NIXON LIBRARY : THE LIBRARY : Controversy Dogs Creation, Content

Richard M. Nixon witnessed, changed and created history in one of the most tumultuous careers in American politics before the Watergate scandal forced him to resign the highest office in the land 16 years ago. Now, in the latest of his Phoenix-like ascensions, Nixon returns in triumph to Yorba Linda to open his presidential museum next door to his birthplace.

The dedication will be filled with pomp, ceremony and the strains of “Hail to the Chief.” A presidential phalanx will start with George Bush and extend through Republican former Presidents Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. Nixon’s wife, Pat, will make a rare public appearance. His children, Tricia and Julie, will be on hand.

The ceremonies in the county where Nixon was born, where he ruled the nation from his Western White House, and where he returned after being forced from the presidency in 1974 one step ahead of impeachment, come during what is shaping up as a banner year in the rehabilitation of the 37th President.

In March, Nixon strode the halls of Congress to acclaim. In April, he stared out from the cover of Time for what the magazine says was the 66th time. He chatted on a television talk show. He watched his book “In the Arena,” the latest volume in his memoirs, hit the bestseller lists.

Yet this is Richard Nixon after all, a man whose White House once kept an “enemies list,” who used the Internal Revenue Service to investigate his opponents, whose tenure was marked by divisiveness over Vietnam, Spiro Agnew, Watergate.

So it comes as no surprise that the quest for a library site was marked by the rancor that Nixon has engendered over the years, most of all during Watergate, the “cancer on the presidency” that drove him from office and so tore apart the nation that many recalled W.B. Yeats’ line that “the center cannot hold.”

Soon after Nixon became President on Jan. 20, 1969, the city of San Clemente, home to the Western White House and the beach where Nixon walked in wing-tipped shoes, proclaimed itself ready to house his museum and library.

Whittier College also put in a bid for the collection of its most famous alumnus. Cal State Fullerton said there were two good sites in Orange County for the papers and artifacts. Then came the poison of Watergate, and enthusiasm dimmed:

* Duke University, where Nixon graduated from law school, considered hosting the library, but many teachers were bitterly opposed. The faculty senate voted unanimously to “categorically reject the creation of any museum or memorial designed to foster the glorification of the former President as part of a Nixon presidential library” on or next to the campus. Even the executive committee of the university’s board of trustees, which voted 9 to 2 to cede land for a library site to the federal government, stipulated that the facility be limited to 150,000 square feet and have “strict limitations on the space to be set aside for museum purposes.” The opposition eventually helped persuade Duke to withdraw its offer.

* UC Irvine was a possibility, but the faculty there was divided as well, and the Nixon backers pulled out after the university’s academic senate attached what Nixon’s supporters called “totally unacceptable” conditions to the library offer. The conditions included limiting exhibits to educational displays that would occupy no more than 5% of the building and banning those “dealing with the private lives of Mr. Nixon and his family.” Nixon would also have been forced to yield all claims to control over his presidential papers and tapes and allow establishment of an oversight committee with at least 40% university representation. The committee would have controlled the nature of exhibits and privately funded activities at the library.

* San Clemente re-entered the bidding and reached a tentative agreement with Nixon that city officials said ensured that there would be no “slanted view favorable to Mr. Nixon” in the library’s documents. But when the matter dragged on and on, Nixon picked Yorba Linda.

The choice was serendipitous. The house where Nixon was born still stands, and museum-goers will be able to visit it, gazing at the piano on which he learned to play, the beds where he slept with his brothers, even the family cookbook.

“Our main draw will be to politically and historically curious individuals,” said Hugh Hewitt, executive director of the Richard M. Nixon Library.

The museum will function as “another niche in the tourism market” of Orange County, Hewitt said, appealing to people wanting to spend a day at Disneyland and a half-day at the Nixon museum.

Hewitt estimated the cost of the building, which has the library in the basement and the museum on the ground floor of the single-story, Spanish-style building, at $21 million. The money was raised by a nonprofit foundation, and library backers 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 a curator are hired.

Nixon himself, in a letter last January to William E. Simon, a Nixon Administration treasury secretary and now president of the library foundation, warned that presidential libraries “can be dry, deadly dull places, full of memoranda no one read when they were written and only archivists will read in the future.”

By contrast, he wants his library to allow “new generations of Americans to get a glimpse of great events they did not experience themselves but that directly shaped their world.

“They will see how in America a boy born in a tiny farmhouse his father built can someday be President.”

They will see the old: Life magazine black-and-white photos of Nixon from the 1940s and 1950s, when he was a congressman from Whittier, a senator from California, and a 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 them.

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

Hewitt thinks that the most popular exhibit for tourists will be either the tape of Tricia Nixon’s wedding or the display of gifts from world leaders to the Nixons. He thinks that the one that will rivet the press, at least at first, will be the Watergate room, with famous headlines from those years and Nixon’s reactions to the unfolding scandal.

Hewitt said the Watergate display is “a balanced exhibit,” that will be “full, fair and objective.”

Nixon’s will be the only presidential library aside from Rutherford B. Hayes’ that is not run by the National Archives, and is the only one with an operating budget paid for solely with private funds. Hewitt said Nixon doesn’t believe in ex-Presidents’ being “a drain on the federal treasury.” But it also means that Nixon’s supporters can decide what to exhibit and can put the best “spin” on his career.

And yet, historians say that even museums run by the National Archives shine soft, flattering lights on their subjects.

Harry Jeffrey, a Cal State Fullerton history professor who is writing a biography of Nixon and has visited all the presidential libraries except Jimmy Carter’s, says that scholars expect the museums to “accentuate the positive” and draw heavily on other sources for portraits of the people they are studying.

“Most people who go to the museums are not professional historians,” Jeffrey said. “They don’t know very much about American history. So by having these museums you get hundreds of thousands of Americans going through . . . each year, so they learn about American government, about American history. . . . That’s a positive.”

Stephen E. Ambrose, a University of New Orleans historian who has written a biography of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower and published two volumes of his planned three-book biography of Nixon, said that a presidential library should enable scholars to learn “what this man did and why he did it.”

A library presents a picture of a leader through his papers, showing what advice he was receiving and who was giving it to him.

A presidential museum, by contrast, exists largely “to honor the President. That’s all right. I don’t expect to see in the Lyndon Johnson Library all sorts of displays about anti-war marches. I expect to see stuff that’s going to be positive about the man,” Ambrose said.

But to maintain credibility with viewers, a few negatives are usually sprinkled in, Ambrose said. An exception, he said, is the John F. Kennedy presidential museum, which has nothing but positive exhibits about the slain President.

The Kennedy library is “a scandal,” Ambrose said. Kennedy’s partisans are “covering up all evidence of his private life. They’re covering up a great deal of stuff on his dealings with (Soviet leader Nikita) Khrushchev, his administration’s blackmailing of Martin Luther King Jr.; they’re covering up anything that makes Kennedy look bad,” Ambrose said.

“It’s a scandal that they’re getting away with this. But as Dick Nixon can tell you better than I, the Kennedys can get away with stuff that nobody else can.”

However, Jill Brett, spokeswoman for the National Archives, said that while she didn’t know about “the private life” materials, there can be explanations for other materials not on view at the Kennedy library.

For one thing, Brett said, until legislation changed the procedures for all presidential libraries after Jimmy Carter’s opened in 1986, donors have been allowed to keep materials from public scrutiny for certain time periods.

Also, Brett said that papers relating to King were FBI records, most of which were barred from public view by law. As for Khrushchev, Brett said, all presidential library staffs work under tight budgets, and the Kennedy librarians are now working on processing and releasing materials from the early 1960s, which will include the Kennedy-Khrushchev years.

Will Johnson, chief archivist at the Kennedy library, said that library “operates by precisely the same procedures” as all the others run by the National Archives. He said regulations spell out which presidential papers are private and these designations are “not capricious or arbitrary.”

What, if anything, the people running the Nixon library will try to “get away with” won’t be known until all the displays open. Press tours ended four weeks ago, with Hewitt saying the National Archives needed the time to supervise security arrangements for the gifts to the Nixons that are the property of the American people and are essentially on loan to the museum.

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

There will be four television sets scattered through the museum, reflecting the influence of the tube 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 Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952; another will show his four debates with 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, through Nixon’s defeat for the California governorship in 1962, to his winning the presidency in 1968.

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; Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong of China; Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union.

The designers tried to portray the leaders chatting casually, with some sitting and some standing. By touching a video screen, a museum-goer can obtain thumbnail sketches of the leaders and hear their thoughts on Nixon and his on them.

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 cover-up. 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, Gerald R. 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.

Hewitt said that copies of the important presidential papers will be available at the library as they are processed and that Nixon’s papers from his non-presidential years will be open to scholars as well.

Hewitt said that historians now must journey to Alexandria to research the Nixon presidency but that because the Virginia archive is limited to papers from the presidential years it is “necessary but not sufficient.” When everything is under one roof in Yorba Linda, he said, the library will be a “necessary and sufficient” stop for scholars.

Ambrose said that because most of Nixon’s papers are available either in Alexandria or, in the case of the vice presidential papers, at a federal archive in Laguna Niguel, the most important part of the Yorba Linda library will be the collection of his papers from 1974 onward, including the drafts of his books.

“In fact, from the scholar’s point of view, that’s the only valuable part” of the library, Ambrose said.