I was pretty young when Nixon was president. I don’t remember much. Beyond the obvious Watergate scandal, how was his terms in office regarded by history?
If Watergate hadn’t happened, I’m pretty sure history would regard him as one of our best post-war presidents. For that matter, I still think of him that way - he was a horrible human being, but a fine President. He started the EPA, began detente with the Soviet Union (thus reducing the risk of nuclear war), and started us on the road towards normal relations with China - thus widening the Sino-Soviet rift.
Even with Vietnam, Nixon’s presidency made the world a safer place. I’d take him over either Bush, or Reagan, in a heartbeat.
Nixon is the only president to declare war on his own people. Bush came very close in his suspension of constitutional protections, but Nixon was the one with an enemies list. That may have been limited to media types but it was symbolic of the way he treated those who did not agree with him. I never felt as much oppression in my own country, even when those who disagreed with Bush were being called traitors. We were called that and more.
Watergate was merely the thread that unveiled the criminal enterprise that was an ineradicable part of everything Nixon touched. You can’t say anything about Nixon “except for Watergate.” His entire presidency was unmitigated evil, or perhaps somewhat mitigated evil since he was more competent than Bush and actually achieved some useful policies over his first term. The second term accomplished nothing but hunkering in his bunker.
Nixon can only be understood in these terms. That’s why no one on the opposition has ever forgiven him for anything he did. To have lived through his reign not as a supporter was to be on the losing side of a war with one own’s government. That’s why Nixon was and remains the byword for evil presidencies.
Was he a worse president than Bush? A different question. For long-lasting damage, probably not. However, there is no possibility that Nixon will ever improve his place amongst the lowest rung of presidents any more than Bush will.
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Let’s move this over to IMHO, since it’s asking opinions.
GQ > IMHO
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Great presidents reshape their party and their country as they go - even after these administrations New Dealers, Jacksonian Democrats, and Reaganites had an outsize effect on the body politic. Even the underrated Ford administration produced a number of officials that contributed quite a bit to future Republican administrations.
Nixon didn’t have this effect - and a moment’s thought shows that he couldn’t have had it even without Watergate. Very few people had a political loyalty to Nixon - whatever allegiance people had to him was partisan or situational. Nixon had incredible political skills, but they were usually put to the cause of his political survival and seldom toward building his party or creating lasting political alliances.
This of course accelerated his downfall when it came.
Actually, most people on the list were prominent Dems and Dem fundraisers. Here is the original list of 20, according to Wiki. A good number I’ve never heard of:
This later grew into a larger list of several hundred (again from Wiki). This one is really too long to quote. It’s interesting that there is a category of Senators, and of Members of the House of Representative, and yet a 3rd of black Members of Congress. At heart he must have been a segregationist. 
For the purpose of this hypothetical, do you mean that the Watergate break-in never happened, or that it was carried out and not discovered?
I agree with some of what Exapno Mapcase said, except my knowlege is mostly from hindsight. I remember Nixon resigning, but nothing else. Everything I’ve learned about him since then (like the Canuck Letter) leads me to believe that he was a nasty individual, and sought out others to work for him.
But if the break-in had not been discovered, how would his true nature have come to light? Historians unearth lots of information after the fact. I suspect that even if the whole truth had come out in dribs and drabs, learned tomes and retrospectives, it would have given him a better reputation than the way it all came crashing down.
I am still, after all these years, bewildered as to why someone with his political acumen and popularity did not fire everyone involved in Watergate the moment it became public. He had just been re-elected by 23 percentage points!
I find it difficult to envisage a Nixon presidency without something like Watergate.
There was something in his character, something despicable and vile that always existed within him.
Without Watergate, he’d have gone down, I think, as an OK president. His virtuosity in foreign affairs would have kept him in the middle of the pack, despite the fact that he was one of the worst human beings to have ever held the office.
Even in our world where Watergate did happen, I think it’s still possible to recognize that Nixon accomplished a lot of good, in particular in peaceful international relations. And frankly, I don’t think I can say that there was all that much lasting harm done to the country from Watergate: At worst, it decreased public trust in the government, but really, the people shouldn’t trust government too far.
I would happily have swapped Nixon as a replacement for Dubbayah any day.
Yup, W makes Nixon look like Solomon. Maybe that’s part of W’s karmic role – to rehabilitate Nixon by comparison to subsequent losers.
Nixon was a terrible president, even setting aside the interlocking series of scandals known as “Watergate”.
His economic policies were purely interventionist. Remember wage and price controls? Nixon had no economic ideology. He was prepared to engage in any sort of economic shenanigans. Where do you guys think the economic malaise of the 70s came from? It was Jimmy Carter of all people who listened to Paul Volcker and set the stage for the prosperity of the 80s long after Carter had been voted out of office.
And his record in international affairs is similarly pathetic. Sure, he visited China. But anyone remember a little war? In a place called Vietnam? Nixon inherited Vietnam from Johnson, but his prosecution of the war was just as ham-fisted. Eventually he signed the Paris Peace accords…after escalating the war dramatically, widening it to neighboring countries, and killing millions of Vietnamese. And for what? What did Nixon gain that couldn’t have been gained by swift withdrawl in 1969?
Nixon knew the war was lost. His goal during the war was not to win but to demonstrate to the Soviets that we were capable of fighting. And so the United States and Vietnam were sacrificed on the altar of “credibility”. The sheer cynicism and duplicity of Nixon and Kissenger’s foreign policy is mindboggling.
Nixon and Kissenger saw their role as presiding over the orderly decline of the United States. Even his much publicized anti-communist credentials were a sham. He didn’t give two shits about communism. His red-baiting was entirely and completely tactical, just a method for winning elections. And so “Nixon goes to China” is completely in character for him. He didn’t care about China itself, it’s economic system was irrelevant to him, the opening to China was pure geopolitics, foreign policy as a giant game of Risk.
Nixon had no vision for the country. He left nothing behind. His presidency was an instance of pure power politics for no other reason than the holding and wielding of power. He was a pure Machiavellian figure who cared about nothing and no one. His legacy is purely negative and exists only as a cautionary tale.
The only president who comes out worse is James Buchanan, who actually presided over the disintegration of the United States. George Bush isn’t even in the same league, Bush is just a nobody who stumbled into the job and flailed around ineffectually. Nixon was a purely malignant figure, who accomplished nothing good even by accident.
Nixon also happily presided over the dismantling of the Apollo program, abandoning a program that had invested a decade and tens of billions of dollars to achieve a manned space capability that was one of the most shining achievements the US ever had. But once it became clear that it had nothing to contribute to the Cold War it was scuttled, when even moderate continued funding would have meant that the money already spent on development wasn’t for nothing. Now, thirty years later, we’re having to reinvent the same basic technology.
Lemur866 already mentioned the wage/price controls, Nixon’s hamfisted attempt to deal with inflation. Even as a child I thought “how can you make it against the law to change what you charge for something?”.
From my perspective, he was practicing politics in a manner that killed no one. He did withdraw US forces from Vietnam, after all, and that was simply rectifying Johnson’s folly (not Johnson’s “evil”).
By the way, those helicopter scenes of refugee diplomats and others leaving the American Embassy in a panic were taken two years after the last US troops - other than embassy military guards - were withdrawn from South Vietnam by Nixon.
I reserve terms like “unmitigated evil” for those who are genuinely evil, i.e. the mass murderers of history. If you apply that term indiscriminately to anyone you don’t like or disagree with politically, then you have nothing left over to apply to those who are genuinely evil.
Come to think of it, on rereading your stuff, perhaps in your case you do think they are all equally “evil”.
Silly me. 
But Nixon withdrew from Vietnam in 1973. When did he take office? 1969. If we want to give Nixon credit for withdrawing from Vietnam how do you explain those years? Nixon didn’t wind down the war, he escalated the war. As for killing no one, how many Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians were killed by American forces between 1969 and 1973?
And there’s a pretty direct correlation between the withdrawl of American troops and the fall of South Vietnam. Sure South Vietnam wasn’t completely overrun until 1975. But the “peace” agreement Nixon signed was nothing of the sort. Nixon agreed to withdraw American troops. North Vietnam agreed to a ceasefire until all American troops were withdrawn, then resumed the war. And South Vietnam collapsed like a house of cards. The Paris agreement was a sham.
South Vietnam “collapsed like a house of cards” after Congressional Democrats cut funding to South Vietnam in half in 1974.
Bush has made me appreciate Nixon. At least Nixon knew that the National Guard was for killing hippies, not brown foreigners.
I’ve heard speculation in the past that Nixon’s China visits were inspired by urging from the Japanese, rather than any deep strategy by his administration. It is known that the Japanese were anxious to rehabilitate the Chinese internationally as part of their negotiations for a WWII reconciliation treaty, and they also feared the USSR’s quest for influence in eastern Asia. Certainly, the Japanese would have been very happy to see the Americans get closer to the Chinese during their negotiations, so it was either a even greater accomplishment for Nixon, or a favour for an ally that turned out a lot better than he foresaw.
Well, exactly. Without the US propping up South Vietnam it collapsed like a house of cards.
If we had continued to prop up South Vietnam it might have survived longer. But we didn’t so it didn’t.
Let’s face facts. When he signed the Paris treaty, did Nixon have any good reason to believe that South Vietnam had passed some threshold and was now capable of defending itself? Of course not. South Vietnam was incapable of winning the war on its own. That’s why the “peace” agreement was a sham. Nixon and Kissenger knew there wouldn’t be any peace, they knew North Vietnam would resume hostilities, and they knew that without American support South Vietnam would lose.