Must Reads: Fifty years ago today, Richard Nixon took office, and for him it was a time of hope, civility and optimism

Inauguration Day 1969 dawned windy, stone-gray clouds gathering to shroud the viewing stands from the sun, a sharp cold chilling the nation’s capital. America thinks it knows Richard Nixon now, 50 years later, when his very name summons other memories: the I-am-not-a-crook disavowal, the crude remarks on the White House tapes, the Watergate cover-up, the televised resignation speech, the teary farewell to staff and country that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger later called an “elegy of agony.” Though other events would help define Nixon as president — his astonishing walk along the Great Wall of China and his stroll through Soviet Russia’s Red Square — this largely unmarked anniversary recalls the great hope, the deep sense of mission, the pervasive air of national purpose and the jolting frisson of idealism that surrounded Jan. 20, 1969, and spilled into the early years of his presidency. In his 1993 eulogy for Nixon, President Clinton, who during Nixon’s first year in the White House protested the Vietnam War and successfully angled to avoid the draft, saluted the president he once reviled, saying, “May the day of judging Richard Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.” NIXON'S INAUGURAL ADDRESS, ANNOTATED "Those who have been left out, we will try to bring in.Those left behind, we will help to catch up." read the speech Thomas Jefferson, no admirer of the role of the president in the new Constitution, thought the founders had created an office that was no more than “a bad edition of a Polish king.” Nixon saw the modern presidency far differently, and in the weeks leading to his inauguration he solicited speech drafts from Patrick Buchanan, a conservative agent provocateur; from Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat and Harvard professor who would help craft the most significant Nixon domestic initiatives; from William Safire, a future New York Times columnist; and even from Paul Keyes, a producer of “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” where Nixon once awkwardly delivered its running punchline, “Sock it to me.” He wanted an inaugural address that soared as much in its language as it soared in its goals. Gannon believes Nixon was handicapped by his face; the president didn’t have, Gannon said, “the facial expressions for compassion and warmth.” Onetime presidential military aide Col. Jack Brennan said Nixon “was not a guy you go backpacking with.” But the great irony — one that would have amused Richard Nixon and tortured John F. Kennedy — is that the most famous line that Alan Jay Lerner wrote for the musical “Camelot” might apply not only to the brief Kennedy interlude at the beginning of the 1960s but also to the early White House period of Nixon at the end of the 1960s, the forgotten new dawn that for “one brief shining moment” was full of high hopes and high purpose.