimes he was among the best of presidents. Sometimes, too, he was among the very worst.

No president in American history managed to combine so many soaring accomplishments with so many sordid defeats as did Richard Milhous Nixon. He died Friday night in a New York hospital after suffering a stroke on April 18 at his home in Park Ridge, N.J. He was 81 years old.

Though driven from the White House in disgrace almost 20 years ago, he managed -- typically -- to invent a new Nixon, a world-traveling author and statesman who in the end softened the memory of the original old Nixon, the mean-spirited, mistrustful politician who betrayed himself and his country during his final Watergate years in the presidency. It was one of many positive achievements in an extraordinarily long career that defies easy analysis.

Mr. Nixon leaves a legacy of accomplishments that historians will find compelling -- abroad, an open, now-entrepreneurial China (he and his foreign policy guru, Henry Kissinger, made that possible) and, here at home, a Republican Party increasingly anchored in the old and the new South (he and his advisers invented the so-called Southern Strategy).

That Mr. Nixon came to bestride the world stage marks a triumph of the will over the body. Mr. Nixon was a clumsy man, in word -- he was virtually incapable of making small talk -- and gesture. Images of him in action persist -- expanding, for example, on the "global village" theme, how the world was growing smaller every day. The words were all right; the gestures were all wrong. As he talked about the world growing smaller, he kept throwing his arms wider. The crowd grasped the words, but was puzzled a little by what he was trying to say with his hands. Think of him, too, at leisure, strolling along a beach with his jacket, Kennedy-like, over his shoulder. Then move down to his feet: He's wearing black wingtip shoes.

Perhaps to make up for the fact he wasn't exactly one of the boys, Mr. Nixon in private conversations would sometimes use extraordinary locker-room language. Some of it shows up in the Watergate tapes. But it could appear almost any time. Once, when flying in a small private plane back to New York after a speech in the Midwest, he reeled off to a reporter the names of politicians and officeholders down below. So-and-so, he would say, peering out the window in the dark, "is the county commissioner down there. He's an (expletive deleted)." It was a dazzling performance, combining an uncanny photographic memory with language that would have made a drill instructor blink.

Mr. Nixon made up for his deficiencies by using his head -- he was probably one of the three or four brightest presidents in American history -- and sheer tenacity. His mother, Hannah -- Mr. Nixon would call her a "saint" in that final, maudlin address from the White House -- always remembered the way he whipped mashed potatoes. "He never left any lumps," she told his biographers. "He used the whipping motion to make them smooth instead of going up and down the way other boys did." She also said she always called him Richard; he just seemed to be a Richard sort of boy.

He was, first of all, a lawyer, and almost certainly would have had a very successful career at the bar if he hadn't chosen politics instead. He graduated from Duke Univerity Law School and served as a desk-bound lawyer in the Navy during World War II, rising to the rank of lieutenant commander.

He returned home to California after the war, set up a practice near Whittier and proposed marriage to a young schoolteacher named Thelma Ryan -- friends called her "Pat" -- the first night they met. The marriage produced two daughters, Julie and Tricia. Mrs. Nixon died last year.

All of Mr. Nixon's campaigns were, in one way or another, memorable. His first, in 1946 against Jerry Voorhis, a veteran Democrat and the popular incumbent, set the pattern. It quickly got mean and dirty, with a Nixon ad proclaiming that "a vote for Nixon is a vote against the Communist-dominated PAC with its gigantic slush fund." He was referring to the CIO's left-wing political-action committee, a branch of which had recommended that the national PAC endorse Mr. Voorhis.

He won the election, and in his freshman term became a national sensation for his role as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee in pushing Whittaker Chambers's allegations that former State Department official Alger Hiss had been a Communist spy. "My name, my career," Mr. Nixon would write many years later, "were ever to be linked with the decisions I made and the actions I took in that case."

Intellectuals, he argued, never forgave him for his pursuit of Mr. Hiss. Basically a pragmatic man, he became identified with masses of the voters -- not just intellectuals -- as a ferociously partisan man. Many of them, regular Democrats especially, never forgave him. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that millions of Americans openly, and viscerally, despised Richard Nixon.

He was elected to the Senate in 1950, defeating -- in another nasty race -- Democratic Rep. Helen Gahagan Douglas. His campaign linked her to "the notorious radical," Vito Marcantonio, a New York congressman with Communist Party ties. In 1952, he became Dwight Eisenhower's running mate in what was billed as a "Crusade for Political Purity," and quickly became embroiled in a controversy over what the press called a secret slush fund established by his wealthy supporters to help pay his political expenses. In a speech the night of Sept. 23, carried by 64 NBC television stations and by CBS and Mutual radio, Mr. Nixon -- his career on the line -- took his case to the nation, and the age of television as the prime medium for mass political communications was born.

He talked about his "little cocker spaniel dog," named Checkers by his six-year-old daughter, Tricia. Nobody, he said, was going to take that dog away from the Nixon family. As for his wife, Pat, she doesn't even have a mink coat, he said. "But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat. And I always tell her that she'd look good in anything."

"You're my boy," said Mr. Eisenhower, after listening to the address on television.

Mr. Nixon ran on his own for president against John F. Kennedy in 1960 and lost by only 114,673 votes. He could have challenged the results, but in a statesman-like display, he didn't. He tried a comeback, running for governor of California in 1962, and lost again, perhaps his greatest campaign humiliation. His post-election news conference will always remain a part of the Nixon legend. "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more," he told reporters, "because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference."

But of course it wasn't. Tenacious as ever, he made a new life for himself and his family as a Wall Street lawyer, and quietly prepared for his comeback. His time finally came in 1968, when the nation was at war in Vietnam and the Democratic Party was torn apart over what to do about it. He defeated Hubert Humphrey by 510,645 votes, and would have won even bigger if George Wallace hadn't been winning almost 10 million votes on his American Independent line. In 1972, without Mr. Wallace in the race, he carried the South, once a Democratic stronghold, as he defeated George McGovern by almost 18 million votes.

As president, he slowly began to wind down the nation's military involvement in Vietnam, despite a secret bombing campaign and an invasion of Cambodia. A settlement, worked out by Mr. Kissinger, was signed early in 1973. "Peace with honor," Mr. Nixon declared. South Vietnam fell to Communist forces from the north in 1975.

Because he carried so little ideological baggage, Mr. Nixon could set out to do quite astonishing things. Nothing was more astonishing than his trip to China in 1972, when America's best-known Cold War warrior sat down with Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai. 

He traveled to Moscow, too, to complete strategic-arms talks and to make arrangements for the Soviet Union to buy American grain. Detente, he called it. Russians must have been as stunned as anyone to turn on their television sets in 1972, and listen to a speech by the American president.

He was just as unpredictable at home. In 1971, alone, he froze wages and prices and cut the nation's last ties to the gold standard. He introduced measures to reform the welfare system and health care and began sharing federal revenues with the states.

But Watergate, which began with a ludicrous break-in at Democratic headquarters by GOP agents, brought the president and the reputation he had spent a lifetime building crashing to the ground. His own tapes -- recordings of internal White House discussions -- produced the "smoking gun" that ultimately forced him from office.

Aware he faced impeachment by the Congress, abandoned by almost all of his friends and colleagues, he announced his resignation on Aug. 8, 1974, effective at noon the next day. He was succeeded by his vice president, Gerald Ford, who declared the nation's long nightmare had ended and then proceeded to create a political nightmare of his own by pardoning Mr. Nixon.

The next 20 years of Mr. Nixon's life could have been spent in angry, disappointed seclusion. But, tenacious to the end, he created a new, and ultimately a well-regarded, life by becoming a scholar. America's Lazarus became once again a confidant of the great and the mighty. Even Bill Clinton, a Democrat, turned to him for advice. The final years may have been Richard Nixon's greatest triumph.