Undismayed and Undaunted About Also Being Uninvited

Dear Mr. Nixon:

I just wanted to get off a quick note to you before the big festivities next week so you won’t worry about not inviting me. It’s OK. I wouldn’t have been able to come anyway; we’re just getting back from a long trip, and I suffer a lot from jet lag.

But it has also occurred to me that you might have decided not to invite me for the wrong reasons. Sometimes a lot of spurious rumors and misconceptions get started, and I certainly don’t want anything like that to come between us.

Let’s deal with the Jimmy Carter situation first. I know he begged off, saying he had other commitments that would make it impossible for him to attend. A likely story! He’s probably just off somewhere building low-cost housing, which most of us here in Orange County--except maybe that fellow who was voted out of office in Irvine recently--know isn’t very important.

But I’m digressing. The point I want to make is that--once Jimmy Carter defected--you needn’t have felt uncomfortable about including me just because I would have been the only Democrat present. That would have been perfectly all right with me. Here in Orange County, I’m around Republicans all the time.

Of course, it would have been inappropriate to invite me to the thank-you affair for your Yorba Linda supporters or George Argyros’ reception for corporate donors or the meeting of your beloved February Group since I wasn’t a part of any of them. To tell you the truth, I don’t even know what the February Group is.

But it’s an absolute canard that I was turned off by the menus at any of the other functions. It’s true that I’m not fond of the poached salmon, which will be the main course at the Century Plaza “Celebration Gala,” or the whitefish caviar to be served al fresco to the dedication guests. But I would have enjoyed plenty of other things, like the sour lemon bars, for example. I’ll admit I was sorry that the people planning the Century Plaza event turned down gazpacho as “too casual.” I like gazpacho, but I wouldn’t have let a small disappointment like that keep me away.

It is also not true that I intended to ask the “talking Nixon” during the dedication tour why you were so dead set on funding this library and museum privately. I understand you would have lost control of the nature of the material and its presentation had it been funded publicly and run by the National Archives, which manages all of our other presidential libraries.

Now admittedly that might have changed the presentation of Watergate a little bit. But not much, I suspect. And it would certainly have been a lot more useful to scholars to have all your presidential papers at the museum, accessible through a neutral administrator. I’m not sure you ever clearly understood that was the reason we rejected your library at UC Irvine--and, I presume, at Duke as well. But you always were one not to be stuck in the mainstream, and now you’ve given us our first private presidential library.

I think you would have been less concerned about control if you had checked out the other presidential libraries. (Your library director, Hugh Hewitt, told a group of touring reporters that “No one can say we shied away from a fair treatment of Watergate”--which may be true, but it’s still your treatment.) I’ve explored most of the other presidential libraries, and I can tell you from firsthand knowledge that neither Lyndon Johnson nor Jimmy Carter nor Herbert Hoover are bloodied very much by the way their museums treated--respectively--the Vietnam War or the Iranian hostages or the veterans’ march on Washington in the early years of the Depression when Gen. Douglas MacArthur dealt pretty violently with some of his former comrades-in-arms on orders from the White House.

The latter incident is depicted in the Hoover Museum at West Branch, Iowa, entirely by blown-up clippings from the Chicago Tribune, which may have been the only newspaper in the country that approved of these tactics. But when I looked up the National Archives curator and asked him if a little more balanced presentation might have served history better, he drew himself up and said simply: “This is Mr. Hoover’s museum.”

So, you see, you didn’t have all that much to worry about.

But we shouldn’t cavil about done things, and there’s no question that your museum and library will bring a great deal of prestige to Orange County--and especially to your birthplace in Yorba Linda, which had fallen on hard times over the last few decades.

So just let me say once again that I don’t want you to give another thought to the concern you must be feeling about not inviting me. I assure you that there are absolutely no hard feelings. I’ll continue to treat you in print in the same even-handed manner I always have.

There are some who might say this note is sour grapes growing out of rejection and therefore inappropriate during this week of celebration. Don’t accept that. It’s the farthest thing from my thoughts, and if we want to eat whitefish caviar, we can always short the mortgage money and buy some for ourselves.

So please say hello to Jerry and Ron and George for me--and please don’t think too badly of Jimmy for not coming. I’m probably breaking a confidence, but he doesn’t like whitefish caviar, either. His tastes, like mine, run to simpler things.

But I’m sure he wouldn’t mind joining me to say that we hope you thoroughly enjoy the festivities of next week and that they are both satisfying and fulfilling to you.

I’ll save my questions for the “talking Nixon” for a day when the place isn’t so crowded.

Ciao,

Joe Bell