View From the Nixon Library

Maybe this is more important than it seemed at the time. I was rolling down Yorba Linda Boulevard, past the Pollo Locos and the Laundromats, looking for the Richard M. Nixon presidential library. It was there somewhere. I had the address scrawled on a notebook and kept checking the numbers as they whizzed past. 17724, 17828, 17992. I was very close.

And then I drove right past it.

Well, not completely past. I got halfway past, and suddenly my eyes caught something on the right. Hey, that wasn’t another mini-mall after all. That was it .

And so it was. The monument to Richard Nixon’s presidential years sits serenely squeezed between a shopping center and a subdivision in the bowels of Orange County, so lost in the franchise clutter that it can be missed altogether.

There’s no entrance road lined with sycamores, no sense of remove from the urban mush. It’s right there on the boulevard, across the street from Gold Country Escrow.

And Yorba Linda itself, you understand, is not the breeziest of towns. Its very location is hard to describe. Somewhere south of Pomona, I guess. In the summer the air goes still and turns the color of soap. The heat is so intense it pops the sheet metal on parked cars, setting off their alarms. You hear them wailing all over the mall lots.

And this is where the Nixon legacy will reside. I parked my car and stared at the building from the sidewalk. It seemed like a purgatory site. Maybe, I thought, the gods of vengeance had ordered the library stuck here until Nixon finally comes clean. If he confesses, he gets to move to San Clemente.

And he won’t, of course. Even before the library’s opening on Thursday, the old Nixon popped up. His people at the library first proposed, and then abandoned, a policy to screen scholars for right thinking before allowing them to use the library. Bob Woodward, Nixon’s old Watergate nemesis, was specifically named as a potential rejectee.

So I was figuring it would be a long purgatory for Nixon. It’s intriguing the way this stuff works with our ex-Presidents. Just 50 miles from here, Ronald Reagan has none of Nixon’s library worries. The Reagan library is being planted on the top of a mountain in Simi Valley. Very imperial. It will be the biggest yet, the most expensive by far. From the top you will be able to see Catalina in one direction and the Rockies in the other. The entrance drive will be two miles long.

I walked onto the Nixon grounds and stood by a small reflecting pool. The gardeners were planting roses named after Pat Nixon. It all had a sad quality. Why, I wondered, should Nixon--even Nixon--get stuck down here with the mini-malls while Reagan gets a mountaintop? Was Watergate really that much worse than running an illegal war in Central America? Than looting the S&Ls;? Had the vengeance gods screwed things up?

I felt sorry for this man and his library. Inside, I was told, there will be a 60-foot exhibit on Watergate. Nixon was still explaining. You think Reagan will explain Ollie North and Robin HUD? It will be interesting to see.

Then I walked over to the small house at the side of property. You don’t see this house at first because the larger buildings grab your attention. But, in the end, it’s the house that saves the library.

I was born in the house my father built.

Nixon began his autobiography with that line, and this is it. His father bought the house through the mail, as a kit, and put it up with his own hands.

It is tiny. In the kitchen a man can spread his arms and almost touch the walls. In the upstairs bedroom, where four Nixon children slept, the ceiling is so low that an adult cannot stand.

When Nixon was a child, the house was surrounded by lemon groves, and Nixon’s father was trying to scratch out a living here, an effort that was slowly failing. You can stand outside the front door of the house, under a huge pepper tree, and picture the way it must have been. Lemon trees as far as you could see. A land that was quiet, and terribly isolated.

This is the only house in California, thus far, that has sprouted a future President. There was no wealth here, just the dream that brought so many others to California. And as with so many other California dreams, this one went sour.

The house is mesmerizing. Did the dream, or the dream’s loss, help make a future President? And what happened inside this house that sowed the seeds of Nixon’s ruin? You don’t get the answers here, but at least you get the questions.

And that is more, I suspect, than you will get on the mountaintop in Simi Valley.