Richard Milhous Nixon, 1913-1994. Thirty-seventh President of the United States, and the first to resign the office--some say in utter disgrace; Nixon himself, in one of his interview sessions with David Frost in 1977, stated, "I have impeached myself. That speaks for itself" (Anson, 1984, p. 167). From "dirty tricks" to detente, "Checkers" to China, Alger Hiss to Daniel Ellsberg, Richard Milhous Nixon was at once a master of geopolitics, and at the same time a terribly insecure man. He yearned his whole life for a place in history beside the great men: Churchill, de Gaulle, Alexander the Great, Chou En-lai and Mao Tse Tung, MacArthur, Konrad Adenauer, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and others. What history will do with Richard Milhous Nixon remains to be fully revealed.
This paper seeks to examine the slow, methodical return of Nixon to the American scene in the two decades between his resignation and his death. While the challenge is to present Nixon's version of "the Long March" in an unbiased manner, it must be said that there is little resource material available which itself is unbiased. The people who knew Nixon personally either love him or hate him. The American media, to this day, almost universally despise him, although they were in some measure respectful in the days immediately following his death on April 22, 1994. The vast majority of Nixon's biographers follow the manner of the journalists.
Historian Stephen Ambrose, whose three volume work, Nixon, chronicles Nixon's life from 1913 to 1962, from 1962 to 1972, and from 1973 to 1990, perhaps comes closest to providing a balanced examination of Nixon, but the negativity toward him surfaces frequently. In fairness to Ambrose, the nature of the resource material available, in part, dictates what the outcome, to a great extent, must be. In the closing pages of his third volume, which provides a large measure of the source material...