The Naftali Doctrine

That's Kathy O'Connor, President Nixon's last chief of staff, with his brother Edward and our Nixon foundation friend Ric Leczel this morning after ceremonies marking the opening of the new Watergate gallery at the Nixon library.

Ed was stooping to stay in the frame. The Watergate opening is standing tall as a national story. Follow the links to the LA Times (Chris Goffard's first take), Orange County Register, Associated Press, USA Today, Washington Post, and ABC News -- where, if the story makes the evening news, it will be introduced or reported by former Nixon aide Diane Sawyer. The AP's Michael Blood favored me with a quotation as follows:

John Taylor, who worked for Nixon after he left the White House and helped design the original exhibit, said it was difficult for those who revere Nixon to deal with Watergate. He said the content in the new exhibit made him uncomfortable but with the passage of time, "you can hear the truth, you can accept the truth and you can learn from the truth."

"In the next 50 years America is going to answer the question, what is the sentence that goes with Mr. Nixon?" Taylor said. "Is it, he went to China, or that he quit? For that to be a fair dialogue, this day had to happen."

Kathy and I went to work trying to get the private Nixon library into the federal system in the mid-1990s. Nixon family members desiring a richer settlement from a lawsuit torpedoed our first effort in 1996-97. We finally succeeded in 2007 -- well, we plus $1 million for some blue-chip lobbyists.

That still left the matter of our polemical 1990 Watergate gallery, which had outlived its usefulness, as often happens at first-generation presidential museums that have to grapple with unpleasant or controversial events. Today's unveiling of a stunningly presented, federally anointed replacement was a tribute to Cold War historian and exhibit curator Tim Naftali as well as to two archivists of the U.S., Allen Weinstein (shown signing the handover papers in 2007) and David Ferriero. Ferriero in particular withstood considerable pressure from the Nixon-Bob Haldeman aides who took control of Nixon's foundation as Naftali was conducting his painstaking work.

At today's ceremony, attended by 200 federal library staffers and loyal volunteers (that's Kathy with docents Connie Mesko and Gloria Norton), both Ferriero and his deputy, Sharon Fawcett, amply praised Naftali's professionalism and integrity. Kathy and I were especially pleased to hear that, having gotten him into these often treacherous straits in the first place. Today's mountaintop moment after two difficult years had Naftali waxing prophetic in his eloquent prepared remarks, praising the durability of the U.S. system when one of the three branches abuses its power and suggesting that all presidential libraries should exhibit curatorial as well as archival integrity and openness.

While the Naftali doctrine should be given close attention by Ferriero and his colleagues whenever principles of good practice at presidential libraries are discussed, the structural difficulty with his approach is that a president's rich friends won't contribute millions to see a warts-and-all museum or indeed wart one. Read more about libraries and money here. Until now, NARA has put up with a generation or two of museum hagiography in exchange for warehouses for storing millions of pages of memos and letters as well as photos, gifts, and other artifacts. Now that the vital records of an eight-year administration can be stored on a few MacBooks, will presidential libraries persist? Tune in in two years or six. If there is an Obama library and museum, you can bet that Roger Ailes and Sean Hannity will be howling for curatorial integrity and openness as strenuously as any Nixon critic ever did.

While I have a pretty good idea what's in the Watergate gallery thanks to the background at nixonlibrary.gov, I look forward to spending a quiet afternoon with the massive interactive exhibit, walking that long, hard road with 37. I'll be especially interested to learn who won the argument between Naftali and Nixon's White House men over whether the museum-going, taxpaying public has been permitted to hear substantial excerpts from oral history interviews with Naftali in which Dwight Chapin, Fred Malek, and others discuss dirty tricks, counting Jews in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other discouraging moments from an era when a peace-making, partisan warrior of president, caught in the maelstrom of a war he didn't start, mediated between his dreams and demons.

In any event, it was high time for the Nixon library, now in its 21st year, to grow up and accept that the judgment of history, no matter how it comes out for Nixon, lies beyond the reach of advocacy by family, friends, consultants, and especially those whose own reputations hang in the balance alongside the president they served, often honorably but sometimes, as this new exhibit shows, not.
Above photo, showing Nixon library director Tim Naftali briefing the media on the Watergate gallery, is by Jebb Harris of the Orange County Register.

A Parent Teacher Association

Some outstanding southern California public school teachers I know are enduring the annual ritual of getting undeserved termination letters, the consequence of our state's budget crisis. They usually get their jobs back in a few months, though sometimes not.

Those who were watching the ABC evening news last night got the additional shock of ex-Nixon aide Diane Sawyer leading with Bill Gates' criticism of public schools giving automatic raises to teachers who have seniority and advanced degrees. Teachers already feel they're being scapegoated in the battles between states and public employee unions. They can't be pleased that the Lord High Nerd of the Universe has appeared to lend some momentum to Wisconsin's Gov. Scott Walker's bid to take away teachers' rights to non-salary collective bargaining.

For decades, conservatives such as Walker have been zeroing in on our allegedly poor teachers and their pernicious unions. Is it just because they think educators are a bunch of liberals? If so, that's often what you get when you under-compensate the highly educated. If you want to bring up the money teacher unions give to politicians, I'll bring up Citizens United, and we'll call that one a draw.

But teachers have those fat contracts we've been hearing about, you say. Turns out the union bosses have only won them $40,000-$44,000 a year (the national averages for elementary and high school teachers). While Gates has a point about giving them (or anyone) automatic raises, revoking most of their bargaining rights, as Walker proposes, is overkill. Instead, our elected representatives might consider getting a clue and negotiating with all their employees during revenue peaks on the assumption that recessions are right around the corner. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey argued as much this week. (I'd pay public school teachers $80,000-$100,000 and base all tenure and raises on merit. Lucky for taxpayers, nobody cares what I think.)

Conservatives are also suspicious of public education's doctrines of secularism and multiculturalism. Today's war against teacher unions appears to be a continuation by other means of the battles over prayer in schools and creationism vs. evolution. It's in this area where some conservatives betray a latent statist mindset. Many of them apparently think public school teachers are supposed to do parents' jobs as well as their own.

I've been teaching religion at a private school for five years. While I lack the gifts, experience, and endurance of colleagues who teach all day long, I've learned a thing or two about the opportunities and limitations of being a classroom teacher. Great ones can make a big difference in students' lives. But great parents make all the difference. If a student comes to school with good manners and work habits, she'll take value home whether I'm having a good day or not. Without those qualities, there's not too much the most inspired teacher can to do to compensate. When students bring along religious faith, a grounding in evolutionary biology, or any other homespun perspective, the teacher won't be able to change their minds even if he wants to. Just try telling a child that mom or dad is wrong.

Though we talk about faith in a broad and inclusive way, St. John's is a Christian school. The children come to chapel every day, and to reclaim their attention during New Testament class, I sometimes belt out the Gloria in excelsis. Are the parents of our Jewish and Muslim students afraid we're trying to convert them? Of course not. Parents who pay attention to their children's social, ethical, and academic formation help prepare them to maintain their individuality and thrive in any setting. They won't be a tabula rasa for the NEA, the Episcopal Church, or anyone else. In the end, what worries me even more than some conservative parents' distrust of teachers is their apparent lack of faith in themselves.

John And Diane

I always wondered how a libertarian such as John Stossel thrived at ABC News. Evidently it wasn't always smooth sailing. Diane Sawyer's elevation to the ABC anchor chair suggests that it can still pay to be a Nixonian.

He Is Smiling Impishly

A former Nixon aide (and a principal collaborator on the sections of his memoirs about Watergate) is going to anchor a network newscast.

Just Another Hollywood Nixon

At The Ticker, published by Baruch College in New York City, Alfonso Guerriero shares comments on "Frost/Nixon" from an authoritative source, Ray Price (shown at right in the photo with other members of RN's interview prep team, Diane Sawyer and Ken Khachigian; missing is The New Nixon's Frank Gannon, who was probably either playing the piano or taking the picture):

Price, 78, knew President Nixon for 27 years while working as one of his speechwriters. He wrote both of Nixon’s inauguration speeches, and he helped write Nixon’s resignation speech in 1974. When Nixon resigned from the presidency, Price continued being a loyal friend and collaborated with the president on two of his 10 books before Nixon’s death in 1994. He also helped Nixon prepare for Frost’s interviews, along with...Sawyer and other aides.

Price did not hesitate when offering his thoughts on Frost/Nixon and Frank Langella’s portrayal of the President saying, "[the film] grossly distorted the facts and reduced his character to a Hollywood caricature."