Nixon Abandoned

Beginning from my first days as Richard Nixon's chief of staff from 1984-90, his lack of enthusiasm about his presidential library presented a considerable problem. It was his least favorite post-presidential subject. In his private discourse, he would sometimes actually modify the word "library" with one of those famous deleted expletives.

While generous with his own funds, he refused to raise library money beyond appearing at a few fat cat events and the grand opening in July 1990. Even then, he would dematerialize a few minutes before Bill Simon or Maury Stans, his cabinet members-turned-Nixon library volunteers, made the pitch. One time after another, I was the guy who got to tell Simon, Stans, and others that when it came to the library, Nixon was unable to add anything to his schedule. They'd sometimes wonder why they were raising $23 million for a disgraced president who actually made them feel a little dirty for even mentioning it.

Getting him to focus on architecture and exhibits was rough sledding, too. He realized that any ex-president could get his rich friends to build a museum for him, hold reunions and cocktail parties for his family members and operatives, and say whatever they wanted about the ups and downs of his presidency (such as, in his case, Watergate). As a lifelong reader, Nixon understood that his historical reputation would reside not between museum walls but book covers. That's why, after I became director of the newly opened library in 1990, he reluctantly acquiesced in my plan for an archive of his pre-presidential records. It's also why his last chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor, and I devoted so much energy to getting his White House records home to Yorba Linda by making the private library part of the National Archives, a mission we completed in 2007. We did so despite considerable resistance from Nixon family members and factotums alike.

What would Nixon have thought about the federal library? His feelings would have been mixed, of course. His love of history notwithstanding, he didn't especially love historians. What did he love? Being relevant. Making a difference. His eyes only began to sparkle in conversations about his library when George Argyros (later foundation chairman and U.S. ambassador to Spain), Soviet expert Dimitri Simes, and I asked him to bless our plans for a affiliated foreign policy center that would apply his principles of enlightened national interest to America's challenges in the post-Cold War world.

He agreed immediately. That work, he told us, was worth doing. That work, he said, would have an impact on the course of events. When we were planning the Nixon library, it was hard to get him to drive 50 blocks to midtown Manhattan to attend a meeting. He came all the way from New Jersey to Yorba Linda to announce the creation of the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom in January 1994, on the 25th anniversary of his first Inaugural.

When he died that April, some questioned whether a brand-new Nixon organization in Washington could succeed without him. The momentum his enthusiasm had given us helped us persevere, and in November 1994 the Nixon Center (its shortened name, eventually) opened its doors. In the years since, with Simes at the helm, its experts did exactly what we promised Nixon they'd do: Analyze current events through a Nixonian prism. As recently as last year, when Nixon's White House tapes reminded a new generation of Americans of the less worthy aspects of his legacy and temperament and the Nixon White House operatives now controlling his foundation waxed silent in response, the Nixon Center called attention to the continued relevance of his robust, carefully shaken mixture of Wilsonian idealism and Kissingerian realpolitik.

Nixon would have been proud of its work. Too bad the Nixon Center apparently isn't proud of him. In fact, it just threw its first and greatest patron over the side. At a fundraiser last night, it announced that it was in receipt of "new resources" and also proclaimed its new name: "Nixon Who?", aka "The Center for the National Interest." The National Interest is a foreign policy journal founded in the 1980s by neocon godfather Irving Kristol. Ironically, the Center Formerly Known As Nixon acquired it several years ago and turned it into the voice of principled, Nixonian realism. His kind of thinking became unfashionable in the Republican Party years ago. Who would've thought the foreign policy establishment, not to mention his friends, would finally abandon Nixon as well?
Photos: Nixon in Moscow in 1989 with Dimitri Simes (John H. Taylor photo) and in his suburban New Jersey study

Parked

By 2002, opponents of an international airport in Orange County, to be built on the abandoned Marine base at El Toro, had already tried and failed to get voters to kill it. So they put a new measure on that year's ballot, called measure W, that basically read:

Wouldn't it be cool to have a park right here in Orange County just like Central Park, with lakes and merry-go-rounds, and, like, about a million soccer fields, and places to go hiking, and everything? There'll be hot dogs and cotton candy, and you can ride your skateboard and take your kids there, and no one will ever be sad ever again, instead of an icky old airport?

They even printed posters showing happy people walking through the woods in, evidently, the Sierra Nevada. The measure passed with 54% of the vote. I would've voted for it, but the then-chairman of the Nixon foundation, George Argyros, the airport's biggest booster, was standing in the voting booth behind me.

The problem was that there was no evidence that a "Great Park" was warranted or achievable. No feasibility studies, no nothing. It was a deft if cynical campaign slogan (aren't they all?), and it worked. Now OC Weekly is complaining that there's no Great Park and that politicians and their cronies are getting rich off the fantasy. "I'm shocked," Capt. Renault said. "Shocked!"

Powell At Intermission

In Orange County last Saturday evening to accept an award from Chapman University, Colin Powell was at his most energized while talking not about war and peace but education. He recounted a prior visit to Orange County to meet with students and teachers at Glenn L. Martin Elementary School in Santa Ana, where his sister, legendary teacher Marilyn Berns, who died in 2005, was working. Though Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, it turned out that not arriving by motorcade made all the difference. "The kids didn't know who I was or what I did," Powell told an audience of 600 at Chapman's gala banquet, "but they loved that helicopter." He also talked about America's daunting educational challenges, reminding us that a third of our young people (and half of all our minority students) still don't finish high school.

Though he served four years as George W. Bush's secretary of state, Powell didn't mention him. When he did address global issues, they had to do not with the war on terror, in which he played a central role, but the end of the Cold War, where he was a supporting player under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Accordingly I was honored to have on my arm my wife and successor at the Nixon Foundation, former Nixon chief of staff Kathy O'Connor, who once accompanied 37 when he called on Powell at the Pentagon.

Thanks to the presence of former Ambassador to Spain and former Nixon Foundation chairman George Argyros (one of the architects of a supercharged Chapman along with its visionary, marathoner president, economist Jim Doti), Powell reenacted the comic opera of Perejil Island, a uninhabited pile of rocks in the Strait of Gilbraltar claimed by both Spain and Morocco. One Saturday morning in July 2002, on the way to spend the day with his grandchildren, Secretary Powell kept the two countries from a full-scale confrontation by typing out and signing a peace agreement, faxing it from his home in northern Virginia, and pressuring the king of Morocco to accept the deal and remove his forces.

It was a wonderful story. I also would've liked to hear what it had been like on Sept. 11, how he feels about his controversial speech to the UN in the runup to the Iraq war, and what he thinks the U.S. should do to win in Afghanistan. My friend Don Will, professor of peace studies at Chapman, told me that some of these questions came up when Powell met with three undergraduates before dinner and that Powell had answered directly and graciously. This Orange County Register report has details about that conversation.

As charming and uplifting as his dinner talk was, I felt he was holding the larger audience somewhat at bay, as though he was still sifting through strong and perhaps conflicted feelings about the Bush administration. Whether or not he finishes that process, I'll bet there's a final act of public service to come, either appointive or elective. On Palm Sunday, the Episcopalian Powell will turn 72. Fit and ramrod straight, he looks and acts 60. On Saturday night, he made a lot of cracks about being comfortably retired, but I left the event thinking about a thoroughbred straining in the gate, unsure whether its next race would be six furlongs or a mile, on turf or grass, but almost beside itself with the power to run.

A Monday In An Expectant Washington

They say five million people are coming to Washington to see Barack Obama inaugurated next Tuesday, but this week, it felt empty and expectant. On Monday morning, the bookstores and sidewalk vendors had plenty of Obama merchandise ready, but shoppers were few. The chairs were in place for the VIPs on the west side of the Capitol. To accommodate the rest of the audience, Porta Sans are arrayed along the Mall all the way back to the Lincoln Memorial.

My Nixon Foundation colleagues Kris Elftmann and Kathy O'Connor and I felt as if we had the town to ourselves as we walked from our hotel in Georgetown to the Capitol -- until we saw a smiling friend standing next to us at a stoplight on Pennsylvania Avenue. Even though Tim Mead, legendary communications VP for our home town Angels, was on the way to the White House for a meeting with the President, he graciously paused to let Kris experience the heft of a World Series ring.

Our destination was the lavish new Captiol Visitor Center, the $621 million installation you access from an underground entrance halfway to the Supreme Court in order to protect Sen. Harry Reid from smelly tourists. Again, we expected to be battling crowds, but it was pretty much we and the statue of Po'pay from New Mexico. Perhaps 20 others were along for a breathtaking new film about the Congress and a guided tour of the Capitol.

Naturally, I looked for Christian highlights among the artworks in our greatest secular temple. In John Gadsby Chapman's 1840 painting "The Baptism of Pocahontas," on display in the rotunda, that's her brother turned away in protest as one of my fellow Anglicans, the Rev. John Whiteaker, does the deed, evidently a prerequisite for her marriage to John Rolfe. (Our gracious young guide said the protester was her father, but the Architect of the Capitol sets him straight.)

Wandering around the Obama-fixated capital, I remembered Garrison Keillor's rueful "We're all Republicans now" from the early years of the Bush Administration. These days the rue is on the other foot. As I walked up 12th Street, I passed the headquarters of the Republican Committee of the District of Columbia, where the party's pervasive dysfunction was appropriately expressed by a word-processed sign announcing that the doorbell was out of order.

Republicans associated with The Nixon Center, the Nixon Foundation's nonpartisan foreign policy think tank, were feeling somewhat more au courant Monday evening at the Four Seasons in Georgetown. After all, we were honoring the exceedingly relevant Admiral Mike Mullen, who as chairman of the Joint Chiefs will be President Obama's chief military adviser at least until late 2009. The smart money says he'll be reappointed for a second two-year term. Besides, The Center's foreign policy realism, halfway between isolationism and neoconservatism, corresponds neatly with the Obamian Zeitgeist. Recall that realist prophet Brent Scowcroft remained pointedly neutral during the fall campaign while staying in touch with Obama.

During the reception, I spotted the peripatetic Steve Clemons, whose influential "Washington Note" blog is also known for its humane, realistic perspective on international affairs. I asked him to pose with Singapore's ambassador to the U.S., scholar Chan Heng Chee, a loyal friend of The Center for many years. Steve graciously stooped to be photographed, since he's 6'5", and Ambassador Chan is not. Later Steve was seen giving my wife and colleague Kathy a foot rub at her table, which is a long story.

After paying tribute to President Nixon's foreign policy vision, Admiral Mullen called on the U.S. to make better use of its diplomatic and economic clout in addition to its military power. Good intelligence also plays a vital role in the war on terror, which meant that Orange County's Julia Argyros, wife of Nixon Center founding chairman George Argyros, was in a unique position to get up to date during her dinner conversation with Michael V. Hayden, director of Central Intelligence.

Meanwhile, Kathy (left) was getting caught up with Sharon Fawcett, deputy archivist of the U.S. in charge of all the Presidential libraries. We've been working with Sharon for many years on Nixon records matters in general and, most recently, the complex process of adding the Nixon Library to the Federal system, which culminated last year in the handover of the library and museum to the National Archives.

Sharon was having a little breather before returning to the gargantuan task of preparing President Bush's records for the long ride down to Texas and the soon-to-be-built Bush Library at SMU. She and her Archives colleagues face unprecedented technological challenges. She told us, for instance, that all the electronic records created by previous Presidents equal 2% of W.'s e-records. Among Sharon's most vital responsibilities: Making sure scholars can still read all those e-mails and attachments in 50 or 100 years without making hard copies of everything. Try getting an old file from a five and a quarter-inch floppy, for instance.

By the time all that's done, there'll be an Obama Library to plan -- in four or eight years, depending on whom you ask. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Godspeed on Tuesday, 44!