Richard Nixon would have turned 100 last week, but there were no gala celebrations or retrospectives to mark the event.
Of course, he was the only president ever forced to leave office — and that was just part of his complicated legacy. Indeed, while he’d long been demonized by the left, Nixon was no clear-cut conservative icon.
As president, Nixon instituted wage and price controls, established the Environmental Protection Agency and ended America’s diplomatic isolation of what was then called Red China.
Many conservatives also questioned his détente policy with the Soviet Union, particularly his opposition to a fundamental human-rights issue: linking emigration rights with trade benefits.
Such an approach contrasted sharply with Nixon’s early days as a fervent anti-communist and his dogged pursuit that helped unmask liberal darling Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent.
But Nixon ended the war in Vietnam precisely as he said he would, not with the politically popular swift withdrawal his opponents demanded. And though he expanded big government in some areas, he moved to rein it in elsewhere.
And in 1973, when Israel faced a surprise attack at the start of the Yom Kippur War, Nixon authorized an emergency airlift of arms that played a crucial role in turning the tide of battle in the Jewish state’s favor.
On the home front, he tried to remake the liberal, activist Supreme Court by appointing strict-constructionist justices. And it was Nixon who reached out to the “silent majority” — many of whom, as Fox News’ James Rosen notes in National Review, later became Reagan Democrats.
Arriving at the White House after a year of domestic chaos and turmoil, he emphasized the need for law and order, though his critics called that racism.
He was the first president to raise the issue of prevailing left-wing media bias, a topic now part of the popular debate.
And today, his opening to China looks much more prescient, given Beijing’s economic embrace of the West.
For Nixon-haters, there will always be Watergate — and nothing else.
Certainly, the shame-filled ending of his presidency can’t be minimized.
But, as then-President Bill Clinton said in his eulogy of the 37th president: “May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.”