It can be a curse, the neighbors discovered, to move onto the well-heeled, palm-festooned San Clemente lane next to Richard Nixon's former home.
Christopher Arndt and Maureen Doyle despised what local historians describe as the former Western White House's security wall, which bisects their backyard. The couple whittled a door into the red-tile-capped barrier to reach the rest of their property.
Their next-door neighbor, Richard Osman, loathed the wall too. He told a contractor to rip out the 8-foot-high partition that cut across his yard.
And a neighboring gated community, which begins near where the wall -- or what's left of it -- ends, got riled after Arndt, Doyle and Osman punched their way through the barrier.
While the spat deepened and became mired in lawsuits, the San Clemente Historical Society entered the fray and asked the City Council to label the remaining portions of the once-1,500-foot wall a historic structure.
It's hard to assign blame to one person in this bitter and somewhat bizarre dispute, in which accusations of suburban subterfuge have riven a bluff-top neighborhood where homes sell for $2 million. But like many things in Orange County's southernmost city, its roots can be traced to its most famous resident: Richard Milhous Nixon.
Nixon's presence in San Clemente still lingers over this 18-square-mile coastal city. There are small reminders: The road adjacent to Interstate 5 is called Avenida del Presidente. And the former Western White House is a centerpiece on tourism websites despite having been converted to a private residence tucked behind two gated communities and lush bougainvillea.
Decades after the president left town, his legacy is still strong enough to divide San Clemente's upper crust, whose fight over the wall has spilled into courtrooms and City Council chambers.
"Without the Nixon connection, there would be nothing to fight about," observed Councilman Steven Knoblock.
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Asked to scour the Southern California coast for a presidential hideaway, a 19-year-old Nixon campaign aide stumbled upon the home in San Clemente, the "Spanish village by the sea." The city's best-known inhabitant in the mid-1960s, according to Time magazine, was a red-headed patrolman known as "Red Rider" for his prolific ticket-writing.
