Nixon Library Can't Be Trusted Not to Play With His Words
It's rare for a scholarly conference to make the newspapers. It's rarer for a conference to make the papers when it never takes place. But that's what happened recently when the Richard M. Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda canceled a symposium on Nixon and the Vietnam War that it had planned to sponsor with Whittier College.
The cancellation provoked an uproar. The library claims that tickets weren't selling well enough, but most observers see political motives at work -- more of Nixon's old concern with shaping his reputation.
For years the Nixon Library has seemed more intent on waging a campaign to improve the late president's image than on portraying him accurately. When the library opened in 1990, its then-director, Hugh Hewitt, announced it would bar researchers deemed not "responsible." "I don't think we'd ever open the doors to Bob Woodward," he said by way of example. (The policy was retracted.) Worse, the library was caught editing the "smoking gun" tape -- the White House recording of June 23, 1972, that implicated Nixon in the Watergate cover-up -- to distort its meaning in an exhibit.
Today, the museum's events typically include book-promoting speeches from the likes of Newt Gingrich and Ari Fleischer. The rare invitation to a serious historian will pair him or her with a far-out Nixon defender, like conspiracy theorist Len Colodny, one of the authors of "Silent Coup," which denies the basic facts of Watergate, maintaining it was a crisis imposed on Nixon, not a crisis Nixon imposed on the country.
Thus, for the library to host a conference on Nixon and the Vietnam War that featured an array of esteemed scholars, including critics of Nixon's presidency, seemed to signal a willingness to start dealing honestly with Nixon's record, to "let the chips fall where they may," in the words of the current library director and longtime Nixon aide, John H. Taylor.
It was a hopeful sign in light of another development: Last year, under pressure from the Nixon family, Congress and President Bush cleared the way for the Nixon Library to become part of the official presidential library system.
Some history is in order. In 1955, Congress formalized an arrangement that Franklin D. Roosevelt made for his library in 1939 -- presidential libraries would be built with private funds, but the National Archives would administer their holdings of presidential documents.
