Yorba Linda Via iPhone: April 2010

April 27, 2010 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Nixon Library | 2 Comments 

RN Birthplace and Reflecting Pool with Visiting Mallard

Library Courtyard

Courtyard Colonnade

The Pat Nixon Rose (1972) in the First Lady’s Rose Garden

22 April 2010

Smells Like San Clemente Spirit

April 13, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Music, Nixon Library, Nixon in the News, Popular Culture, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

A few weeks after the 37th President boarded Air Force One for his last trip as President, David Bowie stood in a studio in Philadelphia and asked the country’s young Americans, “do you remember your President Nixon?”

Not long after that, Neil Young, recording “Campaigner,” reminded the world that “even Richard Nixon’s got soul.”

But it turns out that at the same time, another rock’n'roller was starting his career with songs referring to RN – a musician who, though he is not yet in the Rock’n'Roll Hall of Fame with Bowie and Young, is sure to join them sometime after 2013, when his eligibility starts 25 years after his recording (as opposed to performing) career began.

During his final live shows with Nirvana, in the fall and winter of 1993-1994, Kurt Cobain sometimes brought out an Epiphone Texan guitar for the acoustic portion of the show, which he had found in a store in Los Angeles. It sported a “Nixon Now” bumper sticker from 1972, and is now renowned among students of the Nirvana oeuvre as the best-sounding acoustic Cobain ever used. (At the end of 1994, eight or so months after the deaths of Cobain and Nixon, a blowup photo of Kurt playing this guitar was displayed in the Nixon Library exhibit “Rockin’ The White House.”)

But it turns out that this was not the first time that President Nixon entered Cobain’s musical world. From RTTNews.com comes this article:

Early recordings from a young Kurt Cobain were recently discovered at a garage sale in Aberdeen, Washington.

Producers Jack Endino and Butch Vig [the producers of Nirvana's first two albums] both verified that the tapes are self-recordings of Cobain, who is believed to have been 8 or 9 years old at the time. According to reports, it sounds as though he is playing an acoustic guitar and ukulele, sometime around 1974 or 1975, based on the content of songs about Richard Nixon. [Note: Cobain was born on Feb. 20, 1967, so he may have been as young as 7 when he recorded this material.]

Several cassettes labelled “KDC” – believed to stand for Kurt Donald Cobain – in black magic marker were found at the sale. The tapes are estimated to be worth millions.

Managing The Nixon Oval Office

February 19, 2010 by admin | Filed Under Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Foundation, Nixon Library, Nixon Library events, Nixon family, Nixon in the News, Pat Nixon, Presidential libraries, Richard Nixon, Yorba Linda | 6 Comments 

On Presidents’ Day 2010, more than five thousand packed the Nixon Library and were welcomed with cherry pie and appearances by Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt. Then at 1:30 pm, RN’s Oval Office Team presented the second Nixon Legacy Forum, The Effective Use Of the President’s Time, a look at RN Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, how the Office of the President operated and why it became the model for successive administrations.

Twenty-two members of the Haldeman family were in the audience including widow Jo Haldeman, their son Hank, daughters Anne and Susan, and their grandchildren. Dwight Chapin, former Deputy Assistant to President Nixon, moderated the panel of key staff including Larry Higby (Special Assistant to the President and Assistant White House Chief of Staff), Steve Bull (Special Assistant to the President) and Ron Walker (Special Assistant to the President and Director of the Office of Presidential Advance). Chapin’s service to RN started as a young field man in the 1962 California gubernatorial race. After the former Vice President’s defeat, he went to work for Haldeman at the J. Walter Thompson advertising company. It was during this time that Haldeman – who served as Campaign Manager in 1962 and Director of Advance in the 1960 Presidential campaign – spearheaded the organization of RN’s comeback.

“These weren’t the wilderness years.” Chapin explained. “These were the strategic planning years.”

As an example, Chapin pointed to a memo that illustrated a new and innovative strategy for winning in 1968. Outlining the need for more effective time management, Haldeman told RN that he could reach more voters through the use of television in one or two key events with substantive messages, buying much needed time for him to rest, reflect and write.

This was a radical concept that totally changed the way campaigns went thereafter.” Larry Higby added. “It became the style for how we started to communicate as a White House.”

Higby, the youngest of the staff, also began his career working for Haldeman on the 1968 campaign while in graduate school at UCLA. At twenty-three years old, he became Assistant White House Chief of Staff.

“My first job was to find a book on how the presidency worked.” We had just ninety days to build a corporation from scratch.”

The Nixon organizational model would be groundbreaking. Previous White Houses implemented the cabinet form of government where decision-making was delegated to cabinet officials. John F. Kennedy, Higby explained, worked freestyle, forming coalitions and committees for the most important policy issues. While President Johnson managed like a legislator and focused heavily on his domestic agenda, a reflection on his over 20 years on Capitol Hill.

By contrast, RN managed like an executive.   “H.R. Haldeman was his Chief Operating Officer,” explained Steve Bull. “While Dr. Kissinger was the Vice President of International Affairs and John Erlichman was the President of Domestic Affairs.” It was the Cabinet officers’ job to ultimately execute the positions from the White House.

A retired Marine, Bull’s path to White House was trailed after returning from Vietnam in 1966. He hardly recognized his country as rising crime, social upheaval, and protests against the war were dividing the country. He saw RN as the leader who could bring the country together.

After working on the successful 1968 campaign, Bull joined the White House team as the President’s Special Assistant, managing his day-to-day schedule and moving officials in and out of meetings.

“I was not a confidant.” Bull said.  “It was a senior to subordinate position. My job was to run the Oval Office. I was kept around because I was trustworthy. Trust was important.”

Managing RN’s work environment was also important. Bull explained that RN was a private person. He didn’t like meeting with large groups or numerous advisers. He was a contemplative man whose best course was to rely on his own instincts. He needed time to shape his agenda and map out the long term.

He essentially “shaved two days into one,” Chapin said.  RN started his day early by reading the daily news summary and meeting with Kissinger, Haldeman, and other White House senior advisers and cabinet officials.  During the afternoon, RN would take a short 40 minute “power” nap, change and retreat to his private study in the Executive Office Building, where he would “write out long thoughts, shape his agenda, and constantly be looking ahead,” Higby explained.

As Director of the first Office of Presidential Advance, it was Ron Walker’s job to constantly look ahead. Now the President of the Richard Nixon Foundation, Walker prepared hundreds of foreign and domestic trips for RN including the historic trips to China and Russia in 1972.

After working as a volunteer advanceman during the 1968 Campaign, Walker worked on the transition and the first inaugural. Following inauguration, Chapin invited him to construct the first Office of Presidential Advance.

Not only did Walker create the office, but he also perfected the art first pioneered by Haldeman.

“We wanted to be the mantel of the Presidency,” Walker explained. “When I went into the White House to work for Dwight and Bob, the first thing I thought was important was that I write an advance manual.”

The manual took six months and amounted to 397 pages, constituting what Haldeman initially developed for political campaigns and refining it to advance the President of the United States.

The Nixon White House had “all of those elements necessary to move the President of the United States outside the White House,” Walker said. “We had advance men who knew how to run airport arrivals, how to put motorcades together, how to do press conferences, how to handle the press,” and who were able to effectively “work with Secret Service,” and “the White House Communications Agency.”

On the last day of the 1972 campaign, Walker advanced President Nixon to Greensboro and Spartanburg, South Carolina at midday, flew to a sunset rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico and landed in Ontario, California for a torch light parade of fifty thousand with appearances by John Wayne and the Carpenters.

The next morning at the White House, the President thanked the advance team for their hard work and told them if it not for what they had accomplished he wouldn’t have earned a second term.

To give a sense of their efficiency, RN later told Walker that his team could have took the beaches at Normandy.

Nearly forty years later at the President’s Library in Yorba Linda, the Oval Office Team also performed with masterful efficiency, finishing two minutes ahead of schedule. “The program was to run from 1:30 to 3:30, this program ended at 3:28,” Walker concluded, “that’s called a good advance.”

Article On Ron Walker In Orange County Register

February 13, 2010 by admin | Filed Under American Politics, China, Foundation News, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Foundation, Nixon Library, Orange County, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, White House, Yorba Linda | 1 Comment 

During the Nixon Administration, Ron Walker headed the White House’s advance team, working on projects ranging in scale from the thirty-seventh President’s 1972 visit to the People’s Republic of China to his visits to Washington-area schools. The concepts developed by the team Ron headed form the basis for all the subsequent advance work of American presidencies.

Today, Ron Walker is president of the Richard Nixon Foundation, and the Orange County Register has just published an article about him by Jessica Terrell. who often covers Nixon-related personalities and events for the newspaper. It contains some remarkable facts: it turns out that Ron, at the time he joined the Nixon campaign in 1968, was a registered Democrat. He also describes his ambitious plans for the Foundation, which include doubling the size of its endowment, and organizing more events to make the public aware of the accomplishments of the Nixon era in both domestic and foreign affairs.

Richard Norton Smith On The Nixon Funeral

February 9, 2010 by admin | Filed Under American Politics, Nixon Library, Nixon Library events, Pat Nixon, Presidents, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Yorba Linda | 3 Comments 

This week Public Affairs Press has reissued Who’s Buried In Grant’s Tomb?, a book edited by Brian Lamb and originally published in 2000 as a companion volume to the “American Presidents” series of programs that were, at that time, being first broadcast on C-SPAN. (In the decade since they’ve frequently been rerun, most often on C-SPAN3.)

The book, as you might guess from the title, concerns Presidential gravesites. Did you know that George Washington had such an intense fear of being buried alive that his will stipulated that he not be interred until at least three days after his death? Well, I didn’t either until I read this article about the book by Paul Bedard, the “Washington Whispers” columnist of US News magazine.

Bedard includes a lengthy excerpt from the new editions introduction by that pre-eminent Presidential historian Richard Norton Smith, who describes his work on the address delivered by then-Senator Bob Dole at President Nixon’s funeral at the Nixon Library in 1994:

“As one who had a hand in drafting Robert Dole’s eulogy for Nixon, delivered on April 27, 1994, I will go to my grave convinced that Richard Nixon hoped to influence the 1996 presidential race from his. In point of fact, Dole had been among the eulogists at Pat Nixon’s funeral the previous June, as was California governor Pete Wilson. Approximately 33 million Americans watched Nixon’s late afternoon burial in the lengthening shadow of his boyhood home. They saw a side of Bob Dole few would have predicted—except Nixon himself. For he knew that Dole’s feelings lay just below the surface, much closer than his hardboiled public image suggested. In designating him one of his Yorba Linda eulogists, Nixon anticipated the sob in Dole’s voice as he struggled to complete his tribute to the central figure in what the senator that day called the Age of Nixon. So authentic a display of grief was touching to all but the Nixon-haters in the vast audience. Moreover, by exhibiting his feelings so openly, Dole was, in effect, humanized in ways no other speech could have done. Which is exactly what Nixon intended, I believe, as he made his own funeral a showcase for his political heirs. Nixon was always a better campaign manager than candidate.”

Indeed, Dole’s eulogy was likely an important factor in reinforcing his status as a frontrunner in the 1996 election.

History And President Obama’s Oslo Imprimatur

December 14, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Barack Obama, History, Nixon Administration, Nixon Center, Nixon Library, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 4 Comments 

In President Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech last Thursday, he cited President Nixon’s trip to China as an example of a bold and controversial action by a leader that furthered the cause of peace:

In light of the Cultural Revolution’s horrors, Nixon’s meeting with Mao appeared inexcusable — and yet it surely helped set China on a path where millions of its citizens have been lifted from poverty and connected to open societies.  Pope John Paul’s engagement with Poland created space not just for the Catholic Church, but for labor leaders like Lech Walesa.  Ronald Reagan’s efforts on arms control and embrace of perestroika not only improved relations with the Soviet Union, but empowered dissidents throughout Eastern Europe.

In his speech, the President named some of the men and women whose “vision, hard work, and persistence” led history to bestow on them the title of peacemaker:

Henri Dunant*

John Paul II

Martin Luther King, Jr.*

Mohandas Gandhi

John F. Kennedy

Nelson Mandela*

George C. Marshall*

Richard Nixon

Ronald Reagan

Albert Schweitzer*

Aung Sang Suu Kyi*

Lech Walesa*

Woodrow Wilson*

*asterisks indicate Nobel Peace Prize laureates; Henry Dunant, founder of the Red Cross, received the first Peace Prize in 1901.

The President’s inclusion of RN amongst this noble company drew little attention and scant controversy.  Indeed, writing in Politico about the Oslo speech, Larry Sabato observed:

Obama also smartly included Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in his parade-of-history salutes. Reagan properly receives some credit for the fall of Communism, but if any modern Republican deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, it was Nixon. Yes, Nixon-and this is written by someone who wasn’t exactly a Nixon fan during the Vietnam War and Watergate. But in the light of history, Nixon’s opening to China and his policy of détente with the U.S.S.R. made enormous contributions.

In fact, President Obama’s inclusion of RN as one of these leaders, visionaries, and peacemakers may be seen as the thirty-seventh President’s passage from the exurbs of rehabilitation to the outskirts of apotheosis.

There have been many turning points and milestones on the long and winding road from 9 August 1974 in Washington to 10 December 2009 in Oslo.

In 1978, the publication of RN’s memoirs –RN— following on the broadcast of David Frost’s four 90-minute TV interviews, marked the return of the former President as an active presence on the American scene.

The Frost interviews were broadcast in May 1977 and RN was published in the fall of 1978.

In the summer of 1980 the Nixons moved to New York —“the fastest track in the world” as he called it— and the former President began enjoying a busy life as a best-selling author, adviser to politicians and presidents, globe-trotting traveler, committed sports fan, and doting grandfather.

In 1984 CBS broadcast an hour of Nixon interviews on 60 Minutes, and in 1986 he appeared on the controversial and widely discussed Newsweek cover that announced: “HE’S BACK.”

In 1987 John Adams’ three act opera Nixon in China —commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Houston Opera, and the Kennedy Center in Washington— was premiered to great acclaim.  Alice Goodman’s free-wheeling libretto took liberties with the characters’ psychologies, but the work rose above controversy and introduced the idea of RN’s life and career as subjects of rich dramatic significance and potential.

Nixon in China is now considered one of the major operas of the 20th Century; it is also one of the few modern operas that has actually found a popular audience and continues to be presented in opera houses around the world.  The original Peter Sellars production will be revived in the 2010-2011 season at the Metropolitan Opera in New York; and the work’s Canadian debut will coincide with this summer’s Olympics in Vancouver.  Another new production will be mounted in March 2010  — by the Long Beach Opera — just up the road from Yorba Linda.

Cover art for Nonesuch’s 1990 complete recording of Nixon in China.  The 3-CD set became a surprise classical best-seller and is still in print.   This summer it was joined by a new complete live recording conducted by Marin Alsop.

On 19 July 1990, the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace was opened in Yorba Linda.  President and Mrs. Bush and former Presidents Ford and Reagan and their First Ladies joined RN and PN and their family for the celebration.

The Nixon Library Opens —  on 19 July 1990, RN and PN hosted several of their successors at the opening of the Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda.

In 1992 RN hosted President George H. W. Bush at a conference on “America’s Role in the Emerging World” presented by the Nixon Library and Birthplace in Washington.

In January 1994, RN established the Nixon Center as a foreign policy think tank in Washington.  In March 1995, President Clinton was the guest of honor at a Nixon Center dinner at the Mayflower Hotel.  He spoke warmly and admiringly about President Nixon, who had died eleven months earlier.

Indeed, President Clinton’s heartfelt and thoughtful eulogy, delivered on 27 April 1994 in the presence of his four living predecessors and their First Ladies at President Nixon’s funeral at the Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, was one of the major turning points on the road from August 9^th:

27 April 1994: President Clinton eulogizes President Nixon during the funeral at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda.

President Nixon’s journey across the American landscapes mirrored that of his entire nation in this remarkable century. His life was bound up with the striving of our whole people, with our crises and our triumphs.

When he became President, he took on challenges here at home on matters from cancer research to environmental protection, putting the power of the Federal Government where Republicans and Democrats had neglected to put it in the past, and in foreign policy. He came to the Presidency at a time in our history when Americans were tempted to say we had had enough of the world. Instead, he knew we had to reach out to old friends and old enemies alike. He would not allow America to quit the world.

Remarkably, he wrote nine of his ten books after he left the Presidency, working his way back into the arena he so loved by writing and thinking and engaging us in his dialogue. For the past year, even in the final weeks of his life, he gave me his wise counsel, especially with regard to Russia. One thing in particular left a profound impression on me. Though this man was in his ninth decade, he had an incredibly sharp and vigorous and rigorous mind. As a public man, he always seemed to believe the greatest sin was remaining passive in the face of challenges, and he never stopped living by that creed. He gave of himself with intelligence and energy and devotion to duty, and his entire country owes him a debt of gratitude for that service.

Oh, yes, he knew great controversy amid defeat as well as victory. He made mistakes, and they, like his accomplishments, are a part of his life and record. But the enduring lesson of Richard Nixon is that he never gave up being part of the action and passion of his times. He said many times that unless a person has a goal, a new mountain to climb, his spirit will die. Well, based on our last phone conversation and the letter he wrote me just a month ago, I can say that his spirit was very much alive to the very end.

That is a great tribute to him, to his wonderful wife, Pat, to his children and to his grandchildren, whose love he so depended on and whose love he returned in full measure. Today is a day for his family, his friends, and his nation to remember President Nixon’s life in totality. To them, let us say: may the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.

Every living former President and First Lady joined President and Mrs. Clinton at RN’s funeral in Yorba Linda.  Other eulogists included Henry Kissinger, Bob Dole, Pete Wilson, and Billy Graham.

In the summer of 1995, Joan Hoff published Nixon Reconsidered.  A history professor at Indiana University and Co-Editor of the Journal of Women’s Studies, Hoff attempted to put RN’s presidency in an “historical rather than histrionic perspective.”   The book received widespread —and surprised— attention for its bold (and impressively researched) thesis that RN’s domestic contributions would be seen as even more important and enlightened than his widely admired foreign policy.  Professor Hoff wrote that RN:

exceeded the accomplishments of the New Deal and the Great Society in the areas of civil rights, social welfare spending, domestic and international economic restructuring, urban parks, government reorganization, land-use initiatives, revenue sharing, draft reform, pension reform, and spending for the arts and humanities.

Other books had played a part in preparing for a reconsideration of RN.  Stephen Ambrose’s three-volumes (1988-1992), and Jonathan Aitken’s 1993 biography supplemented RN.  And Tom Wicker’s One Of Us appeared just a few months before Professor Hoff’s bombshell.

Throughout this period, RN himself was a prolific and best-selling author whose books were widely reviewed and discussed.  They included The Real War (1980), Leaders (1982), Real Peace (1984), No More Vietnams (1987), Victory Without War (1988), In the Arena: A Memoir of Victory, Defeat, and Renewal (1990), Seize the Moment (1992), and the posthumously published Beyond Peace (1994).  He traveled widely and appeared strategically on op-ed pages.

After his 1978 memoirs RN, RN’s post-presidency best-selling books ranged from profiles of leaders he had known, to on-going analyses of American foreign policy, to personal essays.

In 2006 playwright Peter Morgan turned the unlikely material of the David Frost interviews into a compelling and highly successful play.  Frost/Nixon, directed by Michael Grandage, and with Frank Langella as the former President, filled houses and won awards in London and New York.  A road company starring Stacy Keach as RN toured across America.

In 2008 it was made into a Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Oscar-nominated film directed by Ron Howard, with Frank Langella reprising his West End and Broadway role.  The Morgan-Grandage-Howard-Langella version introduced a new generation of worldwide play and moviegoers to the notion of a smart, witty, complex, and compelling Richard Nixon.

It’s possible that President Obama’s thinking about his thirty-seventh predecessor has been influenced by the most recent milestone passed between ‘74 and today — which came last August from a little-suspected source.  In his column in the Washington Post, Steven Pearlstein wrote about Edward Kennedy, who had died three days before: “Asked about his greatest regret as a legislator, Ted Kennedy would usually cite his refusal to cut a deal with Richard Nixon on health care.”

Writing in Newsweek , J. Lester Feder expounded on this idea:

It must pain those fond of Senator Ted Kennedy that his death comes just when the current health-reform effort is threatened by the same kind of attacks that tanked previous efforts. In fact, the Obama health-reform package Kennedy supported in his last days is similar to one Kennedy helped defeat when proposed by President Richard Nixon. If anything, the Obama plan is more conservative. Nixon would have mandated that all employers offer coverage to their employees, while creating a subsidized government insurance program for all Americans that employer coverage did not reach. It would take a miracle to pass such a plan today—a public insurance plan and an employer mandate are two provisions of the proposals now in Congress that are most in doubt.

RN had no illusions about the time it would take for history to be ready and able to assess him realistically and objectively.  In RN, he described the scene as he left the Oval Office after delivering his resignation speech on the night of 8 August 1974:

Kissinger was waiting for me in the corridor.  He said, “Mr. President, after most of your major speeches in this office we have walked together back to your house.  I would be honored to walk with you again tonight.”

As we walked past the dark Rose Garden, Kissinger’s voice was low and sad.  He said that he thought that historically this would rank as one of the great speeches and that history would judge me one of the great Presidents.  I turned to him and said, “that depends, Henry, on who writes the history.”  At the door of the Residence I thanked him and we parted.

RN was aware that the process of historical rehabilitation is usually measured more in centuries than decades.  Privately, he thought that fifty years (the passage of two generations and their passions) would be the minimum amount of time required.  (The most recent example, David McCulloch’s Truman, had appeared twenty years after HST died and four decades after he left office with a 22% approval rating and mired by scandals.)

Now, thanks to President Obama’s Oslo imprimatur, the timetable for reconsideration has been considerably moved forward.  It may even be that in 2010 —twenty years after RN’s Library opened and sixteen years after his death— it might be well begun; and, that by his 100^th birthday in 2013, it might even be well under way.

A Once and Future Slogan: a bumper strip from the 1972 campaign.

Welcome To The Club

November 21, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Nixon Library, Pat Nixon, Presidential libraries, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Groundbreaking for the George W. Bush Presidential Center —the latest addition to  the National Archives’ system of Presidential Libraries— will begin a year from now.  The designs of architect Robert A. M. Stern were unveiled in Dallas on Wednesday.  Several drawings were released, and the general impression was described in today’s Washington Post by architectural writer and critic Philip Kennicott:

Architect Robert A.M. Stern’s plans for the George W. Bush Presidential Center call for a low-slung building of brick and limestone, following traditional lines and hugging the Texas landscape with a calm reserve. It’s almost as if Bush has chosen to retreat into the patrician reticence of his blue-blooded, Connecticut forebears.

The library, with groundbreaking scheduled for November 2010 and an estimated cost of $250 million, will be built on the campus of Southern Methodist University and will house public exhibition space, a mock-up of the Oval Office, a conference center with 364-seat auditorium, and separate entry and offices for scholars. Visitors will enter through Freedom Hall, emblazoned with an American flag on its ceiling and capped by a square glass box that allows natural light to flow in.

The George W. Bush Presidential Center entrance. WaPo critic Kennicott, combining admiration and snark, writes that “It is all self-consciously attuned to and consonant with the SMU campus, a hyper-dignified collection of buildings with porticos and white columns that look as if they were designed by Thomas Jefferson unconstrained by a budget.”

Freedom Hall: The Bush Presidential Center’s entrance lobby.

Kennicott is harsh on the Clinton Library in Little Rock:

Compare this with the  William J. Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, the shape of which recalls the 42nd president’s tediously repeated “bridge to the 21st century” metaphor. Created by Polshek Partnership, the Clinton library is a flashy, contemporary confection of aluminum and glass, with dramatic cantilevers and a high-tech gloss. Although Polshek’s work in Washington has tended to the empty and meretricious (e.g., the Newseum and desperately flawed plans for a visitor center at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial), the library for Clinton achieved the brass ring of all too many architectural endeavors: instant iconic status.

Purely as a consumer in the competitive market of Presidential Libraries, I find that judgment  misleading.  One man’s tired metaphor may provide another man’s moment of quiet inspiration, and the Clinton Library  —strikingly situated on the bridge-crossed Little Rock River, and unconstrained by the style of any surrounding campus — provides the visitor an intriguingly site-specific experience, particularly when approached by foot on President Clinton Avenue.  The interiors and exhibition spaces are open and friendly and sleekly modern.  And walking through the replicas of the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room remind visitors of the tangible reality of the Office and the office.

The William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock.

I have recently had two occasions to visit and tour the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library in Staunton, Virginia — the first time out of curiosity and the second out of interest based on the first.   Wilson was one of RN’s favorite predecessors; he chose portraits of Wilson and Eisenhower for the Cabinet Room.  The Wilson Library complex is bounded on one side by the mansion acquired to house the presidential papers and on the other by The Manse — the house in which Wilson was born in December 1856.  Although he only spent his first year in Staunton, he always considered it as home and chose it as the site for his Library.

The Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library in Staunton, Virginia.

Each of the twelve —and soon to be thirteen— presidential libraries reflects the character and the times of its namesake.  So comparing them is a business of apples and oranges.  That said, and acknowledging that I’m myopic, I find the Nixon Library —designed by Langdon Wilson— especially architecturally suitable and institutionally successful —as both an accurate rendition of its namesake’s story and as an experience for the average visitor.  Its setting, its design, and its general ambiance convey a real sense of the President and Mrs. Nixon.  The remarkable arc of the Nixon story is all there — from the house where he was born to the simple polished granite headstones of  his and Mrs. Nixon’s  final resting places.  And in the spacious and graciously proportioned building is the history of the deep valleys and high mountains they experienced between.

The original architect’s drawing of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library campus in Yorba Linda.

The Reflecting Pool and Colonnade at the Nixon Library.

Twenty years ago next July: The 38, 40, 37, 41, and their First Ladies at the opening of the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda on 19 July 1990.

“I was born in a house my father built.”  RN’s Birthplace at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda.

The New Nixon Podcast Is Up And Running

October 31, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Advertising, Foundation News, Interviews, Media, New Media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Center, Nixon Foundation, Nixon Library, Nixon Library events, Podcast, Popular Culture, Richard Nixon, Social Networking, Technology, The National Interest, The New Nixon | Leave a Comment 

During a recent visit to the Nixon Library, I had a discussion with several people about the potential for a podcast, something designed to highlight the events at the library, as well as the larger work of the Nixon Foundation.

We determined to use the recent visit of Sonny West and his talk about the day Elvis came to see President Nixon in the Oval Office for the premier production of the podcast.

This podcast is being registered with I-Tunes and will be available through them by the end of today. This, of course, makes the podcast portable. It can be downloaded to I-Pods and other such devices. In the meantime, here is a link to the first episode of what we hope will be a regular feature.

A couple of provisos: First, the theme music is from “VICTORY AT SEA” at the recommendation of Sandy Quinn. He told me how much Mr. Nixon enjoyed it – so it was an obvious choice. Second, some of the audio during Sonny’s remarks is a little difficult to hear and I suspect he pulled a Fran Tarkenton and scrambled out of the pocket, straying from the microphone, at times. These technical difficulties will be addressed and corrected for future events and podcasts.

But even with a few “glitches” – this podcast will be, I think, a welcome edition to the wonderful media expressions of the Nixon Foundation.

It is my privilege to host and produce this and I look forward to working on new editions about once a month – so, stay tuned! My special thanks to Philip Bassham, on my staff in Fairfax, for his vital help with this project.

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Download on iTunes

Sonny Rises In The West

October 26, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Music, Nixon Library, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

At 7 PM tonight in Yorba Linda, the Nixon Library will welcome Elvis Presley’s friend and bodyguard Sonny West, who will talk about —and sign copies of— his book Elvis: Still Taking Care of Business.

White House photographer Ollie Atkins captured a candid moment with RN, Sonny West, Jerry Schilling, and The King in the Oval Office on 21 December 1970.

The Statue In Yorba Linda

October 1, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under China, Cold War, Nixon Library, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Yorba Linda | 6 Comments 

“Leader’s Exhibit:” A statue of Mao ZeDong is featured with the bronze likenesses of nine other world leaders during RN’s presidency at the Nixon Library.

Today, as is noted elsewhere at TNN, the People’s Republic of China celebrates its sixtieth anniversary. The day is being marked with celebrations throughout that nation and in Chinese communities around the world. But there are also a considerable Chinese with a profound distrust and dislike of Communism who are, here and there, registering their protests of the PRC’s policies.

Probably the largest number of active protesters are associated with the Falun Gong movement, but there are also some whose animosity toward the PRC’s institutions is very personal and heartfelt. One of these people is Kai Chen. Chen is a 56-year-old resident of Los Angeles in the real-estate business. He was born in the People’s Republic, into a family associated to some degree with the Kuomintang party of Chiang Kai-shek, who had, in 1949, been forced to leave the mainland for Taiwan. This status meant that Chen’s family suffered considerably in the Cultural Revolution, and that he was, as a teenager, denied a university education and sent to work in the countryside.

However, it happened that by the age of fifteen, Chen had reached the height of six-foot-seven, quite unusual for a Chinese, and, around the same time, discovered the game of basketball. By this time the Cultural Revolution was moving toward its final stages and the PRC’s premier, Zhou Enlai, envisioned basketball as one of the sports that might enable his country to end its twenty years of comparative isolation and reach out to the world.

Of course, the big breakthrough in this area came when the PRC’s ping-pong team, after playing against its US counterpart in Japan, invited the Americans to China, which dovetailed with behind-the-scenes diplomatic overtures and helped make possible President Nixon’s historic trip to China in February 1972. But although it would take a few more decades before players like Yao Ming became NBA superstars, the Chinese basketball team, on which Chen played for a time, played a significant part in the 1970s and 1980s in building friendly relations between the PRC and the West.

In 1981, Chen moved to Los Angeles to further his education. After obtaining his degree from UCLA, he went into business in California, found success in his field, and raised a family. But his memories of his mistreatment in the China of Mao Zedong have remained, and, as such interviews as this one (and his 2007 autobiography One In A Billion) show, he feels that not only was he exploited as an athlete for the political purposes of a regime he has long detested, but that Beijing has continued to use sports in the same way to the present, most spectacularly in the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Last year, Chen visited the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, and entered the room which features one of its most prominent and written-about exhibits. What he found there upset him, and led to the protest which he made, with several others at the Library today.

When the original staff of the Library was planning the building’s permanent exhibits two decades ago, they decided to devote one of the rooms to a set of life-size bronze statues of nine men and one woman, from around the world, whose leadership qualities had formed the subject of individual chapters in Leaders, one of RN’s most readable and fascinating books. The ten statespersons selected for the Hall of World Leaders were, alphabetically, Konrad Adenauer, Leonid Brezhnev, Winston Churchill, Charles De Gaulle, Nikita Khruschchev, Mao Zedong, Golda Meir, Anwar al-Sadat, and Shigeru Yoshida, and Zhou Enlai. In the exhibit Mao and Zhou are depicted sitting on couches, much in the way that they had talked with Nixon during his trip in 1972; the others are standing. Near the statues is this quote from the President: “They are leaders who have made a difference. Not because they wished it, but because they have willed it.”

When Chen came to the Library, he was angry that Mao, a person he regards as a mass murderer comparable to Hitler and Stalin, was featured among the other leaders, and he wrote about this to Timothy Naftali, the current director of the Nixon Library. Chen’s letter and Naftali’s response can be found here.

For a while, word of Chen’s dismay with Mao’s presence in the Hall was limited to his own website and to a handful of blogs. But yesterday the Los Angeles Times published Mike Anton’s article describing the controvery and Chen’s plan to stage a protest. In it, Chen is quoted as saying: “Mao was the biggest mass murderer in human history. His hands were dipped in the blood of American soldiers who fought in Korea and Vietnam. … How can that image be put alongside world leaders like Winston Churchill and De Gaulle? It’s a perversion of American freedom. You don’t put an anti-American symbol in a U.S. museum.” Naftali wrote to Chen that he personally was less comfortable with having a statue of Mao in the room than was the case with the other leaders, and his view of the issue, as reported in the Times article, is much the same:

“I think having a statue of a person in a museum can imply respect,” he said. “I thought there might very well be confusion among visitors. With Churchill, Meir and Sadat all in the same room, there is an equivalency there and the implication that they’re all alike. They were not all alike. Mao was a mass murderer.

“It seemed to me out of place in a publicly funded museum,” Naftali added. “I don’t think it’s the best way to teach history.”

Naftali’s remarks have met with some puzzlement and criticism from those who worked, full-time or on a volunteer basis, at the Nixon Library during the decade and a half that it was operated by the Richard Nixon Foundation before becoming a part of the National Archives group of presidential libraries a few years ago. In all that time, Foundation assistant director Sandy Quinn told Jessica Terrell of the Orange County Register yesterday, no visitor made a complaint about Mao’s being featured in the Hall. Since Chen’s correspondence with Naftali a notice has been put in the Hall saying that the presence of these ten figures in the room does not constitute an endorsement of all of their policies.

The questions that Chen’s protests raise are not that easy to dismiss. The website of the NBC station in Los Angeles played the controversy for laughs today with an article titled “Pinko, Commie Statues Shock, Offend At Nixon Library.” The piece is credited to Olsen Ebright and Joseph McCarthy (presumably not that one, returned to earth at age 101) and is illustrated with the familiar photo of RN flashing the double V at the entrance to the helicopter on August 9, 1974 – but tinted as pink as, presumably, the late Helen Gahagan Douglas’s underwear.

However, Chen is deeply serious about his complaint, and his years of trauma in the turbulent China of the 1950s and 1960s make his anger at Mao’s presence in the Hall understandable. But I don’t think the founder of modern China should be removed from his couch. Mao is in the Hall because, although he wrested power violently from the Kuomintang regime in a civil war that killed tens of millions; although his misguided ideas of a “Great Leap Forward” and a Cultural Revolution brought about the deaths of millions more; and although his troops bitterly fought United States and United Nations forces for two and a half bloody years in Korea, in his last seven years he sought, with Zhou, to set aside violence and extend the hand of friendship to the United States. President Nixon reached out as well, and, with substantial help from Dr. Henry Kissinger, Winston Lord, Dwight Chapin and Foundation president Ron Walker, and many others, the stage was set for the handshake at the Shanghai tarmac between Nixon and Zhou, and the meeting with Mao, which ended almost a quarter-century of suspicion and hostility, helped prevent the possibility of a third world war between the superpowers, and made possible ties which have been truly beneficial to both countries.

As former Library director, TNN’s John Taylor, points out here, Nixon was a lifelong anti-Communist. He spent more time face-to-face with Chiang Kai-shek than with Mao. But in his years as Vice President, he was ready to have a dialogue with the Soviet Union, in the years after it emerged from Stalin’s shadow, and so met Khruschchev and then, as President, Brezhnev. Both of those men had been part of Stalin’s savage world for decades in their early careers, but when they came to power, they proved able to move beyond that awful legacy.

And so, too, did Mao and Zhou, in the years after 1969, make their efforts to move beyond the chaos, misery and isolation of the Cultural Revolution. That’s why these four men are in the Hall of Leaders – because they met that ultimate test of leadership, to try to make a more peaceful world for coming generations.

George McGovern Speaks At The Nixon Library

August 28, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Democratic Party, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Foundation, Nixon Library, Nixon Library events, Presidential libraries, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Yorba Linda | 5 Comments 

On Wednesday night, a crowd of over 700 gathered in Yorba Linda to see former Senator George McGovern talk about his new book, a short biography of Abraham Lincoln. The event, co-sponsored by the Richard Nixon Library and Museum and the Richard Nixon Foundation (and held in the Library’s replica of the White House’s East Room) would have been remarkable enough for the appearance of President Nixon’s Democratic opponent in the 1972 election – but, in a surprise appearance, the Senator was introduced by none other than 83-year-old Gore Vidal, almost the last major American writer of the “Greatest Generation” still living, who has written about RN on many occasions (including the 1972 play An Evening With Richard Nixon). Both men received standing ovations.

Though Vidal has sometimes expressed a degree of admiration for the thirty-seventh President’s resilience and achievements in the field of foreign affairs, in recent years his remarks about Nixon have been much more negative, and he seems to blame RN for instigating the careers of former Vice President Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom worked in the Nixon Administration and have been the targets of Vidal’s angriest barbs in articles and interviews since 2000. The late Senator Edward Kennedy has also been the object of Vidal’s bile from time to time, unsurprisingly given the writer’s mercurial relationship with the Kennedy clan, and his preference for Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s brand of populist radicalism. But in his introduction in Yorba Linda, Vidal spoke instead of Lincoln, the subject of one of his best-known and most acclaimed novels.

Sen. McGovern then took the podium and discussed his biography. He stressed that Lincoln’s greatest achievement was preserving the Union, and spoke at length about the difficulties the sixteenth President had to overcome – his limited formal education, and his struggle with depression (which McGovern knows from experience, as he movingly describes in Terry, his book about his late daughter’s tragic battle with alcoholism and bipolar illness).

Though Ted Kennedy went unmentioned in the main part of McGovern’s talk, one of the questions asked after it referred to him, and the reply was:

“Ted was a great senator,” McGovern said. “He hardly missed a day [of work] . . . I admired him and, on a personal basis, if any senator suffered a loss like a child or a spouse, he was the first person who called. When our daughter Terry died, he came to see Eleanor and me. He was there at 9 a.m. the next morning with his wife. He was a person who respected tragedy because of his family. He was very thoughtful. I thought a lot of him.”

McGovern also spoke at Chapman University earlier in the day.

President Thomas Jefferson Packs The East Room

August 19, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Nixon Library, Presidents | Leave a Comment 

America’s third President, Thomas Jefferson, presented the third talk in the Nixon Foundation’s Meet The Presidents program, a series on the lives of great American Presidents.

Nearly 600 youngsters and their parents surrounded President Jefferson in the Foundation’s replica of the White House East Room as he presented a fascinating talk on his role in drafting the Declaration of Independence, his purchase of the Louisiana Territory, and his design and founding of the University of Virginia.

The OC Register covered the program and have made video available on their website:

The free Meet The Presidents includes a talk with the President, a student question and answer period, coloring time, Presidential photo-taking, and punch and cookies.

Next in the series is President Richard Nixon, presented by his younger brother Ed on August 25. The final talk will be with President Harry Truman on September 1. Both events take place from 10:30 am till noon.

More Coverage Of The Resignation’s 35th

August 9, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Frost/Nixon, John Dean At The Nixon Library, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Library, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, TV News, U.S. History, Watergate | 2 Comments 

Today marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of President Nixon’s resignation, and since I wrote about coverage of this last night, some more articles and op-eds of note have appeared. Apart from the memorable discussion of RN’s achievements on this morning’s Chris Matthews Show, discussed in Jonathan Movroydis’s post below, I have not seen or read about any mention of the anniversary on TV. 

Right now MSNBC, for example, is finishing yet another hour of programming about the Manson murders, since today is also the fortieth anniversary of the murder of Sharon Tate and four others, while other networks have already started running shows about Woodstock’s 40th.

(It may be that a lot of younger viewers nowadays wonder how the coverage of Charles Manson affected the coverage of Woodstock in August 1969. It didn’t, since no one, apart from the killers themselves and a few who had crossed their paths, had any idea at the time who had committed the murders. It was not until December 1 of that year that arrest warrants were issued in the Tate case, which brought Manson’s evil to light, and less than a week later the disastrous free festival at Altamont, immortalized in the documentary Gimme Shelter, continued the ominous note on which the decade finished.)

But the Nixon Administration did come up in today’s New York Times online roundtable about Woodstock’s 40th.  The participants include such notables as Nixonland author Rick Perlstein, novelist Ishmael Reed, social critic Morris Dickstein, and historian Joan Hoff, author of Nixon Reconsidered.  Perlstein makes no mention of RN in his contribution, but Ms. Hoff discusses at some length why she thinks that ”Woodstock had little or nothing to do with the radical-conservative change in politics” that began during the Nixon years; she thinks that the big political story of the period was the rise of neoconservatism and the role it played in the emergence of Ronald Reagan on the national scene.

At NPR’s website, Daniel Schorr, who will turn 93 at the end of this month, speaks of the resignation and how it changed American perceptions of the presidency. He concludes:

After 35 years, Nixon is enjoying a revival of interest because of Frost/Nixon, first a stage play, then a movie based on Nixon’s 1977 television interviews with David Frost, for which Nixon was paid $600,000 — triple his annual salary as president.

For that, Frost got the closest thing to an apology that Nixon ever uttered for having put America through the wringer.

“I let the American people down,” he said, “and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life.”

He did let the people down. And we are still carrying the burden.

And at Truthdig.com, historian Stanley I. Kutler, author of The Wars Of Watergate, offers some thoughts about the resignation, in a gentler tone than has sometimes been the case when he’s written about the Nixon White House.

Speaking of Kutler naturally brings John W. Dean to mind, since both have frequently criticized what they claim are “revisionist” examinations of the events surrounding Watergate. For the last several months, since his appearance at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, Dean has shown up from time to time in scenic Southern California locales such as Mission Viejo to promote his apparently self-published reissue of his book Blind Ambition, and last night he spoke to an audience at the Hotel Zoso in Palm Springs.

(Yes, Zoso as in the alternate title of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, the one with “Stairway To Heaven.”  For Watergate students familiar to that passage in Blind Ambition in which Dean describes H.R. Haldeman informing him that the President thought he was dressing like a “hippie” because his tie was wider than usual at the White House, this has to produce a chuckle.)

The Desert Sun, Palm Springs’s newspaper, has an account of this event. It’s worth mentioning that the caption to one of the photos that accompanies the Sun’s article refers to the current edition of Blind Ambition as being a “sequel” to the original 1976 edition of the book. The truth is that, apart from a new afterword of about 100 pages, it is the same book as that published over 30 years ago.  The real sequel to Blind Ambition was Dean’s 1982 book Lost Honor, which is mostly forgotten except for the chapter in which Dean argues at length that Gen. Alexander Haig was Deep Throat, a theory he later abandoned.

Dinner of the Century Revisited

July 19, 2009 by David Emig | Filed Under Nixon Library, Nixon Library events, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, Yorba Linda | 3 Comments 

Author’s Note:  Nineteen years ago tonight marks the anniversary of the dinner honoring the Library’s dedication.  The following article appeared in the Checkers newsletter in the August 1990 issue.

As a bit of background, Checkers was a newsletter started by Chris Crain, a prolific collector of Richard Nixon political memorabilia.  Checkers was published four times a year between 1975 to 1994.

I was Assistant Editor of the newsletter from 1986 to 1991.  In those days, we complied the newsletter should I say, manually.  There was a deadline to submit articles.  The illustrations were photocopied and placed on the page.  Chris would then type around the illustrations.  What we could have done with modern technology of desktop publishing…

I will always be grateful to Chris Crain for giving me my first opportunity to write about Richard Nixon.

So here are my thoughts after the dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel.  I would be most interested to hear from anyone else who was there that night.

There are no second tables here; only first tables   You are all our friends—RN

The evening festivities took place in Los Angeles with a ‘celebration gala’ at the Century Plaza Hotel.  The black tie dinner honoring President and Mrs. Nixon and their family followed the morning’s dedication of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda.

When our party arrived at the hotel, our cab was greeted by protesters.  We weren’t sure exactly what they were protesting, but the following day’s newspaper said it appeared to be about 30 different causes.

The formal reception began at 7:00pm in California Lounge.  Inside was a virtual treasure trove for autograph seekers.  Several former Nixon administration officials and other celebrities were making the rounds outside the banquet room.  Notables such as Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, George Romney, H.R. Haldeman, William Simon, Richard Allen, Pat Buchanan, Ken Khachigian and Herb Klein.  Celebrities included Foster Brooks, George Allen, Tom Landry and Cesar Romero.  There were some people that fit both categories, like Benjamin Stein.  Stein, a former speechwriter for the Nixon administration, presently appears on “The Wonder Years,” a top-rated television series.

About 8:00pm, people began entering the Los Angeles Ballroom for dinner.  A program greeted each place at the table.  Featured in each program was a 5” x 7” color photograph of the entire Nixon family.  The photograph had been taken on the occasion of the Nixons’ 50^th Wedding Anniversary at their home in Saddle River, New Jersey.  This photograph made the program a very special one indeed.

Seated at our table were the Crains, Eldon Almquist, Bob Fuhr, Harry Jeffery, Jim Carskadon, Jack and Darlene Cook and myself.  Seated at the other NPIC table, on the other side of the ballroom, were Les and Susan Spreen, Phil and Jean Baldwin, Lu Paletta, Lloyd and Mabel Johnson and Donna and Bill Hickman.

After a welcome by Bruce Herschenson, the Master of Ceremonies, and the invocation by Billy Graham, the appetizer, salad and entrée were served.  According to the wishes of Mrs. Nixon, the dinner featured a low sodium meal.  While dinner was being served, the All-American Boys Chorus sang to the guests.  It was at this point that the most personally event almost occurred.

The area where the Boys Chorus was singing was directly across from the head table.  Between dinner and dessert, former President Nixon appeared on the stage, briefly leading the chorus in song.  It quickly became apparent that RN might attempt to greet each table.  Maybe I would get to meet him.

Many thoughts crossed my mind.  What would I say?  Perhaps tell him what his legacy meant to younger Americans like myself.  Maybe just a “how about those Mets?”  There probably wouldn’t be enough time.  I would have a few moments at the very most.

My inner excitement grew as the former President approached.  A crowd of people, with RN in the middle, moved toward our table.  It was a different feeling seeing the former President in this setting.  Slightly larger than life, but also one of us.  A bodyguard walked ahead, clearing the way.  People were getting up and greeting RN.  This, unfortunately, made passage a little difficult.  I had no desire to push my way into the crowd.  RN looked taller than I thought he would be.  As he passed by our table he shook Chris’ hand.  He then reached over and shook Candy Crain’s hand.  By the time I extended my hand the group had moved on.  I guess that’s what one would call a near brush with history.

After dessert the program continued.  Norman Vincent Peale recounted his visit to Vietnam, as well as personal memories of the Nixon family.  Bob Hope provided some comic entertainment.  Hope quipped that the library dedication was an opportunity to see Mount Rushmore live.  He also noticed that Yorba Linda was the only place in which Nixon T-shirts were outselling the Simpsons.  Hope’s remarks were followed by two toasts to the Nixons.  Maurice Stans gave a toast to Pat Nixon and Ambassador Walter Annenberg gave a toast to President Nixon.  President Nixon was then introduced by William Simon.

At the beginning of his remarks, President Nixon recognized all of the people who had spoken on his behalf.  He remembered that he probably knew Les Brown the longest.  Brown and his band had played at Duke Law School while RN attended there in the 1930s.  RN recalled Mrs. Billy Graham’s show of support during the time of his brush with death in a Long Beach hospital in 1975.  He thanked Norman Vincent Peale for the support given his family over the years.  He recognized Bob Hope’s contribution to the USO and his frequent visits to American servicemen overseas.  In total, RN expressed his deep appreciation for friends who stuck by in the darkest of times.  While RNs evening remarks carried the theme of his dedication speech, the tone was much more personal.  In a highlight to the evening, Mrs. Nixon said a few words after the program.

Finally, it was over.  It had been a most memorable day.  All of the planning and anticipation were reality.  It truly was the event of a lifetime!

On Documents & Reassessment

July 7, 2009 by David Emig | Filed Under Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Library, Nixon in the News, Presidential libraries, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Vietnam | 2 Comments 

Whenever new documents (or in the case of RN – tapes and documents are released), it is an opportunity to reassess a subject.  Or at the very least, provide some nuance into the subject.  Probably the best opportunity we have for this continuing process of discovering something new is in the area of presidential history – as these new documents are released on specific timetables.  For many Nixon historians like myself, the release of these documents is much like Christmas morning.

When reading the sample documents, one cannot help to be struck by the conflict mentality of the Nixon White House.  It was leadership by political warfare; the art of beating the opposition party on the political battlefield of public opinion.  Many documents authored by Charles Colson, and especially a memorandum to the President by Daniel Patrick Moynihan (with RN marginalia) {See Memo from Moynihan to the President: November 13, 1971} ; suggest that the Nixon administration thought they weren’t only fighting a political war, but a cultural war against liberals.  This is several years before Bill O’Reilly made the ‘culture war’ into media rhetoric.

While RN was moderate politically, these documents underscore that perhaps that RN might have been more conservative privately.  RN might have been less of a ‘fellow traveler’ of the right, as Pat Buchanan has accused RN of being; and more of a ‘fellow traveler’ of the center.

More of the re-assessment of history might come in the area of RNs role in the Vietnam War.  It seems that RNs public rhetoric of confidence, didn’t match what was said in the private halls of the White House.  Like Lyndon Johnson; RN understood the war was a no-win situation.  RNs main objective was to preserve American prestige and respect around the world intact, while withdrawing from Vietnam.  This would be achieved by using different tactics; by bombing the enemy to the peace tables.

Much of this we already know.  But what the latest release of the tapes show, is the length in which RN and Kissinger would go to achieve their main objective.  Protecting American prestige, and getting out of the conflict.  More and more, it is coming out – that the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973 benefited the North Vietnamese most of all.  This is proven by the clear fact that North Vietnamese troops were still allowed in South Vietnam (as both forces froze where they were), after the ceasefire.  Prime Minister Thieu understood it – and became the main obstacle in signing the agreement in Paris.  This became the main subject of RN and Kissinger’s frustration.  It seems that all of this places “peace with honor” into question.

As more and more documents are released, the historical balance will produce a Richard Nixon who was – not the one who the critics or his fanatics want him to be.

Luke Nichter On Dean’s Nixon Library Appearance

June 24, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under John Dean At The Nixon Library, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Library, Nixon in the News, U.S. History, Watergate, Yorba Linda | 1 Comment 

At www.nixontapes.org, Luke Nichter of Tarleton State University (who was extensively quoted in the AP article Frank Gannon discusses below) takes a look at John Dean’s appearance at the Nixon Presidential Library last week. (This post also appears at History News Network, where it is accompanied by a comment by Maarja Krusten, whose thoughtful remarks have so often appeared at TNN.)

When Seventies Phenomena Collide

June 17, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, John Dean At The Nixon Library, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Foundation, Nixon Library, Nixon Library events, Nixon in the News, Presidential libraries, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate, Yorba Linda | 1 Comment 

Tonight, former Nixon White House counsel Luke W. – I mean, John W. Dean III appeared at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda. Speaking before an audience of close to 300, according to Melody Chiu of the Orange County Register, he contended that the Richard Nixon Foundation, by criticizing his appearance, “is reviving the dark side of Richard Nixon,” and asserted that the controversy surrounding his remarks was “petty.”

Nixon Library director Timothy Naftali called the appearance “an important milestone,” adding: “All we care about is that [our speakers]are serious and that our community will learn from them. We want to create a forum for serious discussion, debate and education.”

Earlier in the day, Naftali told Rebecca Cathcart of the New York Times’s “The Caucus” blog that Dean’s appearance formed part of an “initiative” to “provide a nonpartisan presentation of the facts of Watergate,” adding that another element of this would be the renovated Watergate exhibit, to be unveiled at the museum in August.

John Dean At Yorba Linda, or Who’s Deep Throat Now?

June 16, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, John Dean At The Nixon Library, National Archives, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon Foundation, Nixon Library, Nixon Library events, Nixon in the News, Orange County, Presidential libraries, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate, Yorba Linda | 1 Comment 

Tomorrow, June 17, is the thirty-seventh anniversary of the Watergate break-in. At the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, it will be marked by a lecture and book-signing by John W. Dean III, counsel to the President from 1970 until 1973, convicted felon (for obstruction of justice, to which he pled guilty on November 30 of the latter year), and one of the central figures in the Watergate scandal.

Several months ago, when discussing a post Dean made on the site The Daily Beast in which he defended historian Stanley I. Kutler from criticism of the latter’s transcriptions of the Nixon tapes, I noted that in it he said he planned to reissue his first book Blind Ambition, his own account of Watergate, with new material. That book will be republished tomorrow, with a new afterword which, according to a press release promoting the reissue, “truly closes the case on Watergate.”

It would seem a sure bet that one or another of our major conglomerate publishing imprints would be keen to acquire Blind Ambition, given such a promise, but the book is not being reprinted by any of them – not even Simon & Schuster, which originally published it. Instead, the book, according to Al Kamen in the Washington Post, is being “privately published” by Polimedia, the author’s PR firm. The event at the Nixon Library is described as the reissue’s “launch” at the firm’s site.

Dean’s appearance in Yorba Linda is not being greeted with universal hosannas, as Michael Isikoff of Newsweek makes clear in this article. Robert Odle, who worked in the communications office of the Nixon White House (and was later administration director of the Committee to Re-Elect The President) says in it that inviting Dean to the Library is “like having Monica Lewinsky speak at the Clinton library on the anniversary of President Clinton’s impeachment.” (As it happens, Isikoff is the journalist who broke the Lewinsky story.)

And at the Washington Times, Susan Naulty, who was the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace’s archivist from the institution’s dedication in 1990 until 2003, explains why she believes Dean’s appearance is not appropriate. She says, in part:

[T]hanks to Mr. Nixon’s voluminous archives, scholars with a better understanding of the man and his career-long struggle to advance freedom over tyranny on the one hand, and with considerably more data regarding the congressional investigations directed against him on the other, may well begin to wonder who was the real Machiavelli in Watergate – the president or his accusers. If the latter, the lessons of that crisis have enormous relevance for us today – and for freedom-loving people everywhere and at all times.

One drawback of Ms. Naulty’s article is that it does not precisely explain how Dean will come to be in Yorba Linda tomorrow. He was invited to speak by the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, which is part of the federal National Archives and Records Administration, and which now operates the museum facility in Yorba Linda and will be transferring the Nixon presidential documents to the library facility next year from Maryland. The Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace Foundation (sponsor of TNN), which was in charge of the Library when it was a private institution, not part of the NARA presidential libraries system, from 1990 until 2007, was not consulted about Dean’s appearance and, as Isikoff points out, has expressed its disapproval of the invitation.

Ms. Naulty’s article has attracted several comments at the Times’s site. A rather interesting one, from “anonymous222,” refers to Dean’s involvement in the quest for the true identity of “Deep Throat,” the Watergate informant.

In 1975, Dean suggested DT was Earl Silbert, who was the prosecutor of the Watergate defendants in the early stages of the scandal. Then, in his 1982 book Lost Honor, Dean devoted a number of pages to arguing, rather unconvincingly, that Gen. Alexander Haig was DT.

Twenty years later, Dean wrote an e-book published by Salon.com, Unmasking Deep Throat. Several articles, before the book was published, claimed that Dean would identify Washington lawyer Jonathan Rose as DT, which reportedly prompted Rose to inform Salon that he would sue for defamation in such an event. But when the book finally came off the cyberpress (or whatever one would call it), Dean instead suggested DT was a composite of more than one of Bob Woodward’s sources. (After Mark Felt “confessed” to being DT in 2005, Dean told Keith Olbermann of MSNBC he still held to the composite theory.)

And then there are the still-murky events of 2003. In that year, a group of student journalists at the University of Illinois came to the much-publicized conclusion that Fred Fielding, White House counsel for two presidents (and Dean’s deputy in the Nixon years), was DT. At the time it was reported that Dean had gone to the trouble of personally contacting some of the students to explain to them why Fielding could not be DT.

But some questions remain. As Olbermann observed in 2005, according to All The President’s Men, DT talked to Woodward about the famous 18 1/2 minute gap in the tapes before it became public knowledge. Felt, who had left the FBI, would have been unlikely to know about the gap. Fielding, who was still White House deputy counsel at the time, would have known. (Rather intriguingly, Fielding’s Wikipedia entry incorrectly states that his work in the Nixon Administration ended in 1972.)

So, were I in Yorba Linda tomorrow, one question I’d like to pose to Dean would be: Why did you try to steer the Illini journalists-to-be from the conclusion Fielding was Deep Throat? There are some other questions that come to mind, and tomorrow I hope to discuss them here.

Brennan: Living History

May 9, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Military, Nixon Foundation, Nixon Library, Nixon family, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Retired Marine Colonel Jack Brennan — a former military assistant to President Nixon — goes on the record and makes an addendum to his earlier remarks about the history of the presidential helicopter program:

Colonel Brennan also discussed the history of how the Nixon Library re-acquired 37’s birthplace:

Obama’s First 100 Days At The Nixon Library

May 8, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Barack Obama, Nixon Library, Nixon Library events | Leave a Comment 

From left to right: KRLA host Kevin James, pictured with talk show hosts Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager, and Hugh Hewitt.

Last Monday the Nixon Library hosted KRLA 870 and Salem Communications syndicated radio talk show hosts Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager, and Hugh Hewitt. The three evaluated and graded President Barack Obama’s performance during his first 100 days at the helm. MC’ing the event was local KRLA host Kevin James.

Mike Gallagher gives President Obama an “F” for his first 100 days.

“I give him a resounding F,” said Gallagher of the President. “He is a radical tax and spender.”  On foreign policy, Gallagher also pointed to Obama’s stance on interrogation as a snapshot of how Obama views the world and America’s enemies. Gallagher concluded, “he has absolutely made us less safe.”

Dennis Prager critized President Obama for his cordiality with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Dennis Prager was a bit more generous giving the President a “C.” But Prager’s most staunch criticism was in foreign affairs and his embrace of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez at last month’s Latin American conference. “When the President grabs Hugo Chavez like a long lost buddy, it hurts me because of the people of Venezuela,” “Obama doesn’t owe an apology to the American people, but the Venezuelan people.”

Prager also believes Obama has made us less safe through his and the left’s willingness to cede American superiority to the United Nations.  “The U.N. is a moral cess pool.” Prager said.  “The world is a safer place solely because of the United States.” “I don’t care if the world like us,” “it is better to be feared than loved.”

Prager also believed that the White House is promoting fear and is pessimistic about what he thinks will be permanent change to the character of the American economy. “We didn’t undo anything of FDR’s,” Prager said.

Hugh Hewitt gave the President a “C”, with A’s for Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, National Security adviser Jim Jones, and for having a wonderful family. But an “F” for everything else.

Hewitt gave President Obama an “A” for Afghanistan, an “A” for keeping General David Petraeus, an “A” for making General James Jones National Security Adviser, an “A” for having a wonderful family, and an “F” for everything else. Hewitt’s final grade: a C. The former Nixon Library director was also concerned about the direction of foreign policy, “Nixon would say foreign policy matters most,” stressing the safety of Israel and stability of Pakistan. But Hewitt also acknowledged that Obama “isn’t fully formed” arguing that  he will inevitably mature into his role as Commander-in-Chief by spending a lot more time with the “self-sacrificing” troops of the U.S. military.

Hewitt was more optimistic about the resilience of the American economy contradicting Prager’s claims by listing off many of the now defunked alphabet soup programs of the New Deal era. He also contended that time and again the American economy has “stepped up” to overshadow the existence of big government.

RN’s grandson, Christopher Nixon Cox, also discussed Obama’s first 100 days and what his grandfather would do differently in terms of foreign policy.

In the audience was the President’s brother, Ed Nixon, and the President’s grandson Christopher Nixon Cox. Cox also spoke about Obama’s first 100 days in a speech on Tuesday, but not before speaking to TNN about how his grandfather would help diffuse tension in this multi-polar, multi-nuclear and very dangerous world:

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