Presidential Library Says What Nixon Wants to Hear

I shot the breeze with Richard Nixon for an hour last week, and to tell you the truth--even though he was spotting me about 10 years in age--I got tired before he did.

We were chatting in his new museum and library in Yorba Linda. It was my first visit, and I’m sure you could get the same amount of time with him if you’d drop by--as I did--on a weekday about 8:30 in the morning, when the museum opens. The tourists and the busloads of school kids start arriving about 10 a.m., and after that, forget it.

Nixon and I were chatting in this cozy little auditorium where you can punch out your questions on a machine, and he appears on a screen to answer them. It’s called “The Talking Nixon,” and that’s about right--except that he tends to talk more about some things than others.

Most of the questions I asked him were answered rather tersely.

The way it works, see, you punch this computer and it gives you a list of 22 very broad categories relating to Nixon, from his early life to his post-resignation years. (Watergate is one of those categories.)

Then you punch the category you want and a bunch of sub-categories come on. So you make another selection, and then specific questions come up.

Since I have a fairly devious mind, I skipped most of the clearly unctuous stuff and went straight for the jugular: the political campaigns against Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas and Watergate.

To the question: “Was your first political race a mudslinging campaign?” the Talking Nixon answered: “No, it was very gentlemanly. I debated Jerry Voorhis on his home turf twice. I called him sincere and able in my summation, and afterward some of my hard-line supporters said, ‘You shouldn’t have said those kind things about him.’ ”

To the question: “Why do some complain your 1950 campaign for the Senate was the original negative campaign?” the Talking Nixon professed to have no idea, adding: “I stand behind every word I said, unless the Democrats had it wrong because they said it first. She was a member of a number of Communist front organizations. I just picked up where they left off.”

I could almost hear bodies spinning in their graves as he talked.

For a brief perspective on these two answers, biographer Howard Morris called the Voorhis campaign “the steady, slowly gathering din of Red-baiting . . . full of half-truths and innuendoes”; it was also marked by thousands of anonymous phone calls out of Nixon headquarters telling voters: “Jerry Voorhis is a communist.” As for the Senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, Nixon’s fellow Republican (and later Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) Earl Warren characterized Nixon’s “scurrilous attacks on her patriotism” as “grotesquely unfair.”

So on to Watergate, where the answers seem to be more straightforward than those to questions about earlier years that are now shrouded in the mists of time.

Asked if he was “sorry for Watergate” and willing to “apologize,” the Talking Nixon replied tersely: “I can only answer this by stating a fact: there’s no way to apologize more than resigning the presidency of the United States. That said it all, and I don’t intend to say any more.”

Asked why the “hostile press” (which takes a lot of heat throughout these exhibits) wanted him “out of office,” he said, with surprising candor: “Because I had a mandate to reorganize the government. I was going to shape up the place. They knew it . . . and they didn’t like it.” Quite true.

Asked to characterize Watergate, the Talking Nixon went into a long discussion of “what it was not “ (“no one was killed, no one profited from it, no election was affected or stolen”), then kissed it off as “simply a political shenanigan, wrong and stupidly handled.”

Of his pardon by Gerald Ford, Nixon said: “It was difficult (to accept) because I would have preferred to fight it out in court. . . . But the central factor was that my lawyers told me there was no way to get a fair trial in Washington.”

I was just getting into Deep Throat--which the Talking Nixon speculated was “a composite that (Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein) felt they had to create to give more credibility to what they were doing”--when the school kids made the scene and started punching buttons. So I moved along. I was especially eager to hear the “smoking gun” tape before the line got too long.

That turned out to be a major disappointment.

As pointed out earlier in The Times, there are crucial omissions in the tape. What I wasn’t prepared for were the long apologias and explanations that made up most of the tape, apparently inserted so listeners won’t do any thinking for themselves. The tape turns out to be about one-tenth “smoking gun” conversation and about nine-tenths a sepulchral voice explaining that what he really was saying was. . . .

That same tone permeates the rest of the exhibits. If a school kid got all of his current history from this museum, he could only go away with a picture of Nixon as a kind of 20th-Century Joan d’Arc, burned at the stake of public opinion by a slavering press and malignant critics with highly suspect philosophical backgrounds.

The running commentary on the exhibits is full of such incandescent disclaimers as “the President’s opponents wasted no time in finding sinister and devious motives for the . . . gap in the tape” and the description of Special Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox as a “Kennedy protege” whose “objectivity was questionable.”

The only reference I could find to Spiro Agnew--then under indictment by the state of Maryland--was that he resigned the vice presidency during the Watergate period on “unrelated charges.”

There isn’t even the smallest suggestion of balance here, no sense of responsible criticism of Nixon, especially in areas other than Watergate. Now admittedly, this isn’t all that unusual in presidential libraries and museums. I’ve seen all of them except Kennedy and Ford, and most tend to be reverential.

But not to the degree that the Nixon Library does.

To take one small example, one of the staples of the other presidential libraries is political cartoons. Both the Roosevelt and Truman libraries exhibit savagely critical cartoons with great glee. But not Nixon. If there’s a sense of humor displayed here, I didn’t find it.

I ended my visit with Nixon at his birthplace, adjacent to the museum. I went there twice during the years you couldn’t dragoon visitors to the old homestead--once out of curiosity and once to interview the family that lived in the Nixon home for many years, taking care of it and putting up with occasional tourists in their front yard in return for reduced rent.

It was pretty seedy then, a historical derelict with a torn guest register out front and a sagging facade badly in need of paint. Only the Herculean efforts of a group of steadfast Yorba Lindans kept it from disintegrating altogether. Now it has been thoroughly spiffed up, repainted, refurnished and redeemed.

Driving home, I pondered the rewriting of history that takes place to a certain extent in all of these presidential libraries--and that Nixon, typically, has carried to a new level since he didn’t have to deal with any of the restrictions imposed on other presidential libraries that are administered by the federal government. I tried to imagine how useful this facility might have been--especially to young visitors--had it been put together by historians with halfway decent intellectual objectivity.

I wondered how the Talking Nixon would deal with that question. Tersely, I suspect.