So what kind of president was Richard Nixon?

Mostly bad. The good would be achieving a ceasefire in Vietnam (which proved temporary; the North Vietnamese overran South Vietnam two years later and the Democratic-controlled Congress did nothing about it) and going to China. (Because, as Spock put it in one of the Star Trek movies, only Nixon could go to China.)

Nixon also did the statesmanlike thing by resigning before the House of Representatives was about to impeach him. Nixon resigned after Republicans in Congress told him he was about to get impeached, and he was probably going to be convicted and booted out of office. (Which brings to mind the quote apparently misattributed to Winston Churchill about doing the right thing after all other possibilities are exhausted.) It’s impossible to imagine, say, Barack Obama resigning for any reason (or, for that matter, anyone else in American politics who has any chance to become president), and certainly Bill Clinton didn’t resign even though it probably would have made Al Gore president into the 2000s.

Nixon gets credit for making inroads with the Soviet Union, though I’m not sure that’s something worth applauding. By the end of the decade, the U.S. was looking second-rate compared to the Soviets, and Gerald Ford’s successor as president, Jimmy Carter, was impotent. It took one of Nixon’s challengers in 1968, Ronald Reagan, to decide, and have the fortitude to stick with, a radical strategy: “We win, they lose.” And if you think Vladimir Putin is bad today, imagine him with everything the Soviet Union had, including numerous puppet Warsaw Pact governments.

On the other hand, no one could ever accuse Nixon of being a small-government conservative. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Environmental Protection Agency began under his presidency. It’s not that workplace safety and the environment aren’t important, but the EPA is one of the biggest detriments to the economy that exists in this country, and OSHA isn’t anyone’s idea of bureaucratically sensible either. Worse were Nixon’s 1971 wage and price controls to stop inflation, which succeeded only in delaying it and the resulting recession until after the 1972 presidential election. That also made it Ford’s problem, and then Carter’s to a much greater extent. We can also thank Nixon, if that’s what you want to call it, for the 55-mph national speed limit.

For those who don’t know what Watergate was about, the Washington Post summed it up succinctly:

What Richard Nixon did that was wrong was to surround himself with a group of aides who were unaccountable to anyone but himself, whom he empowered to use the authority of government to break into any place they wished — an opposition party’s headquarters, a political opponent’s psychiatrist’s office — to further Mr. Nixon’s political interests and personal animosities. Then he and they lied about it and further tried to employ the intelligence agencies of government to concoct an alibi for them; they paid people to lie in federal court about their involvement. And for almost two years, with great contempt for the public and also, incidentally, for their own political supporters who went out on a limb for them, they kept lying — using the White House Oval Office to lend majesty to the criminal cover-up.

Watergate was a cancer on the country for numerous reasons. If you think I’m going to defend for any reason people like John Dean (who has spent the years since castigating conservatives apparently to atone, which means he missed the point of Watergate entirely), John Erlichmann and H.R. Haldeman, you’re wrong. Everything about Watergate, in fact, proves the worldview of small-government conservatives — when the stakes in elections are too high, politicians will do literally anything to get elected and stay in office, including blatant disregard for the law. (And Nixon was supposed to be the law-and-order president.) That’s true whether the Watergate Hotel burglary and resulting cover-up was about winning the 1972 election, or, as suggested here yesterday, about covering up the run-up to the 1968 election.

Watergate launched the journalism careers of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, though it also prompted some people to get into journalism for the wrong reasons — becoming a media rock star instead of, you know, doing the job you were hired to do. Ronald Reagan was already in the GOP limelight in the early 1970s, but the 1974 and 1976 losses helped make Republicans think that maybe the Democrat-lite approach wasn’t the right approach for the party. It also served to either inflate, or deflate every national-level political scandal since then, as if _____gate was either (1) “the next Watergate!” or (2) not as bad as Watergate. (Nixon was about to be impeached when he resigned. Bill Clinton was impeached, but the Senate decided that lying to a grand jury really wasn’t a big deal. Barack Obama has decided that federal laws are things he can ignore when he feels like it.)

There are no do-overs in elections. Had Nixon not been the GOP choice in 1968, and hadn’t been president in 1972, who would have been a better choice? New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller wasn’t any more conservative than Nixon. Reagan had been governor of California for two years. (And who knows if Reagan would have even gone into politics had Nixon not lost the 1962 California gubernatorial race. Reagan enacted an odd kind of revenge by beating George Brown, the man who beat Nixon.) Democrats were extremely torn about Vice President Hubert Humphrey; antiwar Democrats looked at him as Lyndon Johnson without the drawl. George McGovern was the captive of every Democratic special interest group, and the 1972 nominating process couldn’t have gotten Franklin Roosevelt elected. Jimmy Carter may not have run for president at all had it not been for Watergate. And then there’s the racist George Wallace.

Well, there is one way Watergate could have been avoided. Americans should have voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964.

Richard Nixon’s resignation, which became effective one day later, ended the Watergate crisis. (Except that it didn’t. Nixon’s replacement, Gerald Ford, pardoned him one month later. Republicans got hammered at the polls in 1974, and after narrowly defeating former California Gov. Ronald Reagan for the GOP nomination, Ford lost his election in 1976 to a candidate who as president turned out to be basely incompetent.)

Conventional wisdom says that the break-in at Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington was about the 1972 presidential campaign. George S. Will passes on a theory that the break-in wasn’t about 1972:

At about 5:15 p.m. on June 17, 1971, in the Oval Office, the president ordered a crime: “I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”

The burglary he demanded was not the one that would occur exactly one year later at the Democratic National Committee’s office in the Watergate complex. Richard Nixon was ordering a break-in at the Brookings Institution, a think tank, to seize material concerning U.S. diplomacy regarding North Vietnam during the closing weeks of the 1968 presidential campaign.

As they sometimes did regarding his intemperate commands, Nixon’s aides disregarded the one concerning Brookings. But from a White House atmosphere that licensed illegality came enough of it to destroy him.

Forty years have passed since Aug. 9, 1974, when a helicopter whisked Nixon off the White House lawn, and questions remain concerning why he became complicit in criminality. Ken Hughes has a theory.

Working at the University of Virginia, in the Miller Center’s Presidential Recording Program, Hughes has studied the Nixon tapes for more than a decade. In his new book, Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate, Hughes argues that Nixon ordered a crime in 1971 hoping to prevent public knowledge of a crime he committed in 1968.

In October 1968, Nixon’s lead over his Democratic opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, was dwindling, partly because Humphrey had proposed a halt to U.S. bombing of North Vietnam. Five days before the election, President Lyndon Johnson announced the halt, hoping to convene peace talks. One impediment, however, was South Vietnam’s reluctance to participate. Its recalcitrance reflected its hope that it would be better supported by a Nixon administration.

On July 3, 1968, a Nixon campaign aide, Dick Allen, sent a memo proposing a meeting with Nixon and Anna Chennault, a Chinese American active in Republican politics. She would bring to the meeting South Vietnam’s ambassador to Washington. The memo said the meeting must be “top secret.” Nixon wrote on the memo: “Should be but I don’t see how — with the S.S. [Secret Service].” On July 12, however, she and the ambassador did meet secretly in New York with Nixon who, she later said, designated her his “sole representative” to the Saigon government.

The National Security Agency was reading diplomatic cables sent from South Vietnam≠±=’s Washington embassy to Saigon, where the CIA had a listening device in the office of South Vietnam’s president. The FBI was wiretapping South Vietnam’s embassy and monitoring Chennault’s movements in Washington, including her visit to that embassy on Oct. 30.

On Nov. 2 at 8:34 p.m., a teleprinter at Johnson’s ranch delivered an FBI report on the embassy wiretap: Chennault had told South Vietnam’s ambassador “she had received a message from her boss (not further identified). . . . She said the message was that the ambassador is to ‘hold on, we are gonna win.’ ” The Logan Act of 1799 makes it a crime for a private U.S. citizen, which Nixon then was, to interfere with U.S. government diplomatic negotiations.

On June 26, 1973, during the Senate Watergate hearings, Walt Rostow, who had been Johnson’s national security adviser, gave the head of the LBJ library a sealed envelope to be opened in 50 years, saying: “The file concerns the activities of Mrs. Chennault and others before and immediately after the election of 1968.” Rostow died in 2003.

Based on examination of the available evidence, Hughes concludes that Chennault was following Nixon’s directives (which Nixon denied in his 1977 interviews with David Frost). Hughes’s theory is:

June 17, 1971, was four days after the New York Times began publishing the leaked “Pentagon Papers,” the classified Defense Department history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Nixon worried that further leaks, including documents supposedly in a Brookings safe, would reveal his role in sabotaging negotiations that might have shortened the war. This fear caused Nixon to create the Special Investigations Unit — a.k.a. “the plumbers” — and to direct an aide to devise other proposals such as the one concerning Brookings. This aide suggested using the Internal Revenue Service against political adversaries, but added:

“The truth is we don’t have any reliable political friends at IRS. . . . We won’t be . . . in a position of effective leverage until such time as we have complete and total control of the top three slots at IRS.” Forty years later, the IRS has punished conservative groups, and evidence that might prove its criminality has been destroyed. Happy anniversary.

So here’s an interesting mental game: What if the public had known in 1972 about Nixon’s shenanigans in 1968? First, let’s say that Nixon had been forced to resign before the 1972 election. Imagine President Spiro Agnew.

Second, would that have helped the Democrats that much in 1972? I think few historians believe Nixon really needed Watergate to win, because the Democrats were in complete disarray at the presidential-candidate level. Two Republican Congressmen, Pete McCloskey of California and John Ashbrook of Ohio, actually did run against Nixon, McCloskey as an anti-Vietnam War candidate, and Ashbrook because he was critical of Nixon’s reaching out to the Soviet Union and China. Irrespective of the fact that Nixon was extremely popular in the polls, who else would have run? Perhaps two supposed GOP candidates for vice president (because Nixon’s people wanted to get rid of Agnew but feared a conservative backlash), New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller (who ran against Nixon in 1968) or Nixon’s favorite Democrat, former Texas Gov. John Connally (yes, the same Connally who sat next to John F. Kennedy Nov. 22, 1963). Or perhaps Reagan, who briefly also ran against Nixon in 1968.

(One theory, according to Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, is that Nixon somehow compelled George Wallace, who had run for president as the American Independent Party candidate in 1968, to run as a Democrat in 1972. I’m not sure how Nixon’s mental powers compelled Wallace to do anything, but all Wallace did was get 46 electoral votes and deny Nixon a popular-vote majority. Nixon got 301 electoral votes and Wallace 46, and Hubert Humphrey got 43 percent of the vote and 191 electoral votes. It seems likely that had Wallace not been on the ballot, few of his voters would have gone for Humphrey. On the other hand, had Wallace won one or two more states, that result could have thrown the election into the House of Representatives.)

The maddening thing for Nixon, though, was his complete lack of GOP coattails. Republicans never came close to winning a majority of either house of Congress while he was in office. Even though Nixon won 49 states in 1972, Republicans gained just 12 House seats, and Democrats gained two Senate seats. Nixon was popular, but his party wasn’t.