But this was a great misunderstanding of Richard Nixon: As he’d said so many times before—he wasn’t “a quitter.” It wasn’t in his nature to give up. He’d come back from innumerable defeats and setbacks throughout most of his existence. He’d lost the presidency in 1960 and the governorship of California two years later. Everyone knew that Nixon was finished then. Six years later he was elected president. (Only three other people in our history had lost the presidency and then won it, none of them in modern times.)

And so this remarkably resilient man wasn’t about to quit now. Determined and methodical as usual, with the help of aides who had gone with him to San Clemente at government expense, Nixon made a plan. This secret plan, codenamed Wizard, was one to regain respectability. He would show ’em again. What would have crushed most people to Richard Nixon was another crisis to be overcome.

But this was a new kind of struggle—not for something as tangible and requiring such fairly conventional means (even for him) as political office, but to rehabilitate his reputation. How, exactly, does one in this unprecedented situation go about that? Most people wouldn’t have dared to try. But Richard Nixon was as driven about this struggle as he had been about those that had gone before.

Yet for all his self-pity and sense of persecution, on at least one occasion Nixon showed a striking degree of self-knowledge. In a conversation with an aide in the early weeks of his exile, Nixon reflected on what had brought about his downfall. He said to the aide, “What starts the process are the laughs and snubs and slights that you get when you are a kid. But if you are reasonably intelligent and if your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitudes by excellence, personal gut performance, while those who have everything are sitting on their fat butts.” He had appointed tough guys as his aides, he said, because he wanted people around him who were, like him, fighters. He went out for high-school and college football, and the fact that he had no real athletic ability “was the very reason I tried and tried and tried. To get discipline for myself and to show others that here was a guy who could dish it out and take it. Mostly, I took it.”

And then Nixon recognized the danger of such an approach to life: “You get out of the alley and on your way.” At first it was easy. “In your own mind you have nothing to lose, so you take plenty of chances. It’s a piece of cake until you get to the top.” Then came the danger. “You find that you can’t stop playing the game because it is part of you … So you are lean and mean and resourceful and you continue to walk on the edge of the precipices because over the years you have become fascinated by how close to the edge you can walk without losing your balance.”