Nixon, the memo reveals, had expressed special concern about an office in which he saw two pictures of John F. Kennedy. Butterfield discovered the office belonged to Edna Rosenberg, a low-level civil servant who had been on the White House staff for 41 years, longer than any other staffer. Butterfield said he "checked her file very carefully" and found the CIA, FBI and Secret Service all considered her a loyal American.
One of the Kennedy portraits, it turned out, bore a personal inscription. Still, she was made to take it down.
"On January 14th," Butterfield reported to Nixon, "the project was completed and all 35 offices displayed only your photograph."
The documents are part of about 90,000 pages of materials from Nixon's presidential years released Monday by the Nixon Library, along with 198 hours of Nixon White House tapes.
The tapes reflect Nixon conversations between November and December 1972 and include discussions of the 1972 elections and the bombing of North Vietnam. The tapes can be heard online at www.nixonlibrary.gov "> www.nixonlibrary.gov .
The library opened in 1990 as a privately run facility in the hands of Nixon loyalists, containing only his pre- and post-presidential papers and featuring a Watergate exhibit, widely ridiculed by scholars, that portrayed the scandal as a "coup" hatched by Nixon's enemies. The exhibit has since been dismantled.
The library entered the National Archives system last year, with its first federal director, Timothy Naftali, promising historical accuracy and openness. Although the library released a batch of Nixon's personal and presidential documents last year, Monday marked the library's largest release of materials so far.
"The strength of our democracy is that these kinds of documents get preserved, and they are released, whether or not they shed good light on the government," Naftali said. "In many countries in the world, these documents would have been destroyed. We're pleased we can make these documents available and others can judge."
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christopher.goffard@latimes.com
