The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda has long been the most kicked-around of presidential libraries, and nothing invited more ridicule than the dim, narrow room purporting to describe the scandal that drove its namesake from office.
Venturing into that room, visitors learned that Watergate, which provoked a constitutional crisis and became an enduring byword for abuses of executive power, was really a "coup" engineered by Nixon enemies. The exhibit accused Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein -- without evidence -- of "offering bribes" to further their famous coverage.
Most conspicuous was a heavily edited, innocent-seeming version of the "smoking gun" tape of June 23, 1972, the resignation-clinching piece of evidence in which Nixon and his top aide are heard conspiring to thwart the FBI probe of Watergate.
This was history as Nixon wanted it remembered, a monument to his decades-long campaign to refurbish his name. Nixon himself approved the exhibit before the library's 1990 opening.
"Everybody who visited it, who knew the first thing about history, thought it was a joke," one Nixon scholar, David Greenberg, said of the Watergate gallery. "You didn't know whether to laugh or cry."
In late March, however, workers roped off the Watergate gallery and methodically began to destroy it. Armed with hammers, a crowbar, a screw gun and a Sawzall, they yanked big display cabinets out of the floor, sliced through tough fiberboard panels, detached more than 100 fluorescent lighting tubes and removed the long strips of plexiglass that had sandwiched text transparencies.
The exhibit, which stood for 17 years, had been designed to last, and the demolition took two weeks. "It was as permanent as you can build it," said museum Curator Olivia Anastasiadis. Workers piled debris onto a cart and rolled it out back, where it filled two gigantic Dumpsters.
"I can't run a shrine," says the man who ordered the demolition, Timothy Naftali, 45. Named last year as the library's first federal director, the Harvard-trained historian is guiding the library's shift from a privately run facility -- the only modern presidential library not part of the federal system -- to an institution that bears the National Archives' imprimatur.
In effect, that means transforming the black sheep of presidential libraries into an institution that will eventually be entrusted with the vast trove of Nixon's White House material that the government seized in the 1970s, fearing its destruction.
