Richard Nixon Library And Birthplace

The Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace will hold its annual Labor Day Family Funfest today and Monday at 18001 Yorba Linda Boulevard in Yorba Linda. The event is free for those who pay the regular park admission. Information: (714) 993-5075.

The statues depict two old men relaxing in easy chairs. As others mill about the drawing room, the men engage in conversation, one gesturing at the other to underscore a point. For nearly 20 years the likenesses of China's Communist leaders Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai have sat perfectly still inside the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda. Now, they are creating a stir. They are among 10 statues of former heads of state on display in the library's World Leaders exhibit.

The Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace will host special celebrations today for Presidents Day. The first 100 visitors to the library will get free apple pie. Each visitor will also receive official 8-by-10-inch portraits of presidents Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Ford. The event will also feature a free family concert of patriotic music by the South Coast Brass Band. The library also has an exhibit featuring 115 Barbie dolls from various private collections, including the Mattel archives.

As part of a release of archival tapes and documents Monday, the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum revealed fresh records that reflect the 37th president's heated campaign to investigate, intimidate and smear political rivals and opponents of the Vietnam War. Among the documents is a handwritten note from Nixon's top aide, H.R. Haldeman, on June 23, 1971, which may shed light on the origins of Nixon's infamous "enemies list."

If you thought Watergate was a national embarrassment, wait till you see the kitschy doodads up for sale at the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace gift shop. What could be more dignified than a $2.50 flying disc emblazoned with the "Museum Presidential Eagle," a bird that bears an uncanny resemblance to the one on the back of a dollar bill? The glow-in-the-dark flag shorts, priced to move at a patriotic $12.95, perhaps? Maybe.

Even though he was at a presidential library Thursday, Jesse "The Body" Ventura said he has absolutely no intentions of running for president. "I have no desire to go to Washington," said the former bad-boy professional wrestler who stunned the nation in November when he was elected governor of Minnesota. "I've been inside the Beltway. I wrestled there. I don't like it." Ventura talked to an overflow crowd of 600 at the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace Thursday.

Shortly before noon today, 25 years after he stood on the steps of the nation's capital and swore to uphold the Constitution, former President Richard Milhous Nixon will stand in the shadow of his boyhood home and celebrate the part of his past that was glorious.

Thirty years after winning a bitter gubernatorial race against Richard M. Nixon, former California Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown on Saturday walked into the birthplace of his long-ago opponent and declared that the victory was "the greatest thrill I have ever had." "I can remember when the returns came in, grabbing them and shaking my hand . . .

Officials of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace Foundation in Yorba Linda, Calif., have halted preparations for construction of a $6-million building because of a controversy over anti-Semitic writings of its long-deceased namesake, Nixon benefactor Elmer H. Bobst.

In the official narrative of the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace, Carl Bernstein has long been one of the arch-villains, a reporter whose name -- along with that of former Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward -- elicited special loathing.

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.

As the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace readies itself for a shift into federal hands, the National Archives announced Monday that it had selected a Cold War historian and expert on presidential recordings as the library's first federal director.

The 2007 federal budget that was sent to Congress this week includes $10.6 million for the privately funded Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda to begin its transformation into a presidential library run by the National Archives. If approved by Congress, $6.9 million will go for a new library wing and $3.7 million for National Archives staff to oversee the processing and display of 46 million pages of documents from Nixon's presidency.

In an effort to gain legitimacy as an official presidential library, the privately run Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace has agreed to present exhibits that are "more strictly factual" and turn over control of more of Nixon's papers and tapes to the National Archives. Library officials have also promised to reschedule a controversial April symposium on the former president and the Vietnam War that they said they canceled because of low attendance.

The transfer of Richard Nixon's presidential papers and tapes to his library in Yorba Linda could be delayed because the federal budget includes no money to move or house them. Officials at the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace had hoped to begin receiving the material, along with federal staff members to oversee it, later this year. A $3-million request by the National Archives and Records Administration, however, wasn't included in President Bush's 2006 budget request to Congress this month.

For about 16 hours, behind closed doors in a downtown Miami hotel, they argued, haggled and negotiated. There were lawyers, trustees and two daughters of an American president once so alienated from each other they wouldn't speak. At one point, Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower, the feuding children of the late Richard Nixon, broke off from the group of more than a dozen others and went off by themselves.

In the spring of 1930, a New York writer criticized Yankee star Babe Ruth for holding out for an $80,000 salary while many of Ruth's fans were standing in bread lines. After all, the writer said, President Herbert Hoover made only $75,000. "Yeah," Ruth replied, "but I had a better year than he did." Another time, Ruth declined to be photographed with Hoover, then a Presidential candidate. After all, Ruth said, the game was about to start.

The Nixon Library could finally become, well, a library. Nearly 30 years after Congress barred Richard M. Nixon from keeping his official papers -- and infamous tapes -- when he quit the presidency, a new legislative compromise could set the stage for moving the historic collection from the National Archives in Maryland to the privately run Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda.