Once a leading member of the China Lobby, an anti-Beijing organization, he reopened American relations with China in 1972. He began the rapprochement with the Soviet Union with the signing of the first treaty limiting the potentially deadly nuclear arms race. And after at first broadening and intensifying the conflict in Indochina, he ended American involvement in the fighting there.

Mr. Nixon's funeral will be at 4 P.M. on Wednesday at the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, Calif., the family said. They had asked that there be no official ceremony in Washington. President Clinton, who will be among the funeral speakers, said the Government had made an Air Force plane available to carry the body to the West Coast.

The Nixon Library said the body would arrive in California at 1 P.M. on Tuesday and be taken to the library by motorcade. The Rev. Billy Graham, a longtime friend of Mr. Nixon's, will officiate at the services, and Senator Bob Dole, the minority leader, and Gov. Pete Wilson of California will deliver eulogies along with Mr. Clinton. The body will remain at the library overnight for public viewing. The burial, on Thursday, will be private.

Mr. Nixon's tumultuous political career was born in the anti-Communist fervor of the cold war. In the early days of that struggle and afterward, he employed slashing tactics that provoked strong emotions among voters. He was demonized on the left and lionized on the right. "Nixon's the One," supporters chanted; "Would you buy a used car from this man?" detractors sneered.

Even his biographer, the historian Stephen E. Ambrose, found the inconsistencies difficult to resolve, the balance difficult to strike.

"It is mealymouthed, even cowardly, to end an assessment by saying that Nixon deserved to be re-elected and to be repudiated," Mr. Ambrose wrote in 1989. "But a contradictory judgment seems inescapable with this contradictory man, the author of detente and the author of the Watergate cover-up."

In his 1990 memoir, "In the Arena," the former President himself conspicuously avoided elegiac tones in summarizing his long political life. "Only when you have been in the depths," he wrote, "can you appreciate the heights. Without risks you will suffer no defeats. But without defeats you will win no victories." Combative and Partisan