The third and final segment of the "American Tragedy" series is a man who allowed his flawed character to bring eternal shame to his country and its highest office, the Presidency. His Phoenix-like rise from defeat in the Presidential election of 1960 and ignominious failure in the California governor’s election just two years later to - just 6 years later - becoming the nation’s 37^th President is unprecedented in politics. Ordinary men, particularly in politics, just do not recover from such opprobrious defeats. He rightfully should have become a forgotten man whose last public words - "You won’t have (me) to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference..." - would have served best as his epitaph and not, as it is today, a political punch line. If there were not tragedies in history, Benedict Arnold would have been killed at the Battle of Saratoga. But, sadly, tragedies do live among us. Just as Arnold could have, by dying heroically, avoided his inevitable infamy, our subject could have lived out his life as a footnote in American history. Only, as good tragedy commands, he did live to give other press conferences and face, finally, personal indignity and national shame.

Richard Nixon was the ultimate Horatio Alger story. An American "rags-to-riches" tale worthy of Hollywood immortality. Born the son of a poor Quaker family which had moved to the California’s fabled "land of milk and honey" only to be mired in the depth of the Depression. Further, the family were perpetual victims of the tenets of their faith: benevolence and charity to all. The parents gave away what little excesses they might have had in food and money to the poor who poured into the "Golden State" to escape economic hardship or seek their fortune. Their generosity left their own children chronically destitute. Further, Nixon was raised in a strict household with a paucity of parental approval and an excess of harsh punishment for minor transgressions. His father was stern - almost to the point of brutality - and his mother was emotionally distant. Through diligence and hard work, Nixon escaped to academic pursuits where he excelled, eventually being offered a scholarship to Harvard. Unable to attend Harvard due to financial lack - the first of many times he felt the harsh sting of entitlement’s surreptitious hand - he attended tiny Whittier College, eventually being elected student-body president.

After graduating second in his class at Whittier, he attended Duke University Law School (which, again, he could afford only by receiving a full scholarship) and finished third in his graduating class. He returned to California and passed the bar. He entered the mundane tedium of a small-town law practice. He would, undoubtedly, have lead a life of obscurity were it not for his driving and uncontrollable will to be accepted, acknowledged and, even more, to be recognized as a success. This burning, all-consuming flame which fueled the furnace of his very soul (quite possibly, sparked by his abhorrence of his father’s humble life) would eventually consume his life and his otherwise prodigious political and diplomatic legacy. His imperfect\ character would endow him the rightful label of the "Benedict Arnold" of American political history. His "me-against-the-world" mentality was his hamartia, his tragic flaw. And, as his "enemies list" grew, so too did his paranoia and his recklessness. Fed by his inner demons and enabled by unscrupulous and ruthless cronies, Nixon was and remains the only man in American history to be forced to resign from the Presidency.

In the examination of a life gone so very wrong, one is always tempted to find an explanation - a singular, unifying truth - for such a tragedy. It is no different with Richard Nixon. But, as is often the case, there is no such comfortable simplicity in human tragedy. Pulitzer Prize winning author and historian James MacGregor Burns perhaps sais it best when he observed: "How can one evaluate such an idiosyncratic President, so brilliant and so morally lacking?" The answer is, of course, that you can’t.

What is clear to me, however, is that Richard Nixon was a man who exhibited - from the earliest days of his career - a easily identifiable (if rare) personality disorder. He was the embodiment of, as first described by Sigmund Freud, a narcissistic personality. It is characterized, primarily, by a disconnect between the real world and the world imagined in the victim’s mind. Those with this disorder develop an exaggerated sense of their own importance, infallibility and grandiosity. In its most dangerous form, the paranoid form, they believe that their importance is undermined by the pernicious efforts of others. Obviously, in the halls of power, this is a particularly lethal disorder. The symptoms of this relatively rare personality disorder are:

• Grandiose sense of one's own abilities or achievements
• Fantasies about having exceptional power, attractiveness or success
• Sense of belonging to an exclusive group of people who truly understand each other
• Need for constant praise
• Expectations of special treatment
• Exploitation of other people
• Lack of empathy for other people
• Envy of other people or a belief that you are the subject of other people's envy
• Haughty or arrogant behaviors

At one time or other, Nixon exhibited almost all these symptoms. I must admit that I am certainly not the first to suggest this "diagnosis" in President Nixon. It was written about in a "psychobiography" in 1999 by Dr. Vamik D. Vokan, et al. In truth, history is littered with men who suffered the same Walter Mitty-like fantasies of personal grandiosity. Napoleon and Hitler are two that leap to mind. Indeed, a measured amount of narcissism is a necessary ingredient for most effective leaders. Numerous American Presidents - from Thomas Jefferson to Franklin Roosevelt to John Kennedy to William Jefferson Clinton - had a hearty measure of narcissism in their personalities. Military leaders throughout history have displayed narcissistic personality types as well (e.g. Julius Caesar, Napoleon, George Patton).

The problems begin, however, when this "self love’ and imagined infallibility overrides the individual’s basic sense of reality - right versus wrong, if you will - and clouds judgement and decision-making. Under these extreme conditions, narcissistic personalities can become extremely dangerous and self-destructive. This was the fate of Nixon just as it was for other national leaders stricken with this disorder. The fall of these heads of state can often, as in the case of Napoleon and Hitler, take their countries down to ruin with them. Fortunately, in the case of Nixon, the worse case scenario was avoided. But the piper must always be paid, regardless of the tune. The cost in this instance was to irreparably tarnish the once-glittering gem that was democracy and cloud the ingenious design of the "separation of powers." The blemishes remain poignantly visible even 30 years later.

Nixon, for all his deep personal defects, was undoubtedly a political genius. His accomplishments - particularly on the international stage - are undeniable. He surely began the fall of communist Russia and the Eastern Block and made "triangle diplomacy" (deftly pitting the interests of Soviet Russia against those of communist China) part of the diplomatic lexicon. These triumphs, tragically, are lost forever, buried deep beneath the hubris of the thoroughly illegal acts of his domestic policies. The wire-tapping, the lies, the deception, the domestic spying and "dirty tricks" are the eternal legacy of the Nixon Administration.

His enablers - principally, Kissinger, Haldeman, Erlichman, and lesser players - fed the fantasy that was Nixon’s world. Nixon’s classic misconception of his power was, in his own words: "If the President does it, it is not illegal." Mired as he was in his self-delusional and distorted universe, he actually believed this to be reality. His delusions of grandeur, especially toward the end of his Presidency, were seated squarely on this illusionary throne of invincibility. He honestly believed, as his memoirs reflected, that Watergate was nothing more than "politics, pure and simple." To the bitter climax and beyond, Nixon never comprehended that his acts were illegal and, in his mind, were actually justified because he had to "play it tough" because his "enemies" would. This was clearly a dangerous time in American history and, in a lesser government, could easily have brought about autocracy.

Perhaps, it was Henry Kissinger, the greatest (and, ironically, the least stained by the scandal) enabler of the Nixon Administration, that put it best when he said:

"Nixon had set himself a goal that is beyond human capacity: to make himself over entirely. But the gods exacted a fearful price for this presumption. Nixon paid, first, the price of congenital security. And ultimately, he learned what the Greeks had known: that the worst punishment can be having one’s wishes filled too completely." [YOU, 74, 1183, 1185-86]

Greek tragedy has no greater victim - nor more perfect example - than Richard Milhous Nixon. As the Greeks did with the tale of Oedipus, we should remember the story of President Nixon with fear and trepidation - always.