Center Plan to Be Unveiled at Nixon Salute

Shortly before noon today, 25 years after he stood on the steps of the nation’s Capitol and swore to uphold the Constitution, former President Richard Nixon will stand in the shadow of his boyhood home and celebrate the part of his past that was glorious.

Amid much fanfare and souvenirs from that day when he became the nation’s 37th President, Nixon will hear accolades about foreign policy achievements, be hailed as the sage from whom world leaders seek advice, and pose for a commemorative photograph with one of his former vice presidents and about two dozen members of his Cabinets.

And in tribute to Nixon--the only American President forced to resign after being disgraced by political scandal--the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace will mark the anniversary of his inauguration with the unveiling of plans for the Center for Peace and Freedom, a think tank dedicated to Nixon’s principles of “enlightened national interest in foreign policy and pragmatic idealism in domestic affairs.”

Or as one library official said Wednesday, the center’s policy studies will use as a guide Nixon’s “hardheaded, pragmatic, realistic focus on what can be accomplished, rather than what we hope to be accomplished” on foreign and domestic issues.

About 1,000 invited guests are expected to attend the event, which is closed to the public but will be broadcast later in the day on C-SPAN.

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An ongoing fund-raising drive for the library and new policy center, which is scheduled to open in 1997, was boosted with the announcement Wednesday that the Annenberg Foundation will make a $5-million challenge grant. As of Wednesday, the “Legacy for Peace” campaign had raised $13.5 million of its $25-million goal.

The Annenberg Foundation is named for former Ambassador Walter H. Annenberg, who announced during a White House ceremony last December that the foundation would donate $500 million for U.S. schools.

“His personal support for our campaign and for the Center for Peace and Freedom is the surest indication we could have that we are engaged in a profoundly worthy cause,” library Chairman George L. Argyros said in a statement Wednesday.

Of the $25 million to be raised, $20 million will be used to fund an endowment, with some of the income used to defray the operating costs of the Nixon library, as well as programming at the policy center.

While officials say the library is financially sound, federal tax documents filed by the facility last November showed it had lost $1.5 million during two years of operation. It is the only presidential library in the nation to operate without federal funds. In 1974, Congress refused to turn over to Nixon the papers and tape recordings from his presidency, making the library ineligible to become part of the National Archives system until the law is amended.

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Headquartered in Yorba Linda, the new policy center will establish eight endowed chairs--six in the area of foreign policy and two focusing on domestic issues--reflecting the primary focus that the Nixon Administrations paid to foreign relations.

It is in the area of foreign policy that Nixon achieved his greatest success, Nixon observers said.

“Nobody would want to hear what he has to say” on domestic issues, said Stephen E. Ambrose, a Nixon biographer and history professor at the University of New Orleans. “It was not an interest of his and certainly not a strength.”

Perhaps Nixon’s greatest foreign policy achievement was in the re-establishment of relations with China after two decades of isolation, followed by the beginning of detente with the Soviet Union and the “shuttle diplomacy” of his Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger in an attempt to negotiate peace in the Middle East.

Although Nixon had campaigned for the presidency in 1968 with the promise that he had a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War, it took him five years to accomplish only a withdrawal of American troops from the war.

The foreign policy chairs will be titled: “Russian and the Other Post-Soviet States,” “Sino-United States Relations,” “United States-Japan Relations,” “The New Europe,” “The Mideast,” and “The Moslem World.” The two domestic policy chairs planned so far are in “Representative Governance” and “Morality, Freedom and National Renewal.”

Also, the policy center’s program will include the Richard Nixon Foreign Policy Institute to be established in Washington. Part of its mission will be to prepare “an annual assessment of each incumbent Administration’s conduct of national security policy,” library officials said.