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dark, unstoppable stubble on his chin. Against the polished jawline of

John F. Kennedy, his Democratic foe, Nixon appeared shifty, almost

sinister. ''Would you buy a second-hand car from this man?'' jeered his

enemies, driving home the notion that mendacity hung about those

glowering jowls.

Remembering that airless summer campaign, the Washington savant,

Theodore White, concluded that no picture in American politics better

illustrated a story of crisis than the famous shot of the camera

lingering on Vice-President Nixon ''as he half slouched, his Lazy Shave

powder faintly streaked with sweat . . . his face drooping with

strain''. Later, Watergate, with its betrayal of public trust, became

the sin which will forever exclude Nixon from the cavalcade of the

great, yet as blemished Presidents go he was hardly on his own.

Gore Vidal once remarked that the man who wins the presidency of the

United States is nearly always unfit to hold the office because by the

time he reaches the White House he has traded all understanding of

honesty to serve ambition. And certainly it is accepted now that Lyndon

Johnson's contempt for the truth and his rough Texan finagling far

surpassed that of Tricky Dicky.

But everything about Nixon seemed to conspire to make him appear

uniquely sleazy: his morose features, his small-town suits, his bleak

absence of humour, the foul-mouthed temper and his raw, unforgiving

memory for real or imagined slights. Just as television was turning

image into a political credential here was a man so lacking in star

quality that the Big Loser ticket seemed the only convincing one to

play. ''Thank you gentlemen,'' he barked at the press after his

California governorship defeat in 1962. ''You won't have Richard Nixon

to kick around any more.''

But if any man could be spurred by humiliation and disgrace it was

this one, and maybe Nixon's Big Loser persona was his only absolute

triumph because he managed to lose the presidency in a manner more

spectacular and original than anyone had ever lost it before. In the two

decades since the Watergate offences -- the bungled break-ins at the

Democratic HQ, the phone-tapping and smears, the bribery and eccentric

list of recommended slayings -- Nixon embarked on a brave, redemptive

odyssey to claw back some measure of America's respect. Yet during these

past two decades of roving the world as the West's elder political

visionary, he remained an enigma.

Intellectually gifted, a significant orator who in his eighties could

speak cogently for half an hour without the aid of notes, he remained so

rigidly self-controlled that when the standing ovations came Nixon still

appeared not entirely satisfied, still hardened by grievance, and

remote.

An angry man but never congenially emotional, his public shows of

sentiment were either mawkish stunts of affection for family pets or

bitter outbursts against those who ''hounded'' him from office and

dismissed his heroic climb from humble origins. Of his mother, he said:

''She never indulged in the present-day custom, which I find nauseating,

of hugging and kissing her children.'' But last year at Yorba Linda,

California -- where Nixon will be buried today -- the lower lip trembled

in honest grief at the funeral of his wife of 53 years.

Orphaned in her early teens, Pat Ryan Nixon was left to raise two

brothers, hacking a living out of the rural southern poverty Steinbeck

portrayed in Grapes of Wrath. As with many Americans her only legacy

from immigrant parents was that quality she shared with her husband, the

stubborn drive to beat ill fortune, and somehow from countless two-bit

jobs she scraped together funds to put the little battered family of

Ryans through college education.

When she finally qualified as a high-school teacher, Pat Nixon must

have believed life would never be as punishing again. Or did she? Right

through the political defeats and comebacks of the sixties, the wreckage

of a ruined presidency in 1974, there she was with that patient, masking

smile, listening to the same flawed words of Nixon's self-belief, the

endless rhetoric of shifted blame. In some ways she was her husband's

most acceptable qualification for the White House, and in company he

acknowledged as much. ''I'm controversial,'' he would say in

introduction. ''But here's Pat.'' Yet what a story she might have told,

although she said repeatedly that her only desire was to go down in

history as the wife of the President. But Watergate ruined all that.

Dean, Ehrlichman, Magruder, Liddy . . . Twenty years ago these names

became the daily litany of Watergate villains. Most involved were jailed

and then emerged to grow conspicuously pious and rich with lecture tours

and memoirs. But of all the offenders the impeached President was

mentally the most punished. A solemn child, his first teacher called

him. A child who rarely smiled or laughed. In old age he strove to find

that path from shame to stature, but right from the start Richard Nixon

seemed to know that making his way in life would never be a pleasure

excursion.