For much of his life, Richard Nixon lived the American Dream. From his earliest years in poverty, Nixon persevered to graduate third in his class from Duke Law School and begin a promising legal career. After volunteering to serve in WWII, Nixon became a congressman at 34, a senator at 38, VP at 40, and the Republican nominee for President at 47. While Nixon suffered defeat in the 1960 election, he remained politically active behind the scenes, and after being renominated in 1968, he became his nation’s 37th President. The apex of his political life came in 1972 when Nixon opened the doors to the reclusive People’s Republic of China, initiated détente with the Soviet Union, and was rewarded with re-election in one of the greatest presidential landslides in American history. Two days after his second inaugural, he brought the divisive Vietnam War to a close. For 60 years, Nixon fought his way to the peak of the highest mountain his country could offer. And then it all came tumbling down.

Richard Nixon was a political pugilist, always on the attack, and not shy about breaking a few rules to gain an advantage. He was hardly one to quibble over whether the ends justified the means. From a political standpoint, for Nixon, they almost always did. In the glorious year of 1972, Nixon sowed the seeds of his own political destruction by encouraging his subordinates to dig up dirt on their opponents and to use questionable means to do so. Once off and running, some members of the staff took matters into their own hands in trying to serve their President’s political desires. This included a break-in at the DNC’s Headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. The burglars were caught red-handed, and within hours, the FBI and the press were connecting the dots back to Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President. While Nixon did not know of this particular break-in in advance, he was fully aware that his staffers were off performing political dirty tricks and probing for inside intelligence from the opposition. Now that one of those efforts had gone off the rails, the President had decisions to make. Just about every decision he made over the course of the next two years was deeply flawed. He chose the path of a cover-up, which unraveled bit by bit, getting closer and closer to the Oval Office. In the end, the evidence of the cover-up became overwhelming, and Nixon became the first person to resign from the office of the presidency. Nixon’s American Dream had become his American Nightmare.

To the end, Nixon was convinced that history would treat him well. In this, he would be wrong. A half century after he resigned the presidency, Nixon remains primarily remembered by a single word – Watergate – one of the worst epithets in the lexicon of American politics. His story is much more robust than that and deserves to be understood in its entirety. Nevertheless, Nixon has no one to blame for his persisting negative reputation than himself. For years, Nixon’s no-holds-barred approach to politics served him better than just about anyone, but when he finally flew too close to the edge, he got burned. Rightly or wrongly, that’s the Richard Nixon that perseveres in the minds of most of his posterity.