PERSPECTIVE ON THE NIXON YEARS : In a Shrine to History, Too Many Gaps : Richard Nixon, the quintessential American politician of our era, has left ghosts to hover over his expurgated library.

It will be a gala affair, the long-delayed opening of the Richard Nixon museum adjacent to his birthplace in Yorba Linda.

A select list of prominent, admiring guests will attend the solemn dedication on Thursday, then be whisked off to Los Angeles for an expensive and equally exclusive private supper with the former President and Mrs. Nixon.

The ostentation is in keeping with the overall project and purpose. Spurning public funds (and with them, the National Archives’ administration and control), Nixon and his fellow builders raised more than $25 million in private donations for the museum and library.

The 52,000-square-foot Spanish colonial edifice will house what press releases call “priceless gifts of state” in floor-to-ceiling showcases. There will be larger-than-life figures of world leaders Nixon has known, mementos of his 77 years and the latest “touch-screen” video system, allowing visitors to have a “conversation” of sorts with the former President. Outside, there will be elaborate gardens and even a “partial re-creation” of the Nixon family’s original lemon grove, altogether the apotheosis of Disneyland as archives.

With characteristic boosterism, albeit an ill-chosen simile, Yorba Linda’s mayor predicts the whole thing will “last 1,000 years.”

The problem is not the wealthy guests or tourist-pleasing exhibits. It’s just that in this shrine to history, there is so much vital memory missing; in this gathering of notables, so many notably absent.

How ironic the lemon grove. Frank Nixon’s inability to bring to fruition his father-in-law’s nursery stock 50 years ago became the butt of family ridicule and Richard’s own bitter jokes. But in fact it was hard-working Frank’s only failure. As it was, the stunted trees sent Hannah Nixon and her small sons in dejection to work in the local citrus packinghouse, symbol of Southern California’s chasms of caste and race. When angry and exploited workers scrawled a huge “IWW” on the packinghouse wall one night in 1919--the “I Won’t Work” of the radical International Workers of the World union--white, middle-class Yorba Linda was scandalized. The Nixons soon left for Whittier.

How clearly will the exhibits show the full, grim range of social and cultural influences that then and later shaped this President, arguably the most controversial and significant chief executive of the century? Where will visitors sample, say, the secret convenants that excluded non-whites from pious Quaker Whittier, the profound hypocrisy and cynicism, the disillusion and bigotry that poisoned the values of Southern California’s small towns--and ultimately a President’s.

What a shame that so many important guests are absent, not least Nixon’s first political victims. Visitors can see the Mercury “woody” wagon that Nixon drove through the Central Valley in his 1950 Senate campaign, but not even “touchscreen” video will vouchsafe how the candidate smeared so savagely and sabotaged so widely and furtively his opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, how he did much the same to Rep. Jerry Voorhis four years before, why he practiced on both campaign tactics of a kind that would eventually destroy his presidency or why, even in his latest book, he is at pains to smear them still so long after their deaths.

Then there are the men who made this Nixon career celebrated by the library, the men who really made it, and whose reality remains invisible amid the glossy technology. There was Kyle Palmer and the enormous behind-the-scenes dispensation of the Los Angeles Times, the powers of petroleum and agribusiness, real estate and finance, the proxies of Swede Larson and Standard Oil, the quiet corporate levies, Howard Hughes, the men who met so historically at the Malibu beach house, the University Club, San Francisco’s Pacific Union Club and St. Francis Hotel, or later Father John Cronin, the secret FBI informers, the CIA leakers who gave Nixon so much of the Hiss case, and on and on. Most important, perhaps, there should be Murray Chotiner, the lethal twin of Nixon’s dark side, and Earl Warren, over whose political corpse Nixon clambered to national power and whose deathbed joy was to see Richard Nixon fall.

Finally, there is his wife. Pat Nixon will be there, brave and stoic, to dedicate her own garden and once more call on some inner power that has sustained her since a difficult childhood in nearby Artesia. But there will be no true exhibit of her deeper sacrifice to this career, of her exclusion and exploitation for other ambitions, of the larger symbol of a remarkably independent and modern woman crushed by the system.

So the glittering guests will come and go and the lines of school children and tourists will follow, existing, as American crowds are wont to do, on the surface, wandering like one of John Steinbeck’s memorable characters--”Out of a past he can’t remember, into a future he can’t foresee nor understand.”

It is scarcely an ugly abstraction or footnote, this refusal to have a real history, to keep the flesh-and-blood reality of our cultural impact and political past buried beneath confections and touchscreens. Of all people, it is the despised “Reds” of Richard Nixon’s youth and maturity, the Soviets, who are now trying at last to come to grips with their gruesome hidden history, simply because they seem to know that unless they do they can never deal honestly or intelligently with the present or future.

The point, of course, is not that Richard Nixon was evil or least of all an aberration, but that he was so much like the rest of us, so clearly and frighteningly the quintessential American politician of our era. Until we face and fathom that meaning, ghosts will hover over this expurgated library on the soft, undulating orchards that Yorba Linda used to be.

California’s own Steinbeck caught it once, in what might be an epitaph on this tireless reinvention of Richard Nixon, and even on America at the end of the Cold War. “And man has met and defeated every obstacle, every enemy except one,” says a farm worker in the book, “In Dubious Battle.” “He cannot win over himself.”