They Got Just The Exhibit They Bargained For

Nixon operatives' rearguard maneuvers continue over the Nixon library's Watergate exhibit, which opened to the public in 2011. Below is my response to a History News Network post claiming that those now controlling Nixon's foundation hadn't tried to derail the exhibit:

No account of the controversy over the Nixon library Watergate exhibit is accurate if it ignores the ruthless tactics that the Nixon foundation board and staff used against the federal director, historian Tim Naftali. Not only did they try to derail the exhibit. They tried to derail Naftali's career. As a matter of fact, by launching and losing the last battle of Watergate, Nixon’s men earned every square inch of their new exhibit.

Their attacks on Naftali began in the fall of 2009, not because of the exhibit but because he had invited John Dean to give a speech. Nixon White House operatives hated Dean for helping send their friends to jail for their Watergate crimes. When my successor as foundation head and Richard Nixon’s last chief of staff, Kathy O’Connor, endorsed a mature and constructive response to Naftali's Dean invitation, they belittled and marginalized her.

Those who now seized control of Nixon’s foundation had a different plan for Naftali. An item appeared on the foundation web site saying that he should go run a museum for traitor Alger Hiss. Operatives recruited Sen. Lamar Alexander, a former Nixon aide, to put a secret hold on the nomination of a new U.S. archivist to pressure or get rid of Naftali. A former foundation employee who'd opposed the NARA handover wrote a column associating Naftali with "the left." Another operative filed a FOIA request to read his e-mails. Yet another accused him publicly of sending coded signals about his sexual orientation. That operative’s wife publicly accused Naftali of leaking prejudicial Nixon tapes to the media.

When Naftali offered one of Nixon's daughters a tour of the library's new quarters, she accepted only to denounce him in front of her fellow foundation leaders and demand that he leave. A top NARA official and the director of the Reagan library even joined in trying to broker Naftali’s resignation, claiming that the public would be permitted to see his Watergate exhibit if he’d quit.

Thanks to these spirit-of-Watergate tactics, we’ll never know if Naftali could have been persuaded to install a more nuanced exhibit. As he battled back, he told friends that the Nixonites were trying to “clean house” – to use their purported insider contacts to get rid of him. Having raised the stakes to that level and lost, the Nixonites were bound to end up with an unstinting exhibit. It would have made for another historic scandal if David Ferriero, the archivist of the U.S., had buckled to political and financial pressure and permitted the rewrites demanded by a Watergate truth squad that included convicted perjurer Dwight Chapin -- especially when one of its demands was to block museum visitors from seeing videotape in which Chapin claimed that Nixon had been in on 1972 campaign dirty tricks from the very beginning.

It’s of course true that abuses of power occurred in prior administrations. It will be up to historians to assess the significance of so many being aggregated in one wartime administration and whether Nixon’s massive foreign and domestic policy achievements outweigh the shame of Watergate and resignation. But getting a more balanced and yet still accurate Watergate exhibit into the Nixon library won’t just be a matter of overcoming the influence of Nixon skeptics in academe. Archives officials would also need Nixon foundation collaborators who themselves don’t have so much to lose when it comes to the sober judgment of history.

Friendly Fire

Tim Naftali, the former director of the Nixon library, has enough of secular outlook that he didn't know (or perhaps jokingly claimed not to) that he had inherited his surname from one of Jacob's fractious sons. Still, his Yorba Linda years comprised a wilderness experience of Hebrew Testament proportions. As he sometimes reminded me, I was the one who first beckoned him into the trackless wastes. I also helped give him his toughest challenge: Replacing the private library's relentlessly pro-Nixon Watergate exhibit. I'm sorry about the times I made his work unnecessarily difficult and grateful that he beat disgraced Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman's boys and finished what history had called him to do.

No public historian since the Enola Gay controversy at the Smithsonian Institution had a harder challenge. He was uniquely qualified for it. He was a highly regarded, non-ideological scholar of Nixon's defining crisis, the Cold War. A few years before he came to Yorba Linda, Tim and I had worked together a little on presidential tapes, by which Nixon's historical reputation is utterly bound and tied, for better and worse. Tim wasn't a Nixon booster, and I think he ended up deeply discouraged about Nixon's character as a result of his forced curatorial march through the Watergate swamp. Yet he and the last elected moderate Republican president would have disagreed on relatively few domestic or foreign policy issues. Perhaps most important given the odds he faced, he displayed the quality Nixon prized most of all. It turns out that Tim Naftali was tough as hell.

The archivist of the U.S., Allen Weinstein, was so excited by the idea of making Tim our first federal director (the library opened in 1990 as a private institution) that he offered him the job a few days after my call. When things were going well at the library, Weinstein would stress that Tim was his man. When things got rocky, he'd remind me that it had all been my idea. Tim and I labored together for over three years, rarely disagreeing about substance but having a series of pitched battles about Tim's independence vs. the Nixon foundation's right to be consulted on exhibits and programs, space use on our shared campus, and even Tim's lower-case library logo, which he thought invoked the '60s and '70s, when Nixon was president, but we thought unstatesmanlike.

We got important work done anyway. I permitted him to open foundation-owned records to scholars and funded his oral history interviews with Nixon policy heavyweights and White House operatives. Our disagreements never became public nor interfered materially with our shared mission of establishing the federal Nixon library as the successor of a private museum and archive that had earned something of a reputation of partisanship (which, if it was a fair criticism, was no one's fault but mine). Tim's bosses at the National Archives fully embraced the same mission -- Weinstein, of course, and his deputy Sharon Fawcett, who had both worked hard to bring Nixon's library in from the cold.

Having bargained with them for hundreds of hours to launch the federal library, Kathy O'Connor (shown here with Fawcett), Nixon's longtime aide and last chief of staff, and I would sometimes call or write Weinstein and Fawcett to complain about Tim. We never got anywhere. They backed him unequivocally. The most I could pry out of the avuncular Weinstein was his theory that Tim and I were brothers at heart who clashed because of unacknowledged similarities in temperament and outlook. After we each had stated our grievances, he would smile and send us back to Yorba Linda to work it out. While I never fully accepted that I was Dan to Tim's Naphtali, Kathy and I both loved Tim's mother, Marjorie, a delightful Anglican from his home town of Montreal (Tim's late father, a builder, was Jewish). One problem may have been that I was having trouble letting go after spending two decades planning and running the library. By the same token, we felt that Tim, in his actions and public statements, was trying too hard to put distance between himself and the ancien regime, namely us. We didn't become close until I left to begin full-time ministry in February 2009, which, now that I think about it, is often the way with siblings.

Thanks to Kathy, my able successor as head of the Nixon foundation, relations with Naftali and NARA quickly improved. But her journey toward the promised land of happier collaborations with our federal colleagues was interrupted and cruelly ended by the Haldeman renaissance. After Tim invited Nixon White House counsel John Dean to give a speech in June 2009, Nixon's White House and CREEP aides (including some involved in Watergate or Watergate-related activities) and their friends, thanks to enablers on the foundation board, surged to positions of influence or even fiduciary authority.

They were wrong about Dean's appearance, which was inevitable and also appropriate as part of the library's transition to public control. The self-described lynchpin of Watergate, he is pivotal historical figure. Tim and we had already played host to Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. Bob Woodward visited in 2011 without incident or controversy. The actions of Haldeman's acolytes weren't based on what was best for the library, the public, or Nixon's reputation. They lashed out because they despised Dean for helping send fellow operatives to jail for Watergate crimes and then grasped for power because they believed it was their right and their turn. As Naftali told the Los Angeles Times, "It's a very special tribe that has never accepted the nation's verdict on Watergate."

By the fall of 2009, Tim had been at work for two years on the library's new Watergate exhibit, which Weinstein and Fawcett had ordered him to undertake, also at my suggestion. It was part of complex deal in which the feds paid millions to build an archives wing for Nixon's vast collection and agreed to take over the library in May 2007 and move the records from College Park, Maryland. Shaking hands with our federal partners, we and the Nixon foundation board had promised both our acquiescence in an exhibit that would be acceptable to historians and in library-controlled public programming, including appearances by Nixon critics.

But once under the control of Haldeman's tribe, Nixon's foundation broke its promises. Most of their harsh if ultimately impotent actions are part of the public record. They denounced Naftali publicly for inviting Dean. An operative wrote on the foundation web site that he should go run a museum for traitor Alger Hiss. They recruited Sen. Lamar Alexander (right), a former Nixon aide, to put a secret hold on the nomination of a new U.S. archivist to pressure or get rid of Naftali. They assembled a Watergate truth squad including convicted perjurer Dwight Chapin and attacked Tim's Watergate exhibit draft, calling for friendlier treatment of Haldeman and trying to prevent the public from seeing videotape in which operatives discussed dirty tricks and counting Jews in the federal government. A former foundation employee who'd opposed the NARA handover wrote a column associating Tim with "the left." Another operative filed a FOIA request to read Tim's e-mails. Yet another accused him publicly of sending coded signals about his sexual orientation. His wife publicly accused Tim of leaking prejudicial Nixon tapes to the media.

When Tim offered one of Nixon's daughters a tour of the library's new quarters, she accepted only to denounce him in front of her fellow foundation leaders and demand that he leave. He was shocked that his adversaries had gone that far. As I had learned over a decade before, when Nixon put me instead of his family in charge of his estate, the withdrawal of the favor of political offspring is a powerful weapon. Lucky for Tim, it's not quite as potent when the taxpayers rather than the offspring are paying your salary. Though the massive assault on his professionalism and character must've been upsetting and sometimes dispiriting, it can't help but have reassured Tim that he was on the right track.

Besides, his colleagues at NARA must've had his back. Officials in Washington and around the country, especially at other libraries, had to be aware of what he was up against as he did the difficult job the archivist of the U.S. had given him. When all Nixon's men went to war against a federal director in the last battle of Watergate, the blue coats would obviously know where their loyalties belonged.

Not so much, astonishingly. At some point, the Weinstein-Fawcett hard line weakened. After the public learned of the Haldeman truth squad's critique in the late summer of 2010, there were signals from Washington that it was receiving a respectful review. That's right: The National Archives, custodian of documents signed by Thomas Jefferson, was paying serious attention to a Watergate narrative co-signed by Dwight Chapin.

And it gets worse. I remembered Weinstein and Fawcett's stony imperviousness to Kathy's and my minor complaints as I read historian Maarja Krusten's reference to Tim being cussed out not by a Haldeman operative or Nixon family member but by one of his fellow presidential library directors. Someone had figured out how to reach deep into the government and enlist a taxpayer-paid NARA official for a flanking attack on Tim Naftali. Which director was it? What was the official trying to accomplish? Was it part of an effort to get Naftali out of the Nixon library or alter the content of the Watergate exhibit? Did top NARA officials know about or sanction it?

It's hard to imagine Barack Obama's new archivist, David Ferriero, doing so, especially after the senior senator from Tennessee held up his nomination. Besides, I agree with Krusten that he's a stand-up dude. As for Fawcett, I'd always found her to be a straight shooter. But we know from press reports late last year that she'd sided against Naftali and that the Nixon foundation offered her a consultancy after her retirement. All the library directors, including the one who dissed Tim, had reported to her. It's also important to know if Haldeman's operatives played a role. In 2009, the Nixon foundation tried unsuccessfully to get the other presidential foundations to join it against Naftali. Lamar Alexander isn't the only current or recently serving government official with ties to the Haldeman clique.

However it happened, a federal official with a six-figure salary was carrying Watergate for Nixon's men. Maybe this inside move against Naftali was just further proof (as if it were needed) of the wisdom of the scriptwriter who put the words "follow the money" in Watergate leaker Mark Felt's mouth in "All the President's Men." Krusten writes that the director told Naftali, "You're going to ruin it for the rest of us." Perhaps he was speaking on behalf of cash-strapped presidential libraries from Simi Valley to Boston, where private foundation money can still buy a considerable amount of hagiography for the entertainment of credulous museum-goers. Too many balanced and thorough museum exhibits -- torture, Monica Lewinsky, Iran-contra -- and the gravy train might dry up as ex-presidents' rich friends tire of underwriting an undesirable degree of objectivity. For creating (and in March 2011 successfully opening) the Watergate exhibit that his bosses and historians had demanded and that the public deserved instead of the one Dwight Chapin wanted, Tim Naftali had become the ultimate skunk in the Rose Garden.

The Bad Boys Of Watergate

While Chuck Colson didn't apologize to Daniel Ellsberg, he did to John Dean. Dean writes:

While there is little Chuck and I agreed about politically, we have had a long friendship based on mutual respect. While together in the custody of the U.S. Marshals at a safe house at Fort Holabird, Maryland, Chuck and I set aside our difference. He admitted he had tried to destroy me to defend Richard Nixon, and apologized. Begrudgingly he said that no one could have blown up the Watergate cover up better while taking his onslaught than yours truly, right down to figuring out that Nixon had taped us all. From Chuck, that was a compliment for there was a time when he was very good at destroying people.

Maybe that helps explain why he was good at the reverse, and helping broken people find a new life in the teachings of the Bible.

It's appropriate, in a way, that Watergate's bad boys found one another. Many of Nixon's other White House operatives despised Colson, who hired Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, and Dean, who masterminded the coverup. These critics liked to say that the pair played to Nixon's dark side, while they would've been wise enough not to follow his most noxious orders. Such wisdom seems to have been scarcer than they now remember. Chief of staff Bob Haldeman (shown above at the Nixon library many years ago with my godson, Harry Elliott, and me and at right with Nixon) always claimed that his meticulous staff structure would've prevented Watergate. Yet Haldeman's own factotums, on his instructions, sicced the FBI on journalists, launched dirty tricks, and counted Jews in the federal government.

Historians, journalists, Congress, and federal archivists have always categorized these abuses of government power under the rubric of Watergate. In their unsuccessful war during 2009-11 against former Nixon library director Tim Naftali, the Haldeman acolytes now in control of Nixon's foundation (aided by a sitting U.S. senator, former White House operative Lamar Alexander) tried to reduce Watergate to a somewhat mysterious, botched burglary and brief coverup. Their definition (not adopted by Naftali and the National Archives) would have pinned the worst raps on Colson, Dean, and of course Nixon (whom history blames most of all) while letting Haldeman and his loyalists off the hook. It helps you understand why Naftali called it the Haldeman foundation.

Who's The Expletive-Deleted Library Director?

During 2010-11, Nixon library director Tim Naftali was under relentless pressure over the Watergate exhibit that his bosses at the National Archives had ordered him to design and install. We know about the secret maneuvers by Nixon and Bob Haldeman operatives such as Sen. Lamar Alexander and the Watergate truth squad that included perjurer Dwight Chapin. Now historian and former Nixon archivist Maarja Krusten reports that a taxpayer-paid presidential library director got into the act and actually cussed Naftali out. Krusten says the event occurred in the last couple of years. I wonder if this publicly accountable official was representing the get-Naftali mission of the Haldeman clique and, if so, why.

Another Last War Of Watergate

Richard Nixon and Bob Haldeman's ex-aides went to war against John Dean, Nixon's White House counsel, in 2009, with a big boost from another of their own, Sen. Lamar Alexander. Now Dean has fired back in an account of the release of Nixon's June 1975 Watergate grand jury testimony:

There was an attempt to file an opposition...and I was surprised by its source: former Nixon White House junior level aide Geoff Shepard, who had worked on the staff of the Domestic Counsel.

Shepard, who graduated from law school, spent his career in the insurance industry after leaving the White House. More recently, he’s become an active Nixon apologist and conspiracy buff, who published a book titled: The Secret Plot to Make Ted Kennedy President, Inside the Real Watergate Conspiracy (2008). I have not read the book. When I first learned of it, I happened to be talking with the person for whom Shepard worked at the Nixon White House. He told me that he had warned Shepard that he was, in essence, making a fool of himself with his account. This was advice from a person who is intimately familiar with Watergate and has written about it. It was correct, but this fact has not deterred Shepard from proceeding accordingly.

In a similarly fatuous fashion, Shepard tried to intervene in the Public Citizen case I described above, to oppose the petition to unseal Nixon’s grand jury testimony. However, Judge Lamberth denied his request. Shepard then totally flip-flopped and filed a petition requesting the court unseal virtually everything relating to Watergate held by NARA, all the grand jury proceedings, all the Senate Watergate Committee material, the records of the House Impeachment Inquiry of Nixon, and all the WSPF trial materials relating to Watergate. Shepard’s petition appeared to be an effort to stall the effort to unseal Nixon’s testimony. But it failed. When granting the motion to unseal Nixon’s testimony, Judge Lamberth issued an order denying Shepard’s request(s), while pointing out their complete failure.

When Kennedy died in August 2009, I wrote:

In May 2008, when we learned that Kennedy had cancer, a former Nixon White House aide, Geoff Shepard, published a book accusing him of having manipulated the Watergate scandal for the sake of a, well, Kennedy restoration. In the annals of publishing, a stroke of bad timing. With the country awash in sympathy, I decided it would be in poor taste for the Nixon Foundation to host a planned book event for Shepard with the federal Nixon Library. The gesture endeared us neither to the author nor the feds, but it seemed like the right call at the time.

The Dean Haters Society Thanks The Senator

Former Nixon White House counsel John Dean's 1973 testimony before the U.S. Senate's Select Committee on Watergate, distressing though it was for President Nixon and his family and aides, was a signal event in the nation's and Senate's life. Times have evidently changed in the upper body. In 2009 Sen. Lamar Alexander (below), a former Nixon aide, secretly used the Senate's rules as part of an apparent effort to punish the director of the Nixon library, Tim Naftali, for inviting Dean for a speech in Yorba Linda that June on the 37th anniversary of politics' most fateful break-in.

In his LA Times article, published on-line Tuesday afternoon and on the front page of Wednesday's print edition, reporter Chris Goffard gets Alexander, a Republican from Tennessee, to admit that, at the request of operative Ron Walker, he held up President Obama's nomination of David Ferriero to be archivist of the U.S. Here's why, the senator said:

What I said [to Ferrerio] was, "Obviously, Watergate's an important part of President Nixon's presidency, just like Monica Lewinsky is part of Bill Clinton's presidency, but the whole Clinton library isn't about Monica Lewinsky."

But in the fall of 2009, nobody was accusing Naftali of devoting too much space to Watergate. On the contrary: The Nixon foundation had been complaining for months that the library's new Watergate gallery was overdue. Walker's beef was his and Alexander's White House colleague John Dean. Outraged by Naftali's Dean invitation -- Dean is considered a whistler-blower by most observers, a rat fink by the Haldeman faithful -- operatives began to organize in the spring and summer of 2009. Obama sent Ferriero's name to the Senate on July 28. In September, a jumbo-salary Nixon foundation "president" job was awarded to former advance man Walker after a search by Korn/Ferry, where Walker used to work. Ferriero was confirmed by the Senate on Nov. 6. It couldn't have been too long after he got his job that Walker asked Alexander to confront Ferriero.

Walker claims that he didn't want to fire Naftali. "It was to send a signal to the archives if Tim's not gonna straighten up and fly right," Walker told Goffard. Alexander said this: "I know many of [Alexander's fellow Nixon White House staffers] were unhappy with [Naftali's] attitude. And they talked to me about it. Ron asked me to express that to the new director of the archives." No matter how many Haldeman operatives called, troubling a presidential library director for hosting the man who helped send your colleagues to jail for their Watergate crimes isn't a proper use of senatorial power and privilege, especially when Congress is held in such low esteem by the public.

It's ironic that several months later, Walker gave an interview to reporter Scott Martel, comparing his tenure as foundation "president" to mine as executive director:

Walker says he and Naftali get along better than Naftali and Taylor. “It got to be a war between them,” Walker says.

That depends on what you mean by war. Martel obviously didn't know, because Walker hadn't told him, that while Tim and I had a wearying series of procedural skirmishes, Walker and a U.S. senator went thermonuclear on him. In the same article, Walker accused Naftali of unspecified "coded actions" to signal that he was gay. That's nuts. Tim is openly gay. Walker must be frustrated that, despite his secret senatorial signal, Naftali never did straighten up.

How Haldeman's Tribe Got Tennessee Cred

Chris Goffard at the LA Times has revealed that the secret campaign against Nixon library director Tim Naftali (left) waged by Bob Haldeman's out-of-office good old boys included an incumbent, Sen. Lamar Alexander (below), a former Nixon aide who served the people of Tennessee by placing a stop-Naftali hold on President Obama's 2009 nomination of David Ferriero as archivist of the United States. Alexander told Goffard that the Haldeman foundation didn't like Naftali's "attitude." In the summer of 2010, as the anti-Naftali campaign continued, the same operative who sicced the U.S. Senate on Tim complained about the Nixon library director and distinguished Cold War scholar's alleged and unspecified "coded actions" signaling that he was gay.

In getting a senator to tie up a presidential nomination, Haldeman's men insist that they weren't trying to get Naftali fired. It was just to give Alexander the opportunity to tell Ferriero, previously the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Libraries, that Nixon went to China and established the EPA. Whatever its goal, the Alexander gambit failed to block Naftali and the Watergate exhibit, as did the foundation's next moves -- the creation of a Watergate truth squad including perjurer Dwight Chapin and the apparent conversion of archives official Sharon Fawcett. Goffard writes:

There is no sign that the [Alexander-Ferrerio] meeting influenced Naftali's approach, and Naftali said the Watergate exhibit opened as he envisioned it, despite the foundation's panel-by-panel critique and a nine-month delay.

And this:

After former Nixon aide John Taylor left as head of the Nixon foundation in 2009 to serve as a full-time Episcopal priest, the foundation fell into the hands of "Haldeman's inner circle of political operatives," Naftali said.

"Sadly, they were using the same tactics, from the same playbook," Naftali said of the foundation's campaign against him. "It's a very special tribe that has never accepted the nation's verdict on Watergate."

"Come Home America" Watch, Day 34

After Dick Cheney accused President Obama of dithering over Afghanistan, Cheney's fellow Republican, former Gov. Lamar Alexander, spoke wisely:

I think President Obama is entitled to take sufficient time to decide what our long-term role ought to be in Afghanistan. Then I think he should come to Congress and say to the American people what that plan is and see if he can persuade us and all of the American people of the rightness of it because he needs to have support all the way through to the end of that mission, so I want him to take the time to get it right.

Hat tip to the "Daily Dish"

Nixbamian

Odd to have Nixon administration and campaign veterans such as Lamar Alexander and Karl Rove calling Obama Nixonian. As a matter of fact, the charge manages to disserve both Presidents.

As MK notes in a comment here, President Nixon's media strategy was more discerning than most remember. That being said, as Joe Conason reminds us, RN's aides John Dean and Chuck Colson accumulated the names of his administration's critics for what became known as the enemies list. Dirty tricks were never justified. But Conason doesn't point out that President Nixon had inherited a war that was much more complex and costly than Afghanistan while trying to govern in a far more hostile global, political, and media environment. While Nixon critics like to say that his abuses of power were sui generis, so too was the poisonous temperament of his times. Obama's party controls Congress. Nixon's did not. Obama has Fox overtly against him. Nixon had most reporters and editors voting against him and some, at least, subtly prosecuting political agendas. Obama has tea parties. Nixon had firebombings, riots, efforts to shut down Washington, and Kent State. In his book In the Arena, Nixon took responsibility for inculcating a corrosive us-vs.-them mentality in the White House. Few if any of his often vicious ideological critics ever did the same.

By the same token, Conason is right that Obama's public posturing against Fox News isn't comparable to the Nixon administration's behind-the-scenes efforts to punish media adversaries for their perceived bias. In at least one sense, though, nothing has changed. Some who were put on the enemies list are still bragging about it. In the same spirit, most Fox personalities are cheerfully brazen about promoting Obama's demise. They make an incredibly tempting target, and now that Obama and his aides have aimed and fired, Fox couldn't be happier as it totes up its bolstered ratings.

Anderson Cooper probably compared Obama to Nixon to avoid the charge that CNN wasn't being fair and balanced. I don't think he believes it for a second. The media don't have it anywhere near as bad as they did under Nixon, and Obama doesn't have it anywhere near as bad as Nixon did.