A stylishly dressed, excitable man possessed of rapid speech and animated hands, Naftali is standing with a cup of coffee in what the wreckers left of the Watergate exhibit: an empty room, the walls big and blank and coated with primer. For Naftali, a Cold War scholar and expert in presidential recordings, it represents a cleared canvas.
Several months ago, Naftali approached the Nixon Foundation's director, John Taylor, a former Nixon aide who helped write the zealously pro-Nixon text of the original Watergate exhibit, and announced his intention of tearing the exhibit down.
"I said, 'In order to start the process of reforming...' " Naftali says, then chooses a more diplomatic word: " '\o7Changing\f7 the museum, I need to begin with Watergate.' "
Naftali, who gave up his job at the University of Virginia to take this post, presents himself as neither a hater of the 37th president nor an apologist for him. Although he freely dispenses political opinions -- in his blog, he has inveighed against warrantless spying and nominated President Bush as "one of the worst presidents of the last century" -- he is tactfully tight-lipped about Nixon.
He will happily tick off Nixonian achievements -- in foreign policy, the environment, civil rights -- that he wants visitors to learn about at the library. Yet asked for a general assessment of Nixon, the kind scholars love to give, he smiles and says, "Who?"
Naftali, and no longer the fierce Nixon loyalists, will control the library's archives and exhibits. But the first major task he has set himself is not an easy one.
How do you tell a story as ugly as Watergate in a building that bears Nixon's name? How do you chronicle a president's most shameful episode just a few yards from the clapboard farmhouse where he was born and the black marble gravestone he lies beneath? What do you put in, and what do you leave out, in a city where his birthday is a holiday?
"You're going to have the story of dirty tricks -- you have to," Naftali says. The challenge: to hew to the historical record and yet somehow "be respectful of parts of a community that may view it in a different way."
First impressions
When the $21-million library opened with private funds in July 1990, amid trumpets and a crowd of 50,000 that included Nixon and three other presidents, one biographer called the occasion "a symbolic redemption" for the president who had resigned in disgrace in 1974.
