Byline: ROBERT S. BOYD Knight-Ridder
WASHINGTON There was nothing pastel about Richard Milhous Nixon. His life was a study in black and white, like the dark suits and crisp shirts he wore even on the sunny beaches of Key Biscayne and San Clemente.
One of the most remarkable and controversial figures in his nation's history, the 37th president of the United States died Friday night in New York after suffering a massive stroke on Monday. He was 81.
Twin strands of good and evil wound through Nixon's long career. He rose and fell and rose again from ambitious young congressman to the first president to be forced from office in disgrace to elder statesman battling to recapture the respect of history.
On a given day, Nixon could be the foul-mouthed, manipulative, vindictive plotter revealed in the secret Watergate tapes.
Another day, he was the cool, canny master of realpolitik who reopened the gates of China, ended the war in Vietnam and maintained an uneasy detente with Moscow. His counsel was sought by later presidents, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton.
Through 48 years in politics, Nixon always played hardball. His goal was to win no matter what it took from red-baiting in the '40s and '50s to the thinly disguised racism of the ``Southern strategy'' that won him the White House in 1968.
There were many victories, defeats, whiffs of impropriety and harrowing escapes along the way:
A secret fund scandal almost knocked Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower's choice for vice president, off the Republican ticket in 1952. But he saved himself with a maudlin television speech about his wife's ``Republican cloth coat'' and his ``little dog, Checkers.''
Television was Nixon's downfall, however, in his narrow loss to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential race. Kennedy's easy grace on the tube during their first TV debate was widely credited with giving the Democrat a vital boost over the haggard-looking Republican.
Trying for a comeback in 1962, Nixon lost a race for governor ofCalifornia. He bitterly told reporters: ``You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.''
That statement turned out to be ``inoperative'' like many others made later during Watergate, the disastrous attempt to cover up the White House's role in the bugging of Democratic Party headquarters during the 1972 re-election campaign.
After Kennedy's assassination and Barry Goldwater's crushing loss to Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, Nixon re-emerged as the country's top Republican, easily displacing his arch-rival, New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, to capture the 1968 presidential nomination. He beat the Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, in a savage campaign marred by racial and anti-war violence.
Once in the Oval Office, Nixon turned out to be a big-government Republican activist. He adopted price controls, created the Environmental Protection Agency, and proposed a guaranteed annual income for the poor and a universal health-care plan.
At the end of his first term, he spoke proudly about his domestic accomplishments: launching a ``war on cancer,'' sharing federal revenues with states and cities, raising Social Security benefits by more than 50 percent, and boosting spending for mass transit, parks and the arts.
The federal budget grew by 40 percent during Nixon's 5 years as chief executive.
``Our administration had completely changed America's spending priorities,'' he wrote in his memoirs. When Johnson, a Democrat, left office, defense outlays far exceeded social programs; by 1973, Nixon wrote, the opposite was true.
Nixon, a man of striking contrasts, ate wheat germ for breakfast because he thought it was good for him, but he confided to his diary that it was ``such a drab and uninteresting diet.''
His Supreme Court appointments included William H. Rehnquist, an archconservative, and Harry A. Blackmun, author of the Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationwide.
As a good Republican, Nixon said he was philosophically opposed to interfering with private industry by freezing wages and prices, but he decided to do it anyway during an inflationary spurt in 1971. The move was ``politically necessary and immensely popular in the short run,'' he said. ``But in the long run I believe that it was wrong.''
Nixon could be sentimental, especially about his mother, his wife and his daughters. Before he fired his top White House aides, H.R. ``Bob'' Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, the beleaguered president said he ``hoped and almost prayed that I wouldn't wake up this morning.''
But he could also be coldly cynical.
His initial reaction to the Watergate break-in, he wrote, was ``completely pragmatic. If it was also cynical, it was a cynicism born of experience. I had been in politics too long, and seen everything from dirty tricks to vote fraud. I could not muster much moral outrage over a political bugging.''
Later, however, after his pardon by President Gerald R. Ford, Nixon said Watergate ``is a burden I shall bear for every day of the life that is left to me.''
Although Nixon's name is doomed to be linked forever with Watergate, he was widely praised for his foreign policy achievements.
With the aid of his shrewd national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, Nixon tossed overboard a generation of Republican rhetoric about ``Red China'' and made history with his surprise visit to Beijing in February 1972.
``We have at times in the past been enemies,'' Nixon toasted Mao Tse Tung at a glittering banquet in the Great Hall of the People. ``This is the hour, this is the day, for our two people to rise to the heights of greatness which can build a new and better world.''
Nixon also deftly handled relations with America's principal enemy, the Soviet Union. As vice president, he once had an angry ``kitchen debate'' with Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev, but he got along smoothly with Khrushchev's successor, Leonid I. Brezhnev.
A photo printed in Nixon's book of memoirs shows him and Brezhnev, both in shirt sleeves, chatting casually in the study of his vacation home in San Clemente, Calif. Another depicts the two world leaders smiling on a boat in the Black Sea in June 1974, six weeks before Nixon's resignation.
Along with the China trip, Nixon regarded the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty that he negotiated with Brezhnev as his major accomplishment.
His record in Vietnam was mixed. Although he ran for president on a pledge to end the war, it took him five years and repeated bombing campaigns to bring about a peace treaty. Less than a year after he left office, the treaty was broken, and the North overran the South.
Opposition to the war permeated Nixon's presidency and contributed to his downfall. A secret White House investigative team nicknamed ``the Plumbers,'' because they were supposed to stop leaks was the predecessor of the ill-fated Watergate burglars.
After his landslide 49-state re-election in 1972, Nixon pondered why people voted for him in such overwhelming numbers but didn't seem to like him personally.
``It is obvious that we have to get across more of what (presidential scholar Clinton) Rossiter has called affability,'' he told his diary. ``The staff just hasn't been able to get it across.''
Nixon admired toughness. Early in the Watergate affair, he praised WhiteHouse counsel John Dean, who later betrayed him, for having ``the kind of steel and really mean instinct that we needed.''
And he was tough himself, rising repeatedly from defeat to re-enter what he called, in his most recent book of reminiscences, ``the arena.''
``I have never been a quitter,'' Nixon said the night he announced his resignation.
Indeed, after five years of brooding exile in San Clemente, the battered old fighter returned to the East Coast in 1980 and launched the latest in his long series of comebacks. He wrote books, gave speeches, traveled abroad and gradually won back a measure of the respect he had lost.
But in later years he seemed stoic about his mixed place in history, saying it was his philosophy never to look back.
``I came to accept Watergate and the resignation simply as one major defeat in a career that involved both victories and losses, both peaks and valleys,'' he said.
CAPTION(S):
Associated Press CHIEF JUSTICE Warren Burger administers the oath of office to Richard Nixon as 37th President of the United States in January, 1973, while Pat Nixon looks on.
