Still no news on the new Watergate exhibit at the Nixon library? The background on the National Archives-prepared exhibit, opposed by the Nixon foundation and his White House aides, is here. Oddly, the link to the background has been removed from the library's Wikipedia page. Read my thoughts on the controversy here and here and the exhibit's big news here: The dramatic charge by Dwight Chapin (who was jailed for perjury) that Richard Nixon was present when chief of staff Bob Haldeman ordered the creation of a dirty tricks operation for the 1972 reelection campaign.
Friday, October 1, 2010
469 Months Of Watergate Is Enough
Still no news on the new Watergate exhibit at the Nixon library? The background on the National Archives-prepared exhibit, opposed by the Nixon foundation and his White House aides, is here. Oddly, the link to the background has been removed from the library's Wikipedia page. Read my thoughts on the controversy here and here and the exhibit's big news here: The dramatic charge by Dwight Chapin (who was jailed for perjury) that Richard Nixon was present when chief of staff Bob Haldeman ordered the creation of a dirty tricks operation for the 1972 reelection campaign.
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Ah, yes, review panels. Much depends on who is on them and how the Powers That Be react. And what they know about the cultural and institutional issues, not just the content of exhibits. We’ll see what happens. I’m strongly on Tim Naftali’s side. Part of that is becauses I do not want to see negative tactics (such as saying Naftali should head an Alger Hiss library) rewarded. That only encourages their continuance. Of course, I also have a thing about intimidation ;-) And I know all about Watergate, in my heyday, I was considered a NARA expert on it.
I read with interest what Ken Khachigian said about oxygen, then and now. I’ve used the term very differently myself, in telling the people at the Nixon foundation’s blog why I wouldn’t comment there any longer. (I said the blog lacked oxygen. I also disliked the fact that Frank Gannon, whom, like Khachigian, I once met, never responded to comments except by VIP type posters. The whole blog gave off an overly insular vibe after you left.) I remember reading the article in TIME back in 2002 and being somewhat confused. You and I already had exchanged our letters in CHE and you weren’t on the top of my list of people to support or trust. (Now I’m more comfortable discussing NARA/Nixon issues with you than with many other people). Yet there you were in the TIME article, coming across as one of the most reasonable people, if the goal was eventually to get a federal library in California. And a target of a type of criticism I found difficult to understand.
I had to laugh at the Cox lawyer’s comment that Taylor’s lawsuit “tarnished forever the image of a close, wholesome relationship and replaced it with a story of feuding and recrimination." And I found preposterous Khachigian’s comment about you that “He's done what all the Nixon haters couldn't do--drive a wedge in the family."
Hello! The whole idea of records in a library is that they show what happened and why, not that they serve to create or preserve or tear down an image. Want to show a library “gets it?” Don’t play the image card, for heaven’s sake. And enough with the Nixon- haters card, that’s been played so often where it didn’t apply, it has no more meaning. And aren’t Republicans supposed to be all about manning up and accepting personal responsibility? I once had a sister with whom I was very, very close until she died. That doesn’t mean we always looked at things the same way. Heck, she used to grumble, “why don’t they leave Nixon alone” when I talked to her about our efforts at NARA to open Nixon’s records. I could deal with that. So do most siblings. Disagreements don’t have to weaken you. And when they occur, their fundamental reasons usually are organic, not stirred up by third parties. Nope, the arguments cited in TIME against you not only weren't persuasive, they created unnecessary baggage for the Foundation.
You know, John, I keep reading and re-reading that 2002 article from TIME to which you linked in the Khachigian piece. And I keep getting more and more depressed and more and more concerned about NARA. What were those Nixon family lawyers, with their focus on wholesome images and Nixon haters, thinking?
I know lawyers are paid to win short-term battles, not to act strategically to place people in positions where they can act effectively long term. But the quoted words about you in TIME in 2002 dismay me. (Huh. My framed, autographed-to-Maarja photo of Bob Haldeman just fell off the wall. A sign that he too might be dismayed, if he were alive?) If they said that about you 8 years ago, what in the world do they think of those of us who are or were paid to act as honest brokers in dealing with Nixon’s records? Scary, man.
Had those lawyers been thinking long term, they might have taken into account what happened in the past. It’s not as if some of it was not public. In a letter (“Out on a Limb at Archives”) published in the Washington Post in 1998, I wrote: “To understand morale problems (as well as historians' concerns), one must look back at the archives' failure to protect staff in 1992. During public-access litigation, Nixon's lawyer then referred to the government's Nixon tapes archivists as "incompetent clerical-level archivists." In court briefs, he implied that the processing of Nixon's tapes had been flawed by anti-Nixon bias. (In reality, both the supervisor and I had voted for Nixon in 1972.)
Nixon's lawyer appears to have used such tactics to defend his client's interests at all costs. . . .So Nixon's lawyer served his client well. But who stood up to defend NARA's archivists, whose performance earlier had been rated as ‘outstanding’? No one. In a December 1992 article about the Nixon tapes, Seymour Hersh wrote that, in answering his inquiries, the "archives was reduced to anonymous slander" of its own staff. . . .Given the National Archives' failure to stand up to Nixon lawyers, it is reasonable to ask who will protect archivists (and the future of Nixon's records) if unfair charges of ‘bias’ or other excuses are used in an attempt to replace civil servants with Nixon Foundation staff or to limit public access to records?” [From submitted version on my computer]
The last sentence referred to a statement in George Lardner’s Jan. 25, 1998 WaPo story (“Hopes Fade for U.S.-Run Nixon Library” that “[f]ueling the dissatisfaction, the union's two top officials say, is poor staff morale, compounded by reports that the archives has talked with the Nixon estate about putting as many as five staffers of privately run Yorba Linda library on the government payroll of any presidential library there.”
If a dispute within the family so recently drew such over-wrought rhetoric about you, who had served RN loyally but apparently just was a party to a disagreement about how best to position the library for the future, perhaps I should start worrying more again about what NARA is going to face down the road. Sigh.
Thanks for both those comments, MK.
While I don't justify any harsh rhetoric aimed at NARA professionals, from me or anyone else, what was looming large for RN and his lawyers in the 1980s and 1990s was the issue of the "personal returnable" materials. As I recall, the attorneys were telling their client that if NARA dropped everything and returned all personal items (both the third-party political and the strictly personal), his leverage would be dramatically reduced.
For whatever reason, NARA resisted such a large-scale return of all personal materials. Was it because they were hoping to make a deal on the political materials (which we indeed deeded back in '07, as part of the handover)? Was it because of the gargantuan task of snipping the personal segments out of the originals? Was it because of the ambiguity in the finding aids over whether a segment was political vs. personal returnable and the complexities of separating the two? Was it because the agency perhaps thought that once Nixon was gone, his estate would be more reasonable (or having less standing)?
Whatever the reasons, Nixon and his lawyers believed that NARA didn't want to do what SCOTUS had ordered. So we battled back.
[end first comment]
And in such struggles, the rhetoric often becomes too hot, and the attacks too personal.
I hadn't planned on reflecting on Khachigian's attacks at this time, but his reuse of the fire-and-oxygen metaphor made it irresistible. I'd become inconvenient to the Cox family, whom Khachigian advised and served, because Nixon had chosen me as his co-executor and because the estate blocked Ed Cox's move, right after Nixon's death, to secure family ownership and control of the Nixon library. In doing so, I was reflecting the view of local board members who had already had their fill of serving on a board with no power as well as of those, including others in the family, who felt an independent board with strong (but not controlling) family representation and voice was the better way to go now that Nixon was gone. David Eisenhower, for instance, told me that the Eisenhower family had never insisted on total control of the foundation bearing their name.
The lowest point came during the struggle over Bebe Rebozo's millions. Rebozo had once wondered aloud about whether I had enough experience managing endowment funds. He was probably right when he expressed the concern, though I learned soon enough!
An attorney representing the Coxes (a person of some local renown) was instructed to tell the media that Rebozo he said he "didn't trust John Taylor with his money," a different thing entirely. Reading this one morning in the LA Times was a bit discouraging, but it didn't last long, because at 8 a.m. my bishop, J. Jon Bruno, called and told me not to worry; he knew I was an honest man. When on my ordination day I was asked to promise obedience to him, it was a joy to do so.
By no means was that my only brush with such tactics, nor with the personalities and practices of Nixon's Watergate-era group. But because it was reported around the world, it's the kind of thing that stays with you -- as you know so well, having absorbed the slings and arrows coming from our side. As you may imagine, there's been some teaching and learning in it. All things work together for God's purposes!
Interesting. If there was resistance to returning personal-returnable (designated by the letter “G” on our withdrawal sheets), including personal-returnable political, it wasn't during my tenure at NARA (1976-1990). Not only did we snip it out of the master reference copies, we even had a special category within the “G” material to cover certain types of information. By 1987, when Fred Graboske’s team finished reviewing the 3,700 hours of tapes, we had reels and reels of excised tape portions marked “G” ready to go to Nixon. The master reference tapes were 1.5 mil and easy to edit (we then used razor blades and splicing tape). As I recall, the original tapes, being a mere .5 mil, presented greater challenges in cutting so we didn’t do that. There may have been some thinking that if all the “G” material was deeded back to NARA, there might not be any need to cut the equivalent portions on the originals, if the material would revert back to us.
Where the disputes lay, from what I could see, was in the scope of personal. When the Supreme Court upheld the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act in 1977, "lawyers for Nixon were encouraged by the possibility of developing the idea of a right of political privacy. 'Many people don't realize,' one of the lawyers said hopefully, 'that 99 percent of what a President does is political.'" (Washington Star, June 29, 1977). As you know, R. Stan Mortenson argued in 1987 that the Nixon records act’s regulations were “capricious and constitute an abuse of discretion . . . the regulations too narrowly define ‘private or personal’ materials as those ‘relating solely to a person's family or other non-governmental activities.’”
I think there was considerable confusion over a lot of these issues. Indeed, I found mystifying some of what Mortenson submitted to us when we tried to open the White House Special Files. For example, his category 1 and category 6 on the objections list that Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin submitted to us on April 7, 1987 read, “private political association; returnable; privileged; invasion of privacy."” Those are contradictory elements. Private political and returnable refer to personal material; privilege to governmental matters. An item could not at the same time be both private political and also privileged. To me, categories 1 and 6 came across as “kitchen sink, we’ll throw in everything and hope something sticks, just to ensure you don’t open it.”
Other categories were cleaner (category 3 and 5 were “privileged;” category 2 was “private political associaiton; invasion of privacy, private and personal.” For textual and tapes processing staff, the first cut decision always was, it is personal or is it governmental? If governmental, one did not have to open it, one still could review it for privacy (and national security and other restrictions) and decide to retain but restrict it. The Mortenson letter and objections list are public information; Bruce Oudes requested them under FOIA. After the Nixon lawyer’s objection letter was released to him, we placed a copy in our public reading room.
Ah, that is interesting, it gives me some necessary background on issues I only read about in the press back then. Even so, it seems this could have been resolved without your becoming a target.
I agree, on that and other issues, the rhetoric need not have been so heated. Even I would say some things differently now than I did in the early 1990s, LOL. As you say, live and learn.
That you yourself became the subject of such rhetoric from within does make me wonder whether it might not have been better just to have a purely family run Nixon library with no hope or prospect, ever, of putting the pre-presidential and post-presidential materials in a NARA administered library. Perhaps it just is not possible to form the type of relationship that Gerald Ford did with NARA. I like to think anything is doable, given sufficient goodwill, but I just don't know.
I waver between thinking that NARA can find a way to work with most of the presidential family foundations (whose role regarding the post-Watergate libraries is not required legally) and thinking it is more likely not to work out than work well. Should NARA cut the ties and just start storing and making presidential records available in a central Archives facility? I don't know. It is one of the alternatives that has been discussed.
When NARA asked for comments for alterntive models for presidential libraries in 2009, I was somewhat more optimistic than I am now. I'll look up my submission and post an extract in a minute.
Thanks for taking the time to provide such useful insights on some of the battles. As I said, that this happened to you actually makes me not just depressed, but also more concerned about NARA than I was a year or two ago.
Thanks, MK. In my conversations with Nixon, he was most passionate about the purely personal materials, especially on the tapes. I wouldn't have proposed to the Nixon foundation board that it deed the political-personal materials in '07 if I hadn't thought that Nixon would've have wanted his political discourse weighed alongside his policy conversations and deliberations.
But any hint that his lawyers may have received that NARA was angling to have purely personal materials come back to the agency would have sent Nixon into the stratosphere.
I am wondering if NARA ever realized how passionate Nixon was about the purely personal. I know the media never quite grasped it.
On your comment about your discouragement, as TV reporters are wont to say: Only time will tell. But perhaps not too much more time. If NARA can make it in Yorba Linda, it can make it anywhere!
Thanks for sharing Nixon's views on the personal returnable. I mayself was quite prepared to live with the personal returnable going back to him and NARA never regaining it. I'm glad, however, that you and NARA worked out the agreement for deeding them back that you did in 2007. Back when I worked at NARA, I absolutely understood why SCOTUS viewed matters as it did. I always used to tell researchers during my tenure, "Imagine that you tape your conversations at the office, including ones about non-work related matters. And then they are seized and handed over to people you don't know to decide what the public will hear. That's the situation in which Richard Nixon found himself." I wanted to spark some sympathy for his situation.
Here's what I wrote for the submission to NARA on alternative models for presidential libraries. Keep in mind, I too create records that one day researchers will see. I'm a federal employee. Some of the Federal Records Act materials that I've created during my career are designated permanent and one day will be opened to researchers, without my having any say in the process. That's the case for most federal employees, from Cabinet secretaries on down. I and my family will have no say in the release process, any more than will Secretary Bob Gates and his family in the relese of his records by NARA.
Here's part of what I wrote in my submission to NARA in 2009:
"Questions for consideration by a data gathering and analytic body would include:
1. Has there been a chilling effect on the creation of Presidential records since the assertion of public control? If so, what are the causes? Are any of them reversible? Is the 12 year period of Presidential-designated restrictions sufficiently long to prevent a chilling effect at the beginning of the life cycle of records?
2. Does the existence of the museum component and the existence of exhibits associated with the libraries offer a mitigating effect to officials whose records are to be opened for public access? The goal of public access to White House records is an appropriate one for a democratic society. However, it requires the balancing of potentially competing stakeholder interests. NARA needs to consider whether the existence of the museum component softens the blow of having some of one's internal deliberations opened to public examination through the FOIA process. If so, are there advantages or disadvantages to having the government involved in the design and fabrication of exhibits and displays? Does the fact that the public perceives early exhibits to be more laudatory, sometimes more so than many scholars would like, and later exhibits to be more realistic, affect overall perceptions of NARA and the Libraries?
3. What generally are the financial and the non-financial benefits of (a) continuing to have libraries and museums administered by the federal government and (b) dropping the museum component but continuing to administer libraries or (c) dropping operation and maintenance of both libraries and museums and moving instead to housing Presidential records in centralized federal archival facilities?
Without information on such questions, it is difficult to assess the practicality of alternative approaches to the present system of Presidential Libraries."
Interesting point about Nixon going ballistic if he had know that NARA was angling to have the G purely personal and personal-political returned deeded back to it one day. It's my recollection that the possibility of that occurring was mentioned in one of the depositions of government witnesses in Kutler v. Wilson in 1992. (It wasn't a main point in my testimony.) Nixon then still was alive. I don't know how much his lawyers told him about the deposition testimony or with whom they shared the transcripts. I have the original transcripts of the sworn testimony by all the NARA witnesses, so I know what people said under oath. As I have time, I'll go back and look through them to see if the return of personal-material through deed came up then, while Nixon, of course, still was alive.
I hope it all works out but I'm pretty discouraged, not just about that, but a general erosion of values. Way too much blame shifting and dodging responsibility, all around, these days. I guess I'm showing my age, my parents brought me up to believe in accountability. Also, I'm still mostly reading in my spare time about the civil rights era, when some incredibly brave people, such as John Lewis at Selma, acted very courageously in direct action. I still remember the story you once shared about your Mom and her article about Viola Liuzzo's family.
John, my memory was correct. I pulled the transcripts and checked that of former NARA presidential libraries John Fawcett first. Bingo. Testimony in Kutler v. Wilson on July 13, 1992 produced this colloquy between John Fawcett and Public Citizen attorney Patti Goldman (representing Stanley Kutler):
“Q [Goldman]: Do you know whether any of the material that has been segregated from the tapes because it’s personal or private has been returned—
A. No, it was not.
Q: Why has it not been returned?
Mr. Nelson [representing Nixon]: Returned to whom.
Ms. Goldman: I was going to say returned to former President Nixon or whoever else it would be returned to.
The witness: Your question is why has no material been returned to Mr. Nixon.
Ms. Goldman: Yes.
Answer [Fawcett]: I could give you a long answer to this. Archivally speaking, the most important aspect of an archivists [sic., probably said archives] is to preserve the entire historical record. And as such, my predecessors have always looked to the possibility that those materials that have been determined to be personal property of President Nixon might be donated to the National Archives as personal papers so that the entire record could remain intact. Therefore, we have not shipped the material back to Mr. Nixon at this point.”
This is the raw transcript of what the court reporter recorded on the day of testimony.
Did Nixon know in 1992 that a NARA official had testified to this? You suggested he would have gone straight to the stratosphere, had he known NARA was angling for having any of the personal material donated back to it.
For what it is worth, my cohort never discussed this much one way or another. We just made our retain/return decisions, snipped out the information the public could not hear, and noted the withdrawals on the finding aids. We weren’t influenced by what might happen to the material, there was no way for us to predict the future and we didn’t focus on that. We just decided what was Nixon’s property, what he was owed as personal property.
[Below posted by Fr. John with MK's permission]
John, my memory was correct. I pulled the transcripts and checked that of former NARA presidential libraries John Fawcett first. Bingo. Testimony in Kutler v. Wilson on July 13, 1992 produced this colloquy between John Fawcett and Public Citizen attorney Patti Goldman (representing Stanley Kutler):
“Q [Goldman]: Do you know whether any of the material that has been segregated from the tapes because it’s personal or private has been returned—
A. No, it was not.
Q: Why has it not been returned?
Mr. Nelson [representing Nixon]: Returned to whom.
Ms. Goldman: I was going to say returned to former President Nixon or whoever else it would be returned to.
The witness: Your question is why has no material been returned to Mr. Nixon.
Ms. Goldman: Yes.
Answer [Fawcett]: I could give you a long answer to this. Archivally speaking, the most important aspect of an archivists [sic., probably said archives] is to preserve the entire historical record. And as such, my predecessors have always looked to the possibility that those materials that have been determined to be personal property of President Nixon might be donated to the National Archives as personal papers so that the entire record could remain intact. Therefore, we have not shipped the material back to Mr. Nixon at this point.”
This is the raw transcript of what the court reporter recorded on the day of testimony.
Did Nixon know in 1992 that a NARA official had testified to this? You suggested he would have gone straight to the stratosphere, had he known NARA was angling for having any of the personal material donated back to it. As you know, "personal papers" is a term of art in the world of archives.
For what it is worth, my cohort never discussed this much one way or another. We just made our retain/return decisions, snipped out the information the public could not hear, and noted the withdrawals on the finding aids. We weren’t influenced by what might happen to the material, there was no way for us to predict the future and we didn’t focus on that. We just decided what was Nixon’s property, what he was owed as personal property, what was governmental, and what required restriction or could be opened..
Thanks, MK. I don't know everything Jack and Stan told RN. But I do know that it was generally assumed on our side the NARA was reluctant to return all personal items and tape segments. Again, it was the purely personal items (as opposed to the political-personal) that Nixon was positively theological about. The last I knew, some concerned still remains about personal tapes among some family members, though I don't know what may have happened since mid-2009.
Perfectly understandable that RN would have been concerned about purely personal material, that's a natural reaction for anyone.
I don't know what John Fawcett knew of what was on the Nixon tapes when he testified in 1992. I do know that neither Fred Graboske or I, who between us heard everything that was on the tapes because we were the two people who approved and gave guidance for the NARA's team's processing work, never were asked to brief John Fawcett on that.
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