This article ran in the Tallahassee Democrat on May 1, 1994.

With all due respect to George Washington and Teddy Roosevelt, to Andrew Jackson and John Kennedy, it is Richard Nixon who is our most important president to study. The sooner our textbook writers learn this the better our cultural education will be.

This is not hyperbole from a partisan, since I've never counted myself an admirer of Nixon. The lawyer from Whittier was not the president whose impact on our social policies or national life was the most important, yet he remains the most vital leader for us to study and understand.

Like few presidents other than Lincoln, Nixon has a depth of humanity that makes him worthy of cultural scrutiny. In his flaws and frailty, he is not a model for us to follow so much as a lesson in human nature: an example of how easy it is to fall from victory to defeat through greed, spite, arrogance, and illegality.

The measure of his importance is that this week out national poets and writers have struggled to articulate what he signified. But they haven't been able to succeed entirely because his story, positively Shakespearean in the dimensions of its tragic humanness, outstrips their ability to make appropriate sense of it.

Our thirty-seventh president possessed what all of us, whether damned or saved, bear with us, and that is the capacity to fall into error, evil, and disgrace. For that reason it is even more important that we don't turn our back on him. Like those of us know who grew up with an alcoholic father, it is important to learn lessons where they present themselves rather than ignoring them. One of those lessons is the humility to realize that we, too, might be subject to disgrace and failure, to the weaknesses and ambitions of the flesh, and that it is hazardous in such a universally fallen world to cast stones.While he should be judged for what he did, we should realize that what happpened to him could happen, under different circumstances, to us.

As a boy, Nixon shouldered the hopes his parents placed on him and rose quickly from modest surroundings to earn a law degree from Duke and become an officer in the Navy. But he felt too deeply the rebukes he received in life: from the rich and popular while he was in school, from liberals who detested him for his hardball-anticommunist days in the late 1940s, from Eisenhower in the 1950s when Nixon was vice-president, from the national electorate in 1960 and from the California voters in 1962, from Kennedy and the Eastern establishment, and from the student activists during his presidency.

Nixon's reaction to insults from his enemies was to become vengeful. In his enthusiasm for punishing his antagonists, Nixon overreached the Constitutional limits of his power. That was his downfall. When he kept his battles to personal vendettas handled through legal, if unsavory, tactics, it was tolerable. But when he violated the Constitution he was destroyed. A child can play with a screwdriver and stick it into the carpet with impunity, but when the screwdriver is stuck into an electric socket it ends the game. Similarly, Nixon could be deceitful and spiteful in the private or political arena, but when he stuck his screwdriver into the Constitution to readjust the balance of power to his own liking it ended his career.

The irony is that Nixon seemed able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. He was so powerful and the Democrats so weak during his presidency that he alone could ruin himself. With the inevitability that only inherent flaws can produce, in Watergate he derailed his own victory train.

Perhaps Nixon is a fitting symbol for the United States after 1945. Before World War II the isolationism of our foreign policy gave us a cultural innocence. But when the country moved into a position of international leadership and interventionism in the 1940s we bit the apple and like Adam stumbled into a fallen, if wiser state. As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr suggested, this change brought us a tragic view of life--presenting us with choices and consequences beyond our control.

If so, Nixon might be the representative of our tragic and fallen condition in the past half-century. Like America itself since midcentury, Nixon operated in a world without illusion, without innocence--in a real world of arms races and covert activity, where bad measures had to be undertaken in the name of good ends. It's no accident that Nixon was an ardent internationalist who came to political maturity during the beginning of this tragic era.

We need to remember that Nixon, as a cautionary lesson, does us no good if we imagine him as unrelentingly evil. He is useful only if we can relate to him as a real person. So while we should pledge to remember that his transgression of the Constitution was wrong, we need also to remember that when he was rebuked by Congress he did step aside (as undemocratic leaders in other countries might not have) and let the democratic process renew itself without further damage. May both the example of his threats to our democratic values, and his final acquiesence to the power of the democratic citizenry, continue to strengthen our democratic commitments.

So there are two reasons, one cultural and one political, that make it essential that we don't lose the lesson of Nixon in the underbrush of our other presidents. Like the most compelling characters in our literature, this tragic human figure can teach us about the dangers of ambition and at the same time keep us aware of our own weaknesses. At the same time his example warns us of the constant dangers to our democratic liberties. These are lessons that must be kept at the very center of our national memory.