Yet from the start, the library had trouble being taken seriously. Its first director, Hugh Hewitt, announced that researchers deemed unfriendly would be banned from the archives, singling out the Washington Post's Bob Woodward as a candidate for exclusion. Scholars cried foul; Hewitt revoked the plan.
What's more, the library possessed only Nixon's pre- and post-presidential papers. In 1974, Congress mandated that his White House materials be kept in the Washington area, amid fears that Watergate-related documents would be destroyed.
For years, the library enjoyed a reputation less as a sanctuary for scholars than as a roadside attraction, a place Nixon scholar Stanley Kutler derided as "another Southern California theme park," adding: "Its level of reality is only slightly better than Disneyland."
When scholar Greenberg visited the Yorba Linda library to research his book "Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image," he found the staff in the reading room professional and helpful. But when he ventured into the exhibits depicting Nixon's career, he found "an incredibly distorted, biased, pro-Nixon view of his presidency that distorted facts about Watergate."
Described by some scholars as the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War, the scandal got its name from the break-in of Democratic national headquarters at Washington's Watergate building in June 1972. Though the White House downplayed it as "a third-rate burglary," it proved part of a pattern -- one established early in Nixon's presidency -- to use government agencies and independent groups to spy on and harass perceived enemies.
As the drama unfolded, a Watergate grand jury named Nixon as an "unindicted co-conspirator." Nixon's political support collapsed after a tape emerged in which he ordered his top aide, H.R. Haldeman, to have the CIA stop the FBI's probe of Watergate on the pretext of national security. Facing impeachment, he resigned.
Nixon would describe the scandal as "politics pure and simple" -- a campaign by Democrats and other enemies to reverse the will of voters. It was a perspective the museum vigorously advanced, instructing visitors, among other things, that a "mechanical malfunction" explained the notorious 18 1/2 -minute gap of one Nixon conversation, though a team of experts appointed by a federal judge ruled out that explanation.
