Archives Seeks Settlement of Nixon Estate

The head of the National Archives has asked the Justice Department to settle all outstanding litigation with former President Richard M. Nixon’s estate with an agreement that could result in permanent damage to Nixon’s original White House tapes and moving the huge collection of Nixon material to California.

Critics of the proposed settlement say it would cost taxpayers more than all the Nixon records are worth, violate a 1974 law that says the records should be kept in the Washington area, and severely restrict the release of material dealing with the political aspects of Nixon’s presidency.

Nixon lawyers want to have all “personal” conversations excised from the tapes, but experts for the Archives say the originals are too fragile to be cut and spliced without irreversible damage. The Archives last year tentatively agreed to a plan that would have permitted such destruction of the tapes, but it was blocked at the White House by then-counsel Jack Quinn.

However, John Carlin, archivist of the United States, is eager to settle out of court all outstanding disputes with the Nixon family and has renewed discussion of the plan, with some modifications. Carlin has said he believes continued litigation will only further impede public access to Nixon’s records.

The settlement would hinge on a previously proposed payment of $26 million to compensate the Nixon estate for seizure of his papers in 1974. Part of the payment--$8 million--would be used to build a new Nixon library in Yorba Linda, on the grounds of the privately run Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace, to house the huge collection of 44 million Nixon items now kept by the Archives at its College Park, Md., facility.

The issue of how much the Nixon family should be paid is at the center of a compensation suit scheduled to be tried in U.S. District Court here. Carlin has been advocating settlement partly on the grounds that the cost to the public could be much higher if a jury were to decide the case. He said last spring that he had “heard” estimates for the Nixon collection running as high as $250 million to $300 million.

The Justice Department has yet to submit its appraisal, but it is likely to be far lower than $26 million, several sources said. Government lawyers were advised several years ago, the sources said, that “$2 million would be too much.”

The collection would be shipped to California despite a 1974 law requiring that the records be kept in the Washington area.

Congress would have 60 days to object, but historians such as Page Miller of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, Joan Hoff of Ohio University’s Contemporary History Institute and Anna Nelson of American University say no move should be made without a change in the law.

“The [1974] law says the [Nixon] records cannot be moved from the Washington area, and a lot of good lobbying can be done in Congress to prevent them from going,” Nelson said. Hoff said Carlin’s proposal should serve as the catalyst for congressional hearings on the whole “badly flawed” presidential library system.

“I think Carlin has conned [lawyers at Justice] into thinking this system works,” she said. While each presidential library is nominally run by the Archives, she said, “in reality, the former president or his family chooses the library director and then the director has to deal with the family and the presidential foundation set up for the library. Every director turns into a hagiographer.”