Keeping History Straight

Powerful forces often seek to influence the presidential libraries that in turn help to shape history. Yes, folks, we’re talking about money and politics. And even the mists of time don’t stop the struggle.

Controversy has been brewing in Illinois, for instance, since that state’s governor recommended a man with no experience as a historian or curator to be director of the $115-million Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum planned for Springfield. The presidential pardons scandal tarnished the planned Clinton Library in Little Rock, Ark., after it drew significant donations from pardoned financier Marc Rich and his former wife, Denise Rich.

Richard M. Nixon, who knew a bit about money and politics, was a key architect of the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda. But that has not kept surviving members of the former first family from trading legal briefs over how the museum should be governed.

Tricia Cox and Julie Eisenhower’s long-simmering feud tumbled into the public domain after The Times reported that the sisters are squaring off in court over a significant financial bequest from the late Bebe Rebozo, a longtime Nixon friend.

Money is an important issue for the only presidential library that doesn’t accept federal operating funds. The Rebozo bequest could more than double the $13-million endowment at the library, which helps make ends meet by renting itself out for weddings and fashion shows. A planned expansion would make more room for fund-raisers, but historians would rather see the library acquire important Nixon presidency records that are still housed in a National Archives annex in Maryland.

Cox argues that Nixon family members have a right to accept and distribute funds as they see fit. Eisenhower long has maintained that funding and strategic decisions are best left to the broader, 24-member library foundation board set in place during a 1997 reorganization that helped professionalize the library.

The Nixon Library opted from its beginning to eschew federal funds and operate outside of the National Archives’ supervision. Given the tumult surrounding Nixon’s presidency, the library has a special obligation to ensure academics and armchair historians that it stays at arms’ length from strong-willed family members and influential donors.

Cox’s vision of a family-dominated committee would send the library backward, away from any scholarly respectability. Eisenhower is right to embrace a broader, more experienced board that, while top-heavy with such Nixon associates as Henry Kissinger and Kenneth L. Khachigian, seems better equipped to protect the museum’s assets.