Memories of Nixon : Yorba Linda Library, Birthplace Almost Ready to Be Opened

With less than a month to go before opening day, the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace was opened for a last press tour Tuesday before the facility is shut down for the final installation of exhibits.

The day was one for memories, as Clara Jane Nixon told reporters about how she helped save family artifacts that are being included as exhibits in the house next to the library where her famous brother-in-law was born Jan. 9, 1913.

Clara Nixon, 70, who married Nixon’s brother, Donald, kept silverware, tables, chairs and other Nixon odds and ends in the garage of her home in hopes that one day the items would be showcased in a museum. She also helped track down Nixon’s boyhood piano, his high chair and even the bed in which Nixon was born. Nixon lived in Yorba Linda until age 9, when his family moved to Whittier.

“We dreamed of this day, and it’s a dream come true,” Clara Nixon beamed as photographers snapped her picture outside the tree-shaded home.

The birthplace has been restored and furnished as closely as Nixon family members could recall the way the house looked when he and his three brothers shared a cramped attic room.

“Frank and Hannah Nixon (Nixon’s parents) would recognize this as their home if they walked in today,” said Kevin Cartwright, director of public affairs for the Nixon Library & Birthplace.

The attic room, freshly painted in white and overlooking the sprawling $20-million library, contains the same two single beds where Nixon slept with his brothers. A “Mother’s Prayer” poem that Nixon’s mother kept hung over her bed is also in the attic room--in the same frame that Nixon made for it as a little boy. Even the family’s cookbook is back on its kitchen shelf. (Ironically, the book was titled “Presidential Cookbook,” an adaptation from the White House cookbook.)

In the next month, workers will be adding finishing touches to the library, whose halls are starting to be filled with such exhibits as giant photographs of Nixon during his early political years and bronze-tone statues of the world leaders whom Nixon admires most.

And with President Bush’s announcement last week that he would join Nixon and former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford at the July 19 dedication, library officials predicted Tuesday that the parking lot and adjoining streets would be filled to overflowing as the nation’s ninth presidential library finally opens for business.

“It will be a truly historic occasion for Orange County and the nation,” said Hugh Hewitt, director of the library foundation.

So many people are expected to attend the dedication--estimates are running as high as 25,000--that Yorba Linda city officials plan to seal off Yorba Linda Boulevard in front of the library and transform it into a giant parking lot. Shuttle buses will also be transporting visitors from parking lots in outlying areas.

Although Bush’s appearance is likely to boost attendance, Nixon and his reclusive wife, Pat, are expected to be the center of attention and public curiosity. Pat Nixon has not been seen at a public function in more than a decade, Hewitt said.

Nixon, 77, the nation’s 37th president and the only one to have resigned from office, emerged from the ashes of the Watergate scandal to write eight best-selling books and become a renowned foreign policy expert.

“No president fascinates more than Richard Nixon,” Hewitt said.

Hewitt, an environmental lawyer who worked as an attorney in the Reagan White House, led a press tour of the library and birthplace that are part of the nine-acre grounds. The tour was to be the last prior to the grand opening, because officials from the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington have ordered that the library be closed while government-owned exhibits are installed, Hewitt said.

The exhibits--which include such gifts to Nixon as a set of pistols from Elvis Presley and Irving Berlin’s original score of “God Bless America”--are considered so valuable that the National Archives wants to limit access to the library while the items are placed in protective booths, Hewitt said.

Some 30,000 gifts were presented to Nixon during his 5 1/2 years in the White House, and all are property of the National Archives, which is loaning the items to the Nixon Library, Hewitt said.

Although Nixon is perhaps most famous for his role in covering up the break-in of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, the scandal that toppled his presidency was not covered until the final segment of a press tour which, for visitors, will be self-guided.

The library tour begins by picturing Nixon’s early political days. A 1949 Ford Mercury “Woody” showed the type of vehicle that the young lawyer used to stump against Helen Gahagan Douglas in his successful campaign for the U.S. Senate. The tour continues through Nixon’s career, chronicling how he ascended to the vice presidency under Dwight Eisenhower but then lost to John F. Kennedy in his first run for the presidency.

Exhibits were almost in place Tuesday that will show, Hewitt said, how Nixon really didn’t “lose” when he and Kennedy conducted the nation’s first televised debates in 1960. A room dedicated to that race includes a 1960-era television set on which videotapes of the four debates will be played.

Of the four, Hewitt said Nixon bested Kennedy in three, while the Massachusetts Democrat won the most famous one in which Nixon appeared tired and haggard. Visitors will be told that Nixon was, in fact, trying to shake off an illness that day.

Hewitt also offered a peek at the “Room of World Leaders,” where life-sized statues of 10 foreign leaders whom Nixon admired are grouped as though conversing during a cocktail party.

The statues, made of plaster and covered with green epoxy, depict such figures as Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Ivan and Elliot Schwartz of New York City spent 10 months sculpting the figures down to the finest of details, including Churchill’s omnipresent pipe.

“This will probably be the most dramatic experience for the visitor,” Hewitt said.

The Watergate scandal is covered in a long room near the library exit. Along one wall will be a chronology of the scandal’s rapidly unfolding events, with Nixon’s commentary printed beneath. Against the other wall, visitors will be able to listen to some of the Watergate tapes documenting the Nixon Administration’s participation in the scandal--including the so-called “smoking gun” tape that linked the President to the cover-up.

“No one can say we shied away from a fair treatment of Watergate,” Hewitt said.

Nixon’s library will contain documents from before and after his presidency and his personal diaries, but will not house original presidential papers as do other libraries. The reason is that Nixon’s library will be operated by a private foundation instead of the National Archives, which manages the other presidential libraries. Copies of the same papers are being obtained from the archives, Hewitt said, but he could not estimate how long it would take to reproduce the records.

The foundation will pay the library’s annual $1.5 million operating costs, an amount that would otherwise come from taxpayer dollars.

Nixon’s 44 million pages of presidential papers, most of which are stored in Alexandria, Va., are currently being declassified by federal archivists.