Inside the Nixon Library Fight
The New York Times reports on a fascinating fight for President Nixon's legacy at his presidential library:
YORBA LINDA, Calif. — The sign at the entrance to the largest exhibition room devoted to a single subject at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum reads “Watergate.” But on Friday, the exhibit was nearly empty, dominated by a 30-foot blank slate of a wall that is testimony to a new battle set off by this still-polarizing former president: how to mark the scandal that forced him from office 36 years ago.
Officials at the National Archives have curated a searing recollection of the Watergate scandal, based on videotaped interviews with 150 associates of Richard M. Nixon, an interactive exhibition that was supposed to have opened on July 1. But the Nixon Foundation — a group of Nixon loyalists who controlled this museum until the National Archives took it over three years ago — described it as unfair and distorted, and requested that the archives not approve the exhibition until its objections are addressed.
The foundation went so far as to invoke Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, noting that those presidents surreptitiously taped White House conversations before Nixon stepped on the scene.
Bob Bostock, a former Nixon aide who designed the original Watergate exhibit and has been enlisted by the foundation to challenge the installation, filed a 132-page letter of objection to the archives last week, claiming that the exhibit lacked the context needed to help young visitors learning about Watergate to understand exactly what Nixon did.
“Taping and wiretapping go back as far as F.D.R.,” Mr. Bostock said. “It lacks the context it needs: that Nixon was not the first president to do some of these things and that some of these things had been going on with many of his predecessors, in some cases, much more than he did.”
The Nixon Foundation does not have veto power and by law serves in an advisory role. The final ruling will be made by officials of the National Archives within the next few weeks.
The foundation’s objection has left the exhibition in shadows, both figuratively and literally: A visitor touring the museum moves from lively exhibits devoted to Nixon’s visit to China, to the gowns Tricia Nixon wore at her White House wedding and Pat Nixon wore to an inaugural, to the presidential limousine and a testimony to Nixon’s domestic accomplishments, and finally into a bleak half-dark hallway that recalls, well, a certain 18 1/2-minute gap associated with the waning days of the Nixon presidency.
“Please excuse our dust: We are currently building a new Watergate gallery,” says a small sign at the museum, which drew 95,000 visitors last year.
The foundation’s resistance marks the latest chapter in a long and uncomfortable history between the Nixon loyalists and the National Archives as it seeks to bring the Nixon library, along with an archive of papers and tapes, into the presidential library system. And it is being played out, literally, in Nixon’s backyard — the house where he was born is on the site of this museum, which is perched in an Orange County community of rolling orange and lemon groves and lavish housing developments around artificial lakes.
Here, where he was born, he remains something of a hero. (The museum bookstore sells bumper stickers and mugs that ask, “What would Nixon do?” amid books by Laura Ingraham and Karl Rove.)
“It is the last fight over Watergate,” said Timothy Naftali, the director of the museum, though he was quick to add that he was confident a resolution could be worked out that addressed at least some of the concerns of both sides.
Mr. Naftali has overseen the release of a flood of Nixon papers and tapes since he was appointed by the National Archives in 2006. But culturally and politically, he may not fit the profile of the person Nixon may have imagined for managing his legacy. “Think about it,” he said. “I am not a Nixon loyalist. I am not even a Republican. I am gay. I am from Canada. I was 12 years old when Richard Nixon resigned. I have no skin in the game.”
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