WHEN THE POWERFUL CAME TO YORBA LINDA

Powerful and famous people from all over the world came to honor and bury Richard Nixon. Thousands more walked past the flag-draped casket. But even those few who knew him best didn't claim to understand how his mind worked. They honored a perplexing, painfully aloof man who came closer to dominating American politics than any other person of the post-World War II era.

From the time of Nixon's fall 20 years ago, Republican leaders had been very sparing in their praise of him -- lest the GOP be retainted with the Nixon legacy and suffer additional electoral defeats like the devastating ones of '74 and '76. Ronald Reagan and George Bush were careful to keep Nixon a safe, clearly defined distance from their presidencies.

Yet young Bill Clinton enthused about Nixon as a wise old man full of knowledge and insight. What a strange symbiosis between the young president and the old warrior. Nixon, the devout, professional anti-Communist, could embrace the Communist regime in China and advance detente with the Soviet Union. Clinton, the new Democrat, could praise the man whose name was seldom spoken with great kindness in Democratic gatherings.

Bill Clinton thinks of himself as the "Comeback Kid." His political career has been a series of ups and downs marked by a resilience and a determination to pick up the pieces and try again. That's the core of his respect for Richard Nixon, the man who made the word "comeback" into a continuing way of life.

In 1952, Nixon pulled off Comeback #1. He was within an eyelash of being thrown overboard by Dwight Eisenhower, when he executed a cornball TV performance that repulsed the sophisticates, but wooed the public.

After his loss to John Kennedy in '60 and later his humiliating defeat for governor of California in '62, Nixon was surely politically dead and buried. Even he believed so for a while. Yet, in Comeback #2, he pulled himself up and trudged around the country giving hundreds of political speeches, finally capturing the presidential prize as deepening divisions over Vietnam sank the Democratic party.

It was called "Johnson's War" and Nixon intended to keep it just that way in the public's mind -- although almost as many American soldiers died under Nixon as had died under Johnson. As he assumed the presidency, one thing was clear to Nixon: The United States must somehow disengage from Vietnam before his first term came to an end. Although he didn't invent the word "Vietnamization," he eagerly adopted it as his spin on a get-America-out policy.

For much of this first term, he felt that the North Vietnamese could be bombed into submission and could be bludgeoned into agreeing to a permanent division of the country. It was his belief that while the bombing was intensifying, the South Vietnamese army could be trained and equipped as a first-class fighting machine capable of resisting any further threat from the North.

The bombing was of mammoth proportions. For example, during the Christmas holidays of 1972, American planes flew over 1,700 sorties and dropped 36,000 tons of bombs on Hanoi and Haiphong. Yet Hanoi wouldn't submit. Richard Nixon was face to face with a force psychologically prepared to match his will. In Saigon it was just the opposite. Nixon had an unreliable ally never psychologically prepared to match the will of its enemy.

As 1972 came to a close, Nixon and Henry Kissinger knew that, as far as the United States was concerned, the war was over. Bombing couldn't win it and the South Vietnamese couldn't fight it. Nixon and Kissinger agreed to a settlement wherein armed North Vietnamese troops were allowed to remain in the South. Nixon always said of himself that he "was never a quitter," but he knew, when he agreed to let Hanoi keep its army in the South, that the American role in Vietnam was irredeemably concluded and that the war could ultimately be lost.

Comeback #3 was the most stunning of all. It came in the form of his resurrection from the pits of Watergate and resignation from the presidency to his acceptance as elder statesman. Bill Clinton gave the country's blessings to this final phase of Nixon's resilient life with his official announcement of Nixon's death from the Rose Garden and his eulogy at the funeral in Yorba Linda.

Richard Nixon would have loved it all. This perplexing, aloof man was buried in a chorus of praise from admirers he never knew he had.