My mother came not to praise Nixon, but to bury him.

Some 49 Augusts ago, Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency of the United States. It was the first time that ever happened in American history. He wasn’t stabbed in the back, but bluntly told to his face he had no Senate supporters left.

Nixon departed in his graceless way, victory signs over his head as he boarded the helicopter, the first leg of his journey home to California.

But on that summer day in ’74, one woman watching was not done with Nixon yet.

A long-haired professor in Santa Monica, likely on his enemies list, my mother Judith drank the moment the chopper left the White House as a sweet pour of vindication.

“Nothing made me happier,” she told me.

The scenario has special relevance as we contemplate a greater disgrace facing a president: four criminal indictments for the shameless Donald Trump. Four.

Inspiration struck: Judith could drive south to San Clemente and meet the plane to witness the bitter end of Nixon’s political career. So she did.

My mother didn’t take us kids or my father that Friday. We were at camp, I guess, and my father was at work. She just hopped in the car and went without telling a soul.

The freethinker, then in her 30s and a professor of politics, beat Nixon’s arrival with time to spare.

To give you some background, Nixon was the villain of my childhood, always at the dinner table. He never should have won for president in 1968 or, for that matter, 1972.

Nixon lighted student protests all over the country. He refused to end the lost war in Vietnam. Further, he was lying to us about the war and the Watergate break-in and cover-up.

His character was clear as day to my mother, way ahead of her time. I’ll never forget one Rose Bowl parade morning. First lady Pat Nixon — long-suffering lady — was the grand marshal in the Pasadena event.

Then came the “Impeach Nixon” sign in red letters that she waved, years before Watergate. Right in front of my conservative Midwestern grandparents, too polite to make a scene. “Impeach” was a new word to me, but it sounded about right.

Not for nothing did my mother write a book on nonviolent power and resistance.

I’m telling you how a child heard the animated adults in Madison and Santa Monica, both liberal enclaves. Those conversations echoed across land and time.

What was sad, looking back, is that we kids had so little innocence to lose. We learned our lessons young, that trust in leaders was naive. The best ones were gone.

Paradise was lost before we knew it.

At the San Clemente airfield, as my mother tells the sobering story, Nixon’s supporters stood on one side. His critics stood on the other. The traveling press was no longer with Nixon; the plane was not Air Force One anymore. So this tale is seldom told.

When Nixon emerged from the plane, what happened?

A sudden hush took over the onlookers. No citizen took joy from witnessing the war-torn moment. Political sound and fury melted into still silence.

Silence is another country to Trump, a place he has never traveled.

Some comparisons come to mind.

Trump is as crude and profane in public as Nixon was in private. Each had hate to burn.

Liberals should credit that Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Air Act. Trump did his level best to undermine the agency — and public health policy during the pandemic.

Notably, Nixon showed some shame. My late friend, author James Reston, helped David Frost interview Nixon.

As The New York Times noted, Nixon seemed chastened by putting “the American people through two years of needless agony,” adding, “I let the American people down and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life.”

Nixon was 74. His president’s men had gone to prison, including John Dean.

President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, a tragic mistake and message to the future.

We’re now paying the colossal cost of a man confident the law could never catch up to him.

In Nixon’s fall was Trump’s rise.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, please visit Creators.com.

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