Richard Nixon: his great work - 29 April 1994

An attractive buxom lady appearing on a history game show the other evening was asked, "if there was any constant problem with teaching history to 14-year-olds?" And she said without hesitation and with a sort of philosophical cheerfulness, "Oh, of course, when I teach about the War of Independence, of course," she said, "the Revolutionary War, I'm frequently asked why I don't mention the Battle of Gettysburg". This is rather like asking why Mrs Thatcher didn't stop Lord Nelson getting so close to a French man of war.

This little episode with the teacher of 14-year-olds happened on Tuesday evening on the eve of the burial in his hometown in California of Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th president of the United States and the only one ever to have resigned the office, which he did in 1974, not from ill-health or responding to the clause in the Constitution, which omits disability from carrying on, but because the House of Representatives voted three articles of impeachment, which would then have sent him on to appear before the Senate sitting as a trial court. He was told by the leaders of his own party that in the Senate he could not count on more than 10 votes in his favour out of the 100 members, he chose to resign. And on 9 August left Washington and flew home to California to what everyone assumed then would be a lonely and shameful exile.

We'll come back to Mr Nixon's particular high crimes and misdemeanours, but now I'd like to take up from the story about the teacher, which helped me to chase down a very salutary experiment that one reporter made, which was a day or two after Mr Nixon died to go to the local school, roam through the classes and hear what they had to say about him. From this roaming or galloping poll, it's fair to say that most of the students were either fairly cynical or felt that as one rocker put it, Nixon got a raw deal. "A tough break," said a 9th grader; "no president is perfect" from a 17-year-old taking a course in government. There were of course quite a few students who honestly knew very little about him and said so, "all I know it was a bit controversy" said one boy. "didn't it have something to do with embezzling money?" asked the girl. Only one lone student straightforwardly, "a crook, that people feel guilty saying anything bad about the dead", which is true enough.

So in this school – and there's no reason to deduce that it would be different in hundred public schools chosen at random across the country – the overwhelming general mood was one of cynicism and a tendency to defend Nixon as simply a normal politician who got caught. Now much of this attitude is of course bred by simple ignorance of what Mr Nixon did. The cynicism I do believe is a legacy handed down by a generation of young journalists who were aglow with admiration for the two Washington reporters Woodward and Bernstein who broke the Watergate story and followed it till it ran President Nixon into the ground. Asked by the way about the identity of Woodward and Bernstein, these children had never heard of them.

Briefly, let's recall what Mr Nixon did during the two turbulent years 1972-74 that brought him down and then go on to the more astonishing stretch of his career, which was that of a very unlikely phoenix. Simply then in June 1972, five men burgled the headquarters of the Democratic Party in Washington one night in order to set up bugging devices. Evidently, they hope to pick up some scandal about Democrats which would help the Republicans, Mr Nixon in particular, get re-elected in November of that year. The leader of the raid was a Cuban and the four others were strong anti-Castro men. At that time, one of the charges against the Democrats was that they wanted to woo Castro and so prove they were, as the saying went, "soft on communism".That original motive or aspect of the case vanished overnight. The burglars were caught and everybody including the president thought of it as a comical caper, "the Watergate caper" it was called not for too long.

The plot trod water through the summer and by November when Mr Nixon was winding down the war in Vietnam and rightly boasting about his breakthrough to communist China, he went roaring back into the White House with the biggest popular majority in American history, he took every state except one old Massachusetts. We shouldn't forget that five, six months after the Watergate break-in, his popularity was immense, but by then these two ardent investigators, the Washington Post's Woodward and Bernstein had been very busy probing and poking to alarming purpose – they had managed to pin the initiative for the burglary on two or three of the president's aides.

So the next spring, '73, the president said, he took the blame for these wicked men, he fired one, two resigned, but of course he announced time and again he had no personal knowledge of the raid or of subsequent efforts to cover it up. However, a Senate committee now held hearings, which produced very probable evidence of Mr Nixon's involvement. Most dramatically, it brought to the stand an unknown White House aide who made a fatal admission – I suspect that 50 years from now this man will remain the permanent historical footnote to Watergate – one Alexander Butterfield said offhandedly to the committee that some dialogue in the president's office he couldn't recall must surely be on the tapes. "On the tapes, what tapes?" "Oh, the president routinely secretly taped all conversations in his Oval Office". The time came when the Senate committee wanted to hear some of those tapes. Mr Nixon fought to keep them and he couldn't, they came out bit by bit.

And by the next spring, 1974, the Senate committee's record and the pieces by Woodward and Bernstein had shown a vast picture of corruption in the White House, secret raising of great sums for an unreported committee to re-elect the president, the paying out of hush money to the five burglars to keep their tongues still, and to others. There's a tape of the president himself saying, "Well if its one million dollars we could raise it, go ahead", but there was no so-called smoking gun a direct quote from the president proving what he knew and when he knew it. Then his lawyer found one. The Supreme Court said it had to be made public; it was one sentence from the president spoken to an aide only six days after the break-in, telling him to get at once on to the CIA and make the FBI bottle up any investigation of the raid.

That did it. The House Judiciary Committee has precise criteria for voting impeachment. The men who wrote the Constitution had learnt much from English trials for impeachment took seven years to prove Warren Hastings' dishonesty and cruelty. All sorts of grievous sins are not enough, you can be a very bad man and still faithfully execute the laws; maladministration, for instance, could rest merely on the Senate's opinion of how well a man governed. They settled on the faithful execution of the laws, the president's oath on high crimes and misdemeanours, they overlooked Mr Nixon's evasion of income taxes and his secret bombing of Cambodia, the Democrats guiltily recalled Kennedy had secretly planned to invade Cuba. The main charge, a high crime, was upheld – obstruction of justice. He should have reported the break-in at once and not spent two years lying to the press, to the Congress and to the people so he had to go. Three years later, he gave an astonishingly frank interview on television he said he'd messed things up and he'd let the country down, but he never used the word "wrong doing" he'd made mistakes; he resigned because he'd lost his power base.

I saw and heard that interview and I wrote at the time, "it seems to me that in the long run Mr Nixon may come out of it better than it appeared he would, as an engrossing human being once in high office trying to prop up the defences of his self-respect, a character of Shakespearian complexity and pathos, pitiable sympathetic and gone for good." Gone for good, how wrong I was. I didn't see what only his own closest aides, he had no close friends, recognised in him as an iron Quaker determination not to be dependent on others, to make his own way, a relish for fighting uphill as he'd done throughout his boyhood and youth up from poverty and 17-hour-a-day farming chores, grinding away in school, in law school, in the navy, then running for Congress and revealing less admirable fighting qualities both in his Congressional and his Senate campaigns; he slandered his opponents outrageously, but it was the heyday of raging anticommunism and Nixon saw traitors everywhere.

However, we're talking about the long return from Watergate, unlike most retired men, he didn't retire. He stayed absorbed with foreign policy, he went around the world, he talked to leaders; he evolved foreign policy positions more thoughtful, more unpleasant perhaps but in the result, far more far-sighted than those of the reigning presidents who more and more came to consult him.

It is granted now that his breakthrough with China was historic and necessary and that he signed the first arms control limitations treaty. What is less noticed is his enlightenment domestic policies. He imposed wage and price controls for the first time in peacetime; they didn't work he admitted it and they were abolished. He desegregated more schools in the South than all his predecessors, he sponsored and pushed a family assistance plan, which guaranteed an annual minimum salary for the working poor, a leap beyond welfare that was defeated then and has not been attempted since.

By the time he died, even his enemies bowed their heads and reluctantly granted that wherever is ideas were taken up on foreign policy in Asia, in Europe, in the fallen Soviet Union especially they had borne some fruit. I think the last best word was said by a black man who stood most of the day in the rain outside the Nixon Museum on Tuesday asked what he was doing there, this burly man said quite casually almost listlessly "just paying my respects to a former leader, a human being".

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.