Differing legacies: Dick is dead, Phil's in jail.

My wife and I were moseying along en route from Ohio to the East Coast when on April 21 for no particular reason we found ourselves in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. That evening the local paper reported the conviction of the last of four defendants--"members of a group named Plowshares"--involved in the willful damaging of an Air Force jet last December.

I hadn't realized this sort of stuff still was going on. Plowshares seemed a name out of a long-dead past. But apparently not. The article's next-to-last paragraph noted that among the three earlier convicted defendants was "longtime peace activist Philip Berrigan, 70."

The next day Richard Nixon died. On the TV screen in our motel room, a grim-faced Dan (or maybe it was Peter or Tom) marveled at the dichotomous nature of the newly departed, his incessant movement back and forth between triumph and disaster. Nixon, he said, was the most fascinating and complex public figure of our time.

Guest commentator Henry Kissinger then cited Nixon's blend of rationality and creativity in foreign affairs, lauding the president who saved untold numbers of lives by finally ending the Vietnam War and whose precedent-shattering journey to China had redrawn the world's political topography and increased its livability quotient. All unspecified "problems" aside, Kissinger said, at least this portion of Nixon's reputation would remain unsullied and secure.

Unmentioned was the fact that the war was ended in 1973 only after five years of secret "incursions," saturation bombings, and other acts of wanton destruction, or that the terms of the "peace with honor" Nixon claimed to have attained were little different from what had been available when he took office. Similarly overlooked was the reason why an opening to China was necessary or even possible in 1973: Twenty years of political charlatanism marked by Nixonian insistence that, while Communists were clearly visible within every domestic shadow, their presence could be safely denied at the helm of the most populous country on earth.

Blessed are the peacemakers, implied Henry Kissinger, who--one-half of a Nobel Prize notwithstanding--was not and is not one of them. Phil Berrigan, who was and is, surely would agree.

The crazy, flaming, and tragic 1960s cannot be imagined; they had to be lived. Opponents of the war were everywhere, marching, disrupting, filling prisons, sometimes setting off bombs and getting shot, mounting a defense--or trying to--in courtrooms across the land. Their efforts convinced one now-dead president to forgo a reelection bid and set the stage on which another (now also dead) eventually fled office in advance of an impeachment mob. What opponents of the war did, finally, was save lives; what they failed to do, despite moments of high hopes, was change the world.

Phil Berrigan and his fellow priest and brother, Dan, were leaders, one small movement faction that, in place of bomb-building and bluster, based its actions on the word of the Son of the God of Christian love. In the old days, the Berrigans were front-page news, especially when they and seven associates were convicted after a vituperative trial in Catonsville, Maryland, of damaging draft board files by pouring blood over them, an action that served both as a metaphor for the war's victims and for the waning life force of a certain Lamb. The war machine has survived of course, as has Phil Berrigan, though the Elizabeth City 4, as his latest escapade is known, was not covered to my knowledge by the national press.

Other differences also abound. The Soviet Union no longer poses its quasi-fictional threat, the Gulf War was a redeeming triumph (except perhaps for the Iraqi children and other civilians who were in the wrong place when the smart bombs fell), the Iran-contra scam has come and gone, the United States has become the leading arms supplier of the entire planet, and Richard Nixon has reinvented himself one last time. Revered elder statesmen do not need expletives to be deleted. Young American men no longer are dispatched home in body bags, the streets and campuses are quiet, and Phil Berrigan is without allies. Almost.

His co-defendants this time were thirty-four, thirty, and twenty-four, ages at which idealism has been known to flourish. Its light usually dims later, however, and it seems both inconsolably sad and deliriously uplifting to realize that at least one man of seventy still finds cause and strength to refight the worthy battles he originally lost years ago.

But the flags are at half-staff--Richard Nixon is dead. His friends and foes have wept together on a national day of mourning ordered by Bill Clinton, who once marched at least figuratively with the Berrigans and now has concluded that Nixon was "a fierce advocate for freedom and democracy around the world" and "an inspiration to us" all.

Kissinger at the funeral maintained that his former boss's "long and sometimes bitter journey [has] ended in reconciliation," and Clinton urged that "the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life come to a close."

Nixon would have loved it. And, to give him his due, he also would have understood Clinton, s perceived need to honor the politically expedient at the expense of the true.

By all means let us judge the departed by his entire life--the foul, Red-baiting campaigns of the early years; the destruction of reputations and lives; the "Southern strategy" that further split an already divided nation; the attempt to turn the Supreme Court into a citadel of incompetence; the piles of corpses, both Indochinese and American; the secrecy, duplicity, and political conniving; the fervent belief--one of few to be substantiated--that presidents exist above the law.

Yes, he was fascinating and complex, the devious frequently are, which is why Kurtz is more interesting than Marlowe, Iago than Othello. Hell, a strong case can be made for the claim that the Wicked Witch of the West was the most captivating character in The Wizard of Oz, but when she died, nobody pretended that she was anything but a witch.

So on the one hand, beneath the sod of Yorba Linda, there is the dead Richard Nixon, his primary legacy the sanguine knowledge that James Madison was an ass and the Constitution exists mainly to be subverted when the moon is right or the need arises; and on the other, jailed in North Carolina, the live Philip Berrigan, paying one more time the price of an unswerving devotion to the message of Jesus Christ. Berrigan is scheduled for sentencing July 5. If his basic precepts are correct, Nixon already has submitted to another, greater judgment.