Library May Bring Nixon a Measure of Redemption

The first time four living U.S. Presidents gathered in one place was nearly nine years ago, when they congregated for a somber, private conference in the White House to prepare for the funeral of slain Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

This week, four living Presidents will gather once again at an unprecedented public ceremony in Orange County to mark what they hope will be the triumphant political resurrection of Richard M. Nixon.

The public purpose of the meeting between Nixon, President Bush, Ronald Reagan and Gerald R. Ford on Thursday will be to dedicate the privately funded, $21-million Nixon library in Yorba Linda, where the 37th President was born in the bedroom of a wooden farmhouse.

But a secondary purpose, say Nixon scholars, is to loosen the former President from the shackles of the Watergate scandal and publicly rehabilitate his image so he can take a more respectable place in American history.

“It’s a symbolic redemption, a final recovery,” Nixon biographer Stephen E. Ambrose said of the library opening. “It puts Nixon in all of the final categories of the other former Presidents. . . . It’s absolutely the capstone to his life, and it makes it all worthwhile.”

The events cap a busy year of heightened visibility for Nixon, who 16 years ago flew home to Orange County after becoming the first President to resign the nation’s highest office.

Within the last year, he has published a best-selling book, “In the Arena,” which takes on his critics and defends presidential actions such as using the Internal Revenue Service against his enemies.

In March, he was cheered in the halls of the U.S. Capitol, where congressmen once clamored for his impeachment. He has toured China, granted three lengthy interviews and appeared on an April cover of Time magazine, his 66th appearance during his seesaw career.

Now, not only will he take the stage with his presidential peers, but he and his wife Pat are scheduled today to visit the Reagan home in Bel-Air. Later in the week, he will attend a reunion of supporters and former White House employees, including former Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman and former Press Secretary Ron Ziegler.

Nixon’s will be the 10th presidential library to open, but the first in California and the first to be built and operated solely with private money. The next library will be Reagan’s, which is scheduled to open in 1991 in Simi Valley.

Visitors paying $3.95 ($2 for those over 62, no charge to children under 12) will be able to retrace Nixon’s career with a self-guided tour that includes photographs, chunks of text and a half-hour movie.

The starting point will be the restored 900-square-foot farmhouse where Nixon was born Jan. 9, 1913. Thanks to a handful of Yorba Linda city officials and civic boosters, the structure was bought when it became surplus school district land, and a meticulous hunt for the Nixon family’s original furniture allows museum-goers to see the bed Nixon was born in, the piano he learned to play, the beds where he slept with his brothers and even the family cookbook.

The remainder of exhibits are in the new single-story building, which has the library in the basement and the museum on the ground floor.

Hugh Hewitt, executive director of the Nixon library, estimated the cost of the 53,000-square-foot structure at $21 million--money raised by a nonprofit foundation--and said supporters are trying to raise another $10 million to set up an endowment to pay for operating costs.

The library will not open until 1991, after an archivist and curator are hired.

Visitors to the museum will see the old: Life magazine black-and-white photos of Nixon from the 1940s and ‘50s, when he was a congressman from Whittier, a senator from California, and vice president. They will find the new: state-of-the-art electronics allowing viewers to ask Nixon one of 400 or so questions and have him appear on a screen and answer.

They will see the serious: Nixon’s thoughts on world leaders and their opinions of him. And there will be the trivial: the pistol Elvis Presley presented to Nixon at the White House.

Four television sets scattered through the museum will reflect the influence of TV on Nixon’s career and its ever-increasing role in American politics.

One will show the “Checkers” speech that generated the public support he needed to remain Dwight D. Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952; another will show his four debates with John F. Kennedy in 1960; a third will have Nixon’s 1969 plea to the “silent majority” of Americans to support his Vietnam policies; a fourth will play several of Nixon’s speeches over the years, including his introduction of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater at the party convention of 1964 and his eulogy for Ohio State University football coach Woody Hayes in 1987.

There will be a display on the “wilderness years,” stretching from his loss to Kennedy in the presidential election of 1960 until he won the presidency in 1968 and including his losing race for the California governorship in 1962.

A “room of world leaders” contains life-size statues of nine men and one woman whom Nixon deemed some of the century’s greatest leaders: Charles de Gaulle of France, Konrad Adenauer of West Germany, Winston Churchill of Great Britain, Shigeru Yoshida of Japan, Anwar Sadat of Egypt, Golda Meir of Israel, Chou En-lai and Mao Tse-tung of China and Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union.

In “Watergate Hall,” viewers will see the scandal that brought Nixon down, starting with the 1972 break-in at the offices of Democratic National Chairman Larry O’Brien and proceeding through the coverup.

Hewitt said several tapes recorded in Nixon’s office--and which helped drive him from the presidency--will be available for listening. They include the “smoking gun” tape in which Nixon orders the CIA to short-circuit the FBI’s Watergate investigation on national security grounds.

What no one will see are the actual presidential papers from the Nixon Administration.

Soon after Nixon left office and received a pardon from his successor, Ford, he signed an agreement with the General Services Administration requiring the destruction of the White House tapes and allowing the destruction of some of the presidential papers. Congress then passed a law stripping Nixon of the materials and giving them to the federal government. Nixon challenged the law before the U.S. Supreme Court and lost.

The Nixon presidential papers now rest with the National Archives in Alexandria, Va., which is releasing those that do not jeopardize national security, invade a person’s privacy or refer to investigations. So far the National Archives has processed 5 1/2 million of 44 million pages and 12 1/2 hours of the 4,000 hours of tapes.

Such details, of course, will be a mere footnote this week to the celebrations surrounding the opening of the library--a series of events that will feature one of the biggest reunions of Nixon Administration officials since he was sworn into office the second time in 1972.

Expected in the audience will be some of the biggest names from the Nixon era: Haldeman, an Orange County businessman who was sent to jail for Watergate crimes he committed while in Nixon’s service; Alexander M. Haig, who took over from Haldeman as chief of staff; Maurice Stans, a Pasadena accountant and former secretary of commerce who was fined for election law violations as Nixon’s 1972 campaign finance chairman, and Patrick J. Buchanan, former speech writer and now a syndicated columnist.

Missing, however, will be other big names: John W. Dean III, former White House counsel who went to jail for 16 months; John D. Ehrlichman, the former Nixon domestic adviser who went to jail and is now a novelist-artist in Santa Fe, N.M., and G. Gordon Liddy, White House aide who was convicted of Watergate crimes and is also known for holding his hand over a candle flame to demonstrate his iron will.

The festivities actually began Sunday, when about 300 Yorba Linda city, school and Chamber of Commerce officials and guests were thanked for their help with a sneak preview of the library. Nixon did not appear but sent a letter of gratitude to his hometown, which became the only city in the country to make his birthday a legal holiday.

Nixon’s earliest expected appearance will come today, when he is scheduled to visit Reagan in that former President’s Century City office, Reagan spokesman Mark Weinberg said. The two former Presidents will meet alone for private talks, which in all likelihood will turn to such favorite topics as foreign affairs, Weinberg said.

“It is an opportunity to review recent world developments. They’ve known each other for many, many years. They’ve had exchange of correspondence often,” Weinberg said.

After the office visit, the Nixons will join the Reagans at their Bel-Air home for more casual conversation, Weinberg said. Pat Nixon, who suffered a stoke in 1976, will make a rare public appearance during the library festivities.

Later tonight, about 250 corporate library donors will meet at the Yorba Linda complex. The crowd will include such Orange County figures as developers George Argyros, William Lyon and Donald Koll. Hewitt said he did not know whether Nixon will attend.

On Wednesday, former members of the Nixon White House will begin arriving, first for a small luncheon and then for a bigger evening event. Nixon is expected to attend the evening get-together thrown by the so-called February Group--a far-flung network of Nixon admirers and employees who range from his former barber to those notorious for criminal convictions resulting from Watergate. Dewey Clower, director of the February Group, said the former President is expected to make an appearance.

Also late Wednesday, President Bush will arrive at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. He will spend the night at the Anaheim Hilton & Towers. Bush’s arrival sets the stage for the historic public appearance of the four Presidents. After attending an early morning fund-raiser at his hotel, Bush will meet his predecessors in time for the library festivities on Thursday.

Outside, the gates will open to the public for the formal dedication ceremonies at 8 a.m. Admission is free.

All four of the Presidents are scheduled to speak, as well as Sen. Pete Wilson, Gov. George Deukmejian and ministers Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale.

The “grand finale” will include the release of hundreds of “peace doves.”

The last time three former Presidents met in one room with an incumbent was in the White House on Oct. 9, 1981. Nixon, Ford and Jimmy Carter landed in a helicopter on the South Lawn of the Executive Mansion, where then-President Reagan was waiting to usher them inside for talk, hors d’oeuvres and cocktails in the Blue Room before the former Presidents were flown overseas to attend the funeral of Sadat, who was assassinated by religious fanatics. Also in the Blue Room was then-Vice President Bush.

It was apparently the first time in history that four living Presidents had been in one place, historians said.

Thursday will see another first: four living Presidents, with their wives, together for a ceremony to which the public is invited. The fifth living President, Carter, declined an invitation.

“No other President has had three Presidents at the opening of his library, and there’s obviously great symbolic significance for the Republican Party, which I’m betting now will welcome him to a tumultuous reception at the ’92 convention,” Ambrose said.

The Presidents will take the stage at 10 a.m. Thursday for the hourlong ceremony, then take a private tour with Nixon of the exhibits before lunch.

Bush is scheduled to fly out of El Toro by 1:30 p.m., en route to appearances in Boise, Ida., and Billings, Mont. Neither Ford nor Reagan will attend other Nixon events, their representatives said.

A few hours later, Nixon will appear at a 7 p.m. black-tie dinner for about 1,500 invited guests at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, Hewitt said.

With the reunion complete and the famous names gone, Hewitt said, officials on Friday will cut a ribbon outside the library and allow the public in to review the version of Nixon’s life that the former President hopes will become his legacy.

Times staff writers Eric Bailey and Jim Carlton contributed to this story.

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