Nixon Library Delights All but Scholars : Anniversary: After first year, curator says complex holds its own as a tourist attraction, and it has boosted Yorba Linda’s image. But presidential papers are in short supply.

For a few hours last July 19, Yorba Linda seemed almost at the center of the world.

There, on a sweltering summer day before reporters from across the globe, four Presidents stood shoulder to shoulder to dedicate the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace and mark a high point in Nixon’s return to public life.

Nixon hasn’t been back to the library since, and things have quieted down inside the sandstone walls. But even so, library administrators say they have made large strides toward establishing the site as a full-fledged “tourist attraction” in the competitive Orange County market.

In the past year, heads of state and Nixon rivals alike have toured the facility, the only privately run presidential library in the country. Thousands of visitors--most of them admitted Nixon admirers--have been wowed by bronze statues, carefully kept gardens and gadgets such as a Presidential Forum, where visitors ask questions and hear Nixon’s videotaped responses. And recently, the price of admission went up $1, to $4.95.

On Friday, the first anniversary of the library’s opening, John Taylor, director of the facility, will announce plans for expanding some exhibits.

“We feel we’ve had an excellent year,” he said.

But critics say library planners have fallen short in one of their principal aims: to assemble documents that would help visitors assess Nixon’s place in history. For example, the facility includes excerpts from just three of the infamous secret Watergate tapes that were the a big part of the scandal that led to Nixon becoming the only U.S. President to resign.

“It is not now a place to study the Nixon Administration,” said Stephen Ambrose, a historian whose third volume on the Nixon legacy, due out in October, closes with the library dedication in Yorba Linda.

“The day the place opened, it was a library without books or documents,” he said. “The only books in the place were on sale in the bookstore and were mostly written by President Nixon. To have any documents at all would add to its credibility.”

But Taylor, a Nixon aide for 10 years before arriving to head the library last year, said that, too, will change.

Library officials are planning to assemble up to 12 million pages of Nixon’s personal papers, Taylor said, including about half of his documents from his eight years as Vice President to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, papers from congressional campaigns and correspondence with Presidents Reagan and Bush.

The official presidential papers from Nixon’s tenure in the White House are owned by the federal government and housed in Virginia at a National Archives annex.

Accumulating and filing the papers is a painstaking process. Library officials hinted last year that the archives could be ready for viewing soon after the dedication, but Taylor said it will probably be later this year or early next before scholars get their crack at the papers.

Taylor’s predecessor at the library, Hugh Hewitt, caused a stir last year when he said potential scholars wishing to use the archives would be screened based on the slant of their work. He said people such as Washington Post reporter-editor Bob Woodward, who helped uncover the Watergate scandal, were not likely to gain access to the archives.

But that tentative policy was scrapped. And once the archives do open, Taylor said, “our only restriction will have to do with security of the documents.”

While Taylor acknowledged that the quality of a presidential library’s historical archives will help determine its standing and credibility, he said that visiting scholars may number just a handful a week and that his top goal remains attracting tourists.

“We are a museum experience--we’re an attraction,” he said. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say we’re ‘Nixonland,’ but we present a graphic, exciting experience.”

Library officials will not say just how successful that experience has been in attracting customers.

But Taylor did say: “What we know is we’re in a very competitive tourist market. . . . We knew we were going up against the big boys, and we’ve been, I think, very successful.”

The most popular exhibits, Taylor said, are the introductory movie capsulizing Nixon’s life, Nixon’s birthplace next to the library, the gardens and the collection of bronze statues of world leaders.

A survey also indicated that visitors wanted to see even more of Pat Nixon and their family life, already prominently displayed. Plans are in the works to expand those areas, he said.

Attracting the most controversy, however, is the Watergate exhibition.

The biggest exhibit in the library, the Watergate display features edited versions of the tapes, but there are no plans to add more tapes from among new ones released in June by the federal government.

The library, a private, not-for-profit organization, was “self-sustaining” in its first year, through gifts, admissions and gift shop sales, Taylor said. According to the most recent federal filings available from the library, it had total revenue of $15.6 million through 1988.

Taylor said he hopes to establish a $10-million endowment drive for 1992.

Also encouraged by the library’s first year have been civic leaders in Yorba Linda. They say the library has brought more business and greater stature to the city.

“It’s given us a new focal point,” Mayor Mark Schwing said. “Yorba Linda didn’t really have a focal point until now.”

And Roland Bigonger, a former councilman who is on the library’s executive board and who helped bring the library to the city, said it has helped to identify Yorba Linda as a “presidential community.”

“The community, as it relates to Orange County, now is viewed as the birthplace of the President and the library,” he said. “There’s not too many cities that can say that they are the location of a presidential library.”

Taylor said there is still room for growth and improvement--especially if the library hopes to avoid the slump that has sometimes hit other presidential libraries after two years.

“We want more Democrats in” to visit, Taylor said. “We want to show people you don’t have to be a Nixon fan to come to the library.”

But for now, many of those who visit the site are unabashed Nixon devotees and say they do not mind the favorable portrait of the 37th President.

“In a situation like this, where it’s a library in his honor, they’re not going to bring up certain details that are, well, debatable,” said Edward Balch, 77, who came up from San Diego County with his wife Wednesday to visit the library for the day.

And even some of those not so enamored with Nixon have been quickly persuaded.

Dustin Schieve, a 12-year-old from Corona who visited the library with his family Wednesday, said he had thought of Nixon as “a bad President, a cheat and a robber.”

But by visit’s end, Dustin said: “I thought it was cool. . . . I kinda think Nixon was made to retire because people didn’t like him, so they framed him.”