MOST LIBERALS would probably condemn the McCarthy era as one of the low points in American "democracy." But for some reason, the same people forget, consciously or otherwise, that Richard Nixon was not only one of McCarthy's most ardent admirers, but one of his staunchest allies as well. Nixon, packaged as an upstanding defender of democracy on the basis of his unwavering condemnation of those who took the fifth before McCarthy's committee, received in 1952 the Republican vice presidential nomination as reward for his assiduous loyalty to the Wisconsin senator.

Today, twenty years later, the same man -- enthroned in the citadel of the White House via a landslide mandate -- pleads executive privilege (for himself and a coterie of hand-picked hatchet men) before a Senate committee investigating a variety of felonious activities in his own administration. For a man who launched his national political career on the basis of his anti-fifth stance, Nixon's action reeks of unabashed hypocrisy.

Nixon has never been unresponsive to tactical shifts in political position. But in recent weeks, even he has sunk to depths he had never fathomed before. Throughout his career, Nixon's most laudable quality was his unwavering loyalty to his political (and non-political) cronies. But as the recent White House shake-up has shown, even this unfailing loyalty is no longer sacrosanct. When Nixon's White House gestapo could no longer cover up for itself, der fuehrer exterminated the vermin.

It's really quite simple to predict Richard Nixon's actions. When deprived of the California governorship in 1962, Nixon stomped off the political stage like an undisciplined child, fuming "You won't have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore." Ten years later, in the heat of the Watergate scandal exposed by the press, anyone might have predicted what turned out to be Nixon's snide retort: "We have had our differences in the past and I hope you give me hell everytime you think I'm wrong." Give him a teething ring or a dog biscuit to munch on (like an unprecedented landscape victory, and Nixon's a bundle of saccharine assisinity. But deprive of what he wants, and he bawls like an infant or yaps like a terrier.

NIXON IS a dangerous man. Hitler, like Nixon, received his original mandate from a population presumably living in a democracy. And despite the fact that he was born, raised, and has lived in this country for six decades (and has held public office for twenty-seven years) Nixon still does not appear to comprehend the difference between a coronation and an inauguration, let alone the meanings of the words "freedom" and "democracy."

What worries me most is that Nixon does not appear to have aged through his White House experience. Given his previous record, it is not surprising that his conceptualizations or ideology have not matured. But Nixon does not seem to have aged physically either. Unlike any other president in my memory, or of whom I've seen pictures -- before and after four years -- the man who sits behind the desk in the Oval Office in times more trying than any others in history has not sprouted an additional grey hair or developed a new wrinkle. Johnson, at least, looked as if the onus he bore fatigued him, and at the end of his five years, he looked as if it had been twenty.

Nixon is apparently enjoying his White House stint more than his predecessors. That in itself makes me worry, and worry we should.