Gift Assures Building on Nixon Site : Policy: Bobst Foundation provides for $25-million, bipartisan Center for Peace and Freedom on grounds of presidential library.

A gift sufficient to build a new $25-million public policy center at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace was announced Wednesday.

The donation from the Elmer and Mamdouha Bobst Foundation will allow the construction of a building to house the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom, established as a bipartisan political think tank by Nixon months before his death last April.

The announcement by Tricia Cox Nixon and Mamdouha Bobst preceded a keynote address by President Bill Clinton at a two-day conference in Washington, D.C., focusing on the future of U.S. foreign policy. The conference, which also featured former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan), was organized by the Nixon library and the Nixon center.

The Elmer and Mamdouha Bobst Building will be on the grounds of the Nixon library. It will house offices for scholars, a conference center and archives that will handle overflow documents from the Nixon library.

The Nixon center now operates out of an office at the Nixon library and another in Washington, D.C.

Elmer Bobst, former chairman of the Warner-Lambert Corp., was a personal friend and adviser of Nixon, who delivered the eulogy when Bobst died in 1978.

In addition to being president of the Bobst Foundation, Mamdouha Bobst also heads the Bobst International Cancer Education Fund and is an honorary life trustee of the American Cancer Society. She was born in Tripoli, Lebanon, and attended UC Berkeley.

Nixon announced the formation of the public policy center at a January, 1994, ceremony at the Yorba Linda library.