Nixon Center Expected to Be Think Tank With Clout : Institutions: Yorba Linda-based organization will likely be a player on the global policy scene, experts say.

Toward the end of a lengthy ceremony last week announcing that a public policy center would be established at his presidential library here, former President Richard Nixon made a small confession.

“As many of you know,” Nixon said, “I’m not much of a fan of think tanks.”

Despite his misgivings, Nixon said he had been assured by those planning the $25-million Center for Peace and Freedom that his think tank would be fundamentally different from the nation’s estimated 1,000 to 1,200 other public policy centers, more than 100 of which are based in Washington.

With few details on the Nixon center available, where it will fit in the wide range of U.S. think tanks is a matter of some speculation among leaders of those institutions and the small group of scholars who study the organizations’ growing influence on U.S. policy-making.

“How effective the (Nixon) institution will be depends on a combination of its financial and human resources,” said Jess Cook, spokesman for the RAND Corp. in Santa Monica. “It will boil down to who does the thinking in the tank.”

Still, scholars at other policy centers, as well as experts on think tanks, said various factors point to the development of a serious, substantive policy center with potential to be a player in decision-making in Washington and other world capitals.

The center’s main attributes include former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger’s involvement on the board of directors, plans for a Washington affiliate and the recently announced $5-million grant from the Annenberg Foundation, named for former Ambassador Walter H. Annenberg.

“Clearly, their natural advantage is Richard Nixon,” said Donald Schewe, director of the Jimmy Carter presidential library in Atlanta. “He has great access to a number of world leaders, as well as to people in his own Administration and those that followed. When a former President calls, people tend to pick up the phone.”

In fact, many of those interviewed pointed to the Carter Center, an action-oriented think tank affiliated with his presidential library based at Atlanta’s Emory University, as providing perhaps the best model for what Nixon center planners may have in mind.

James A. Smith, considered a leading expert on think tanks, said the Carter Center had created a new activist mold for presidential libraries, which historically have served mainly as repositories for presidential papers and research homes for scholars.

The preliminary information on the Nixon center would seem to place it on a similar track, according to Smith, whose 1991 book, “The Idea Brokers,” is considered the most definitive study on think tanks.

Nixon library officials and others associated with the new center have stressed that Nixon’s center will be innovative, activist and so different from any existing think tank that there is no model for it.

But they also have released few details that might explain how it will work, emphasizing that the planning remains in an “embryonic” stage, as library director John Taylor said last week.

What is known is that Kissinger will serve as a member of the center’s board and also has agreed to play a substantive, but still undefined, leadership role there.

Eight endowed chairs will be established, with six focusing on foreign policy and two on domestic affairs. An affiliated institution, the Richard Nixon Foreign Policy Institute, will be established in Washington.

Kissinger, who spoke to reporters after Thursday’s ceremony, said the Nixon center will be different from existing think tanks because it will emphasize “middle-term problems,” not short- or long-term policy questions.

He said examples of such issues include the changing relationships in Eastern Europe, South Africa and the Middle East, and the increasingly significant roles of China and Japan.

But announcements about such fundamentals as who will chair the center’s board, serve as its president and fill its endowed chairs are yet to come.

Like Carter’s center, Nixon’s is expected to reflect his specific policy interests. Where the Carter Center is deeply--often directly--involved in conflict resolution, election monitoring and human rights at home and abroad, Nixon’s is viewed as likely to emphasize foreign rather than domestic affairs, with a focus on relations between the United States and the other Pacific powers, Russia, China and Japan.

“I’m sure they’re planning to capitalize on his foreign policy expertise,” said Schewe, the Carter library director. “Virtually everyone agrees that the man had a great foreign policy.”

But while Carter’s “way of being activist is to grab a hammer himself,” as his library’s director put it, Nixon probably will not be directly involved in running his policy center or determining specific areas of study, said Dimitri Simes, who is expected to play a leading role at the new think tank. Simes is currently a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a frequent adviser to Nixon on Russian policy.

“He will be a guiding presence, a friend,” Simes said. “The center will be built around his philosophy of enlightened national interest, but not around him as a person.”

In general, think tanks operate on the margins of the American political process to provide expertise to policy-makers, Smith said. There are several types:

* Institutions that emphasize serious, scholarly, social science research and tend to have endowments and a permanent senior research staff, like the Brookings Institution in Washington, the oldest think tank in the country.

* Contract research institutions, like the Urban Institute in Washington and the RAND Corp., which produce reports often for government agencies.

* University-based research organizations, like Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the research centers it houses.

* Institutions, often called advocacy tanks, that can be more partisan and ideological and more intimately engaged in the policy process. An example would be the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington.

While other presidents have public policy centers or schools named for them--including the Kennedy School, Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and Stanford’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace--most are not directly affiliated with their libraries, Smith said.

Martin Anderson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who served on the board of the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley for five years, said Nixon library officials had been shrewd in recognizing the potential for a powerful, activist presidential policy center on the West Coast.

The Reagan library was originally intended to fill that role before a decision was made to back away from plans for a policy center, Anderson said.

Anderson said the Reagan library, originally intended to be housed at the Hoover Institution on the Stanford University campus, also was initially planned to include a major public policy center. But after Stanford rejected its overtures and a series of other problems, the library abandoned plans for the think tank, he said.

Anderson, who served as an adviser to both Nixon and Ronald Reagan, said he expects presidential think tanks to become an increasingly important part of the public policy debate.

“What has happened is that as the number of presidential libraries grows and the number of living ex-presidents grows, these centers will exert increasing influence,” Anderson said, adding that Carter has used his more effectively than any former President to date.

“The other interesting thing is that after these people leave office, they tend to become quite bipartisan,” Anderson said, noting Reagan’s participation in the dedication of the Carter center and Ford’s appearances over the years at ceremonies and conferences at both the Carter center and the Nixon library.