Anyone who remembered the media’s outpouring of vitriol during the Watergate scandal—or, for that matter during several earlier phases of Richard Nixon’s career—must have been astonished at the statesmanlike treatment accorded him by the press at his funeral. Many of the same reporters who made Watergate into the domestic political story of the century seemed to have forgotten that it even took place. Now the story about Nixon was his amazing longevity, his legendary sagacity, and, above all, his perseverance. “He never quit,” agreed Bill Clinton and Billy Graham, Stephen Ambrose and Henry Kissinger. Funny, I thought that was just what his detractors hated about him.

This unexpected generosity had in a way very little to do with Nixon himself. His death represented the loss of something more than that of an ex-President and latter-day sage and seer. In fact, for all his assiduously promoted reputation in that line, he seems in historical hindsight to have been proven wrong more often than right. As part of the reaction against the dewy-eyed coverage by most of the mainstream press, The New Republic, unwilling to give up the anti-Nixon habits of nearly half a century, ran a double-page spread called “Nixon-hating: an anthology,” followed by Jonathan Rauch’s contention that his was “the worst presidency of the century.” Jacob Weisberg, a New Republic alumnus writing in New York magazine, went Rauch one better and called Nixon “the most colossal disaster in the history of the American presidency.”

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