On this, the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon resigning the presidency, forgive some reflections of a personal rather than third-party nature.

In the past two days and indeed for the past half-century, all sorts of people will put forth all sorts of takes about whether the resignation was a tonic for American politics (“it showed the constitutional system worked”) or rather a catalyst for further disillusionment, cynicism, and permanent hardball recriminations. The truth is probably a mix of aspects of all of that and more. Those debates will continue to reverberate no matter what this column says.