The Whats Vs. The Whys Of Torture

Andrew Sullivan skewers former Bush adviser Karl Rove for saying that the Bush administration didn't authorize torture even though he's said that John McCain was tortured in North Vietnam because he was left in a stress position, one of the techniques the Bush administration authorized. Under political and media pressure, the Bush administration itself banned the most controversial technique, waterboarding, which hadn't actually been used since 2003. But as for whether it amounted to torture, the word game that Rove and others are playing is unseemly and dangerous.

While its agents didn't maim and kill its prisoners, the CIA used extreme discomfort and pain to punish people or extract information. Perhaps Rove and other Bush advocates should call it "mild torture," "not the worst kind of torture you can imagine," or "not anything like what our enemies would do and have done to our guys if they got the chance." But they should stop acting as though it wasn't torture at all.

The first reason is that insisting otherwise is an Orwellian misuse of language. Besides that, after all these months the American people have every reason to believe that the fundamental issue in the torture debate is the definition of the word. If President Bush and his advocates are seen as losing the semantic argument, they risk losing the moral one as well. Better to cede the definition and invite the more important and far more complicated debate over how much latitude we are willing to give the government in times of apparent existential challenge. Bush and his advocates will stand taller in that conversation, and rightly so. One risks looking evasive and self-serving by arguing that torture isn't torture. If instead you say, "I might have gone too far to protect the people of the United States, and I have to say that I'd probably do it again," you don't look perfect, but you also don't look small.

Did Bush really go too far? He may have. Did he do so with the best intentions as well as with the knowledge of Democrats and Republicans in Congress? He did. Do future administrations have something to learn from this experience? Undoubtedly. Should the former President and his advisers be prosecuted? Only if we want to weaken the Presidency. Only if we're more interested in political retribution and advantage than in really understanding and learning from what went right and wrong.

Let's At Least Avoid The Political Torture

If there's one place where President Obama's political and diplomatic interests coincide, it's keeping the controversy over whether the Bush administration illegally sanctioned torture from descending into a partisan witch hunt. While cultural elites may think that an exhibitionist accountability exercise will ennoble the U.S. in the eyes of the world, it's more likely to provoke opportunism among our enemies and bemusement among our friends. At home, it will make it harder for Obama to command the center and rebuff the GOP in the 2010 midterm elections.

Though Nancy Pelosi and other liberal Democrats, seemingly intent on punishing Republicans, want a special panel on alleged torture, Obama and Senate Democratic leaders don't, and they held the line today -- an improvement on several days' mixed signals from Obama. A bright partisan spark was thrown by one of his lieutenants yesterday when House Republicans, angered because Obama released Bush-era memos authorizing harsh interrogation techniques (which some call torture), pressed Secretary of State Clinton on charges by Dick Cheney that the Obama administration is covering up evidence that the interrogations worked. She pressed back:

It won't surprise you that I don't consider him a particularly reliable source of information.

Ouch! Yet the same day, "Politico" reported:

Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair acknowledged in a memo to the intelligence community that Bush-era interrogation practices yielded had "high-value information,” then omitted that admission from a public version of his assessment.

So Clinton accused Cheney of being a liar even as it was made clear that her colleagues are spinning the torture story, just like he said. If there was ever a subject in need of a no-spin zone, it's this one. And yet the Clinton-Cheney contretemps is a reliable preview of what Pelosi's process would look like. I say full disclosure on the alleged torture as well as all terrorist plots discerned and thwarted since 2001. If it's still too dangerous to talk about the latter, then it's probably premature to investigate the former and impossible to do so fairly and dispassionately.

Paula Jones Vs. Osama's Jones

The wheel of retributive political justice goes 'round: Jonathan Chait says Republicans are hypocrites for opposing torture indictments for members of the Bush administration after having impeached President Clinton for perjury. The rule of law applies equally to everyone, he argues.

The varying motives for the alleged crimes notwithstanding (protecting the United States vs. not getting in trouble with the First Lady), Chait overlooks an important event when he says:

This argument [that Bush's decisions on torture should be understood in the light of post-Sept. 11 anxiety] would carry more weight if Republicans had changed their thinking on torture and could be expected to follow the law the next time they won the presidency. Alas, they show little sign of intellectual progress.

As a matter of fact, the Bush administration's thinking changed enough that it decided to stop waterboarding in 2005. So if Chait is really saying that torture would have been understandable immediately after Sept. 11 if ultimately the U.S. learned that it probably shouldn't engage in such practices -- well, it did learn, because it stopped, and under Republicans. The pro-torture arguments Chait describes as being intellectually stunted are part of a political rather than a policy debate, since they're being made by those who are engaging in mortal combat over whether Bush officials should be prosecuted. No matter if their thinking has evolved or not, saying, "Now that you think about it, we really are war criminals" is probably not the best defensive move.

If the actions of the next administration, Republican or Democrat, are Chait's real concern, then an intensive blue ribbon investigation (but not leading to prosecutions) is the best way to go.

The Killing Field Was Ground Zero

Andrew Sullivan:

On Fox News, waterboarding someone 183 times in a month is not even close to torture, and the only bad thing in constructing and using the torture techniques devised and designed by the Gestapo, the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Chinese and Stalin was that the evidence was not kept secret. It is asserted as fact that this waterboarding saved lives, even though we have no solid evidence for that, apart from the word of those who ordered the torture.

The American people are entitled to know if the U.S. government went too far in permitting torture. But comparisons to the 20th century's most odious regimes are offensive. Does Sullivan equate their genocidal megalomania with the policies of the Bush administration, whose sin appears to have been that it became obsessed about protecting the U.S. from further attacks?

Obviously war crimes, if they occurred, could not be excused purely on the basis of good intentions. But as Sullivan notes, only those who permitted these interrogation techniques really know if they produced any useful information. Does he think they're lying? Or is it possible that they know things we don't about the threats the U.S. faced?

So I say again: We need to know what was done to terrorism suspects in our name. As part of the same inquiry, we need to know about the terrorist attacks that have been thwarted since 2001. That's the only way to find out if we learned anything valuable from the suspects. More important, if we really need further evidence that George W. Bush isn't Pol Pot, that's how we'll come to understand better the zealous mindset of leaders who promised to protect their homeland and appear to have done so.

"Pro-Torture" Christians

Andrew Sullivan, an eloquent conservative voice against torture, rouses himself from his "summer bloggatical" to respond to yesterday's developments. In his post, he reiterates Matthew Yglesias's generalization about bloodthirsty evangelical Christians. I assume they have evidence to back their statements up. Sullivan's comparison of the attitudes of evangelicals and Iranian Muslims would take an exceptionally specific poll question, asked of both Americans and Iranians:

[M]uch of the American people, especially evangelical Christians, expect less in terms of human rights from their own government than Iranians do of theirs'. In fact, American evangelicals are much more pro-torture in this respect than many Iranian Muslims.

White House Burned By Hackosphere

It appears that someone at the White House gave President Obama Andrew Sullivan's post saying that Winston Churchill's government didn't use torture during World War II. During his press conference last night, Obama offered it up as authoritative evidence in favor of his no-torture position.

As it turns out, the record isn't so clear. Ben Smith has now unearthed evidence of British torture centers that was obviously beyond the reach of the resources of "The Daily Dish" and the Executive Office of the President, elusive evidence buried deep within the web site of the British Guardian, damning evidence available only to those who Google with exactly the right search words.

Sullivan now says that if it really happened and Churchill knew about it, then he's a war criminal, too.

Interestingly, if you capture the link to Sullivan's new entry, it says, "the-british-tortured," perhaps the draft headline for the entry. Someone changed the final "Dish" headline to "Three Mansions In London," which sounds like the title of a Moody Blues song. I thought that on this subject, we didn't like weasel words.

Imago Dei And Torture

In an "epistle," the cover story in the new "Atlantic," Andrew Sullivan, who supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, calls on President Bush to be accountable for torture in the same way Reagan accepted responsibility for the Iran-contra affair and Lincoln for the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War. In doing so, he appeals to his and Bush's shared Christian faith:

[T]orture has no defense whatsoever in Christian morality. There are no circumstances in which it can be justified, let alone integrated as a formal program within a democratic government. The Catholic catechism states, “Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions… is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity.” Dignity is the critical word there. Even evil men are human and redeemable. Our faith demands that, even in legitimate punishment or interrogation, the dignity of prisoners must be respected. Our faith teaches that each of us—even Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—is made in the image of God. To violate that imago Dei by stripping and freezing him, by slamming him against a wall, or strapping him to a board to nearly drown him again and again and again, to bombard him with noise and light until he loses his mind, to reduce a human being to a mental and spiritual shell—nothing can justify this for a Christian. Nothing. To wield that power is to wield evil. And such evil is almost always committed by those who believe they are pursuing good.

Frank Rich's Astonishing Accusation

Astonishingly, Frank Rich writes that Bush administration officials may have ordered Abu Zubaydah to be tortured in 2002 not because they feared an imminent terrorist attack, as they say, but so he would fabricate a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein:

Five years after the Abu Ghraib revelations, we must acknowledge that our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.

Astonishing, if true. If you are wondering about Rich's source, it's this comment by Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), who speculated to Rich about why investigators were putting so much heat on Zubaydah:

They’d say it was to get more information. But they were desperate to find a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

A politician's speculation leading to a direct charge, in print, of what would probably be an impeachable or indictable offense. Astonishing.

A Word From Deacon Philip

Besides being a top official in the Bush State Department, Philip Zelikow was executive director of the Sept. 11 commission. His even-handed New York Times op-ed anticipates what the executive summary of a bipartisan fact-finding torture commission report (as opposed to a partisan get-or-save-Dick-Cheney free for all) might sound like:

A professional evaluation of the C.I.A.’s claims [about the effectiveness of the harsh interrogation techniques] would have to examine these cases to sift and weigh the contributions. The Senate Intelligence Committee is embarking on an important effort to sort out the claims and counterclaims.

What the committee may well find, after all the sifting, is that the reports were a critical part of the intelligence flow, but rarely — if ever — affected a “ticking bomb” situation.

That "rarely -- if ever" brings the reader up short. Tell us, please, if there was such a situation. But whether the techniques were effective or not, Zelikow argues that the U.S. Army's anti-al-Qaeda program in Iraq, which complied with international standards, was highly effective as well. As for the CIA's program, allies and even the FBI kept at arms length because they couldn't or didn't want to be associated with practices that smacked of torture. From studying Sept. 11 closer than anyone, Zelikow knows all too well what happens when intelligence gatherers aren't working togeteher.

The New Knitters

While it's always dangerous to speculate about motives, Michael Barone's assessment of why some people want Bush officials prosecuted rings true:

Whence cometh the fury of these people? I think it arises less from revulsion at interrogation techniques -- who thinks that captured al-Qaida leaders should be treated politely and will then tell the full truth? -- than it does from a desire to see George W. Bush and Bush administration officials publicly humiliated and repudiated. Just as Madame Defarge relished watching the condemned walk from the tumbrel to the guillotine, our contemporary Defarges want to see the people they hate condemned and destroyed.

Bush critics may well respond that their anger over torture isn't opportunistic. Instead, they'd say, the alleged abuses were the inevitable consequence of a mentality of lawlessness typifying the Bush administration from the beginning -- the original sin, of course, being the allegedly stolen 2000 election. In the same way, for many of Richard Nixon's most entrenched antagonists, the narrative that began with the Alger Hiss case was perfected in Watergate. It was in his nature, the argument goes. We should've known from the beginning. Why didn't they listen to us? As I've learned in a half-lifetime promoting the pro-Nixon nuances, it's almost impossible to dissuade those who have such fixed attitudes. Whether they should determine the structure and course of a sober national debate on torture is one of President Obama's many difficult tactical challenges.

Dick Cheney: Elusive Scapegoat

At The New Nixon, reflections on Cheney, Nixon, and scapegoats. From my reply to historian and former archivist Maarja Krusten:

On leaving office, GWB obviously decided to play it old school, letting his successor have his 100 days and assuming, no doubt, that Obama would give him the same cover that RN gave LBJ by not overtly scapegoating him. The preponderance of Obama's public comments makes clear that this is where his heart is. But with the left (significantly abetted by the world's most influential blogger, Andrew Sullivan) defying him and demanding torture prosecutions, I think Cheney heard the rumble of footsteps heading for the Bastille and decided that he was not about to sit meekly and wait for the knock on the palace door.

Have his sometimes aggressive-sounding interviews encouraged his critics? Maybe just a little. And yet by the same token, by essentially saying, "You want a piece of me?", he's rallied both the right and the pragmatic middle (including people such as I, not that anyone's listening) and thus increased the political danger to Obama if he permits a witch hunt. Right now I hear official Washington -- government and media elites alike -- concurring 1) we need to get to the bottom of torture but 2) without legally scapegoating individuals in the prior administration, which would tear the country apart....

Richard Nixon ended up being a perfect scapegoat for Vietnam. In a way, his resignation helped us avoid ever having to come to terms with the war. My guess is that Cheney has decided he doesn't want to go gently into the San Clemente sunset.

Join the CIA And Get A Clue

What would a father do to save his daughter? What would a spy do to prevent a terrorist attack? While the second question doesn't come up in "Taken," it was the first thing I thought of watching retired CIA agent Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) torture and kill the Albanian flesh merchant who had kidnapped his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace). Bryan even shoots a perfectly innocent woman in the arm to get the attention of her husband, a corrupt French police official who may have information about Kim. "It's a flesh wound," he says reassuringly as she writhes in agony on the dining room floor. I lost track of the number of people Bryan killed on the way to saving his daughter. It's movie magic and manipulation, I realize, but as a father, I was rooting for him all the way. I imagine a majority of members of the Supreme Court would have been as well. I'm glad movie audiences don't rule on the legality of torture and rendition.

Neeson's character has quit the CIA to be a more attentive father to 17-year-old Kim, who colludes with her mother Leonore (Famke Janssen) to trick him into permitting her to accompany a friend to Paris, where she and a friend secretly plan to follow U2 on their European tour. This is egregious; 17-year-olds don't much like U2, in my experience. The girls are kidnapped on their first afternoon. What is it with these movies about how dangerous Europe is for American teenagers? While I've never been able to watch it all the way through, "Hostel" promoted the same view. In the case of "Taken," the bad guys are Albanian and French. There's also an old-fashioned perverted Arab sheik, plus a Paris-based American flesh merchant who plays the role of protecting the filmmakers from the charge that they're picking on foreigners. Still, in "Taken," only America is safe. Highly capable CIA agents know how dangerous and corrupt the world really is. Everyone else, especially women, is clueless.

Putting Life Ahead Of Life

William Saletan equates proponents of embryonic stem cell research to proponents of torture:

Think about what's being dismissed here as "politics" and "ideology." You don't have to equate embryos with full-grown human beings—I don't—to appreciate the danger of exploiting them. Embryos are the beginnings of people. They're not parts of people. They're the whole thing, in very early form. Harvesting them, whether for research or medicine, is different from harvesting other kinds of cells. It's the difference between using an object and using a subject. How long can we grow this subject before dismembering it to get useful cells? How far should we strip-mine humanity in order to save it?

If you have trouble taking this question seriously—if you think it's just the hypersensitivity of fetus-lovers—try shifting the context from stem cells to torture. There, the question is: How much ruthless violence should we use to defeat ruthless violence? The paradox and the dilemma are easy to recognize. Creating and destroying embryos to save lives presents a similar, though not equal, dilemma.

No Fun With Dick And Nancy

Andrew Sullivan called for the prosecution of former Vice President Cheney because, he says, Cheney broke the laws against torture. Sullivan now says that if congressional leaders, including Speaker Pelosi, knew about the alleged felonies but did nothing, they too should be held accountable. But he hasn't yet written that Pelosi should be indicted and prosecuted as an accessory to a felony.

I'm not accusing Sullivan of hypocrisy, because I don't think he has partisan motives for dogging the Bush administration so relentlessly over torture. But eventually he'll have to confront the preposterousness of prosecuting government officials. We now know that in the wake of Sept. 11, all three branches of government, including leaders from both parties, acted as though the U.S. was facing an existential threat. We're talking not about a lawless administration but a government-wide state of mind, reflecting the mentality and wishes of voters, in the face of a danger that felt and appeared virtually unprecedented in our national experience.

A truth commission to understand what happened and why in order to guide future Presidents, yes. Locking up a former VP and the woman who is second in line to the Presidency, no.

We Need The Whole Story On Torture

I'm against torture (who isn't?) in any but the most exigent situations, namely everyone's favorite hypothetical, the highly unlikely scenario of having someone in custody who otherwise won't say where the ticking nuclear device threatening hundreds of thousands of lives is hidden. But as the Obama administration releases the Bush-era memos providing legal justification for severe interrogation techniques, I just don't share the passion of Andrew Sullivan and others who favor prosecution of top officials.

To be more precise, I share their concerns but not their anger. After all, the Bush administration calculated that the U.S. faced an existential threat after Sept. 11. They promised the American people that they'd do anything in their power to protect us, and by and large, we were happy to hear it. Allegations that in the process of keeping the promise, the government put itself in the same moral position as Nazis, or even that our democracy was measurably eroded, seem discredited by the results of the 2008 election.

Had there been another attack on the scale of 2001's, we would not be looking at these memos, and we would probably have a different President. Did George W. Bush overestimate and lawlessly overreact to the threat? Or did he meet it so successfully that we now feel safe enough to scapegoat him for his tactics?

There's no question that the memos sound weasel wordy and opportunistic. This image of waterboarding from a museum detailing the crimes of the genocidal Khmer Rouge is especially ironic.

Still, if the Bush policies have been rolled back by his freely elected successor, what exactly is the purpose of a legal witch hunt? Instead, I'd favor a blue-ribbon panel of some kind, given the charge of guiding future administrations. But its members, and to the extent possible the public, should see evidence of all the plots that were thwarted or didn't succeed for some other reason. Ideally, we should know everything Bush knew before we decide he went too far while protecting us. We have a responsibility to make sure we know what was done in our name, legally or not. We also have the right to know why.

O'Reilly On Obama's Unknown Factor

Bill O'Reilly, host of the most popular news program on cable television, believed that he's summoned, and uniquely positioned, to serve the public, which he calls "the folks," in an era of change and crisis. "The television 'Factor' is going to be a major factor in this country," O'Reilly said Friday evening before a crowd of nearly 1,200 at the Nixon Library. "The O'Reilly Factor's" mission in the year to come: Figuring President Obama out and, if necessary, holding him accountable. "Nobody else in the media's doing what we're doing," he said.

While O'Reilly believes that Obama realizes his political future depends on rescuing the economy in his first two years, the PE's perspective on the war on terrorism seems murkier. One reason: his aggressively anti-torture AG-designate. "There's not an intelligence guy in the country who wants to look over his shoulder and see Eric Holder, who may indict you for anything," O'Reilly said, adding that his sources tell him that professionals are leaving the intelligence services at a startling rate as Bush Administration opponents demand indictments and trials. If there's no new terrorist attack, O'Reilly said, "then they'll harass Bush and Cheney until 2022." If, heaven forbid, there is a new attack, then the anti-torture movement will lose its salience: "Bush and Cheney will say, 'Yeah, [when we were in] we beat the crap out of 'em'."

As harsh as that looks in type, it went over great with O'Reilly's audience, with whom he got into an easy rhythm the moment he took the stage. He's plain-spoken, non-ideological, funny, and unapologetic about his sometimes aggressive populism. It sounded as though everyone watches his show daily and had seen the recent greatest hits, including his famous brawl with Rep. Barney Frank. "I haven't paid for a sandwich and soda in a deli since that interview," he said, adding that the secret of his success is that "I just reflect what you feel." Whether on the left or right, he said, Americans are angry, "and it's justifiable, when your 401(k) evaporates, and people on Wall Street are stealing us blind."

One of the reasons Sen. McCain lost the election, O'Reilly said, is that he didn't sound angry enough at those who had brought the economy to the brink of chaos. O'Reilly said he was sorry he too hadn't paid more attention to economic issues on "the Factor" before the mid-September crash. "We were busy looking to the outside for the threat," he said.

O'Reilly is promoting his fifth non-fiction bestseller, the highly readable memoir A Bold Fresh Piece Of Humanity. He invoked old-fashioned virtues of family and discipline as learned from his parents in Levittown, New York and the nuns in parochial school. An opponent of gay marriage, he said Obama's choice of the evangelical Pastor Rick Warren to pray at his Inauguration was "a stroke of genius" designed to further separate himself from his controversial former pastor and friend, Jeremiah Wright. "Obama's thinking, 'Okay, the gays are mad. Where're they gonna go?' My five-year-old son says, 'I'm running away,' and I say, 'See you later'." Only if Obama fails to deliver on key domestic issues such as national health insurance, O'Reilly said, would he be in danger of losing substantial elements of his so-called progressive supporters.

Asked about President Nixon, O'Reilly said that Fox News colleague Monica Crowley, an aide in the former President's New Jersey office, has told him of RN's graciousness and many unheralded gestures of support to those in need. "He was on the way of doing some significant things when he got hung up on Watergate, the same way Bush got hung up on Iraq," he said. "He paid for his mistakes."

If The President Does It, That Mean's It's Legal

Mark Hosenball in "Newsweek":

In a closed-door appearance before the Senate intelligence committee, White House counsel Gregory Craig was asked whether the president was required by law to follow executive orders. According to people familiar with his remarks, who asked for anonymity when discussing a private meeting, Craig answered that the administration did not believe he was. The implication: in a national-security crisis, Obama could deviate from his own rules. A White House official said that Craig's remarks were being "mischaracterized."

Some Capitol Hill sources and intel officials said Craig's private remarks constituted a big loophole in new guidelines, one that would allow Obama to behave much like President Bush. "I don't think there's a really big change, sub rosa," said one veteran undercover spy. Intel sources cautioned that Craig's declaration does not mean Obama plans to issue secret orders that would contradict his public anti-torture stance. (During his confirmation hearing, Dennis Blair, Obama's new intel czar, said emphatically that there would be no torture "on my watch.") What it probably means in practice, the spy said, is that Obama could, in a dire emergency, issue a secret presidential "finding" instructing the CIA or another agency to overstep boundaries of public policy.

Not Yet A Different Rendition

Maybe the President has been more startled than he expected by his intelligence briefings. The New York Times:

In a closely watched case involving rendition and torture, a lawyer for the Obama administration seemed to surprise a panel of federal appeals judges on Monday by pressing ahead with an argument for preserving state secrets originally developed by the Bush administration.

That Campaign Would've Been Torture

Former blogger Ross Douthat, the New York Times's latest new conservative, thinks Dick Cheney should have run for President last year instead of Sen. McCain so George W. Bush's interrogation techniques could have been adjudicated politically instead of legally.

Presidents' droit du seigneur

Richard Nixon was famous for collecting "historic firsts." His friendly rival Ronald Reagan has beat him to the last one. While Yorba Linda continues to wallow in Watergate, the Reagan library, 20 years after it opened in Simi Valley, California, has finally uncovered the scandal that buffeted Reagan's presidency in 1986-87:

Before the [about-to-be-unveiled] renovation, the Reagan library made scant mention of the Iran-Contra scandal, the secret U.S. sale of arms to Iran despite an embargo. The sales were an attempt to induce Iranian-backed guerrillas in Lebanon to free American hostages, but some of the proceeds went to fund anti-communist Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

The new library devotes a section to Iran-Contra, including a recording of Reagan's 1987 speech in which he admits responsibility for the affair.

The long-awaited gust of fresh air in Simi Valley is in the way of all things presidential librarian. Because their millions give them leverage over the National Archives, ex-presidents' friends and families get to see hagiographic museums when libraries first open. It's one price federal archivists pays to get state-of-the-art storage facilities which enable them to preserve White House records for scholars and researchers.

The museums usually last 5-10 years before being renovated or replaced, when objectivity begins to intrude. With the federal Nixon library's new Watergate exhibit evidently still tied up by the Watergate-era Nixon friends who now control his foundation, have the Reaganites outdone the Nixonites in historical transparency?

No and yes. When we opened the Nixon library in 1990, it was an exception to the rule for at least two reasons. The first is that it was privately rather than publicly run. The second is that it had a substantial exhibit on Watergate, the ugliest episode in Richard Nixon's career. That set it apart from the public Johnson and Reagan libraries, whose first-generation museums neglected Vietnam and Iran-contra.

In Yorba Linda, we knew we'd be pilloried for overlooking Watergate. Our solution was a large, polemical exhibit which attracted considerable criticism from reporters and historians over the years, though none managed to find an error. (Trying to do so, historian David Greenberg committed a couple of his own.) In 2006, in my 17th year as Nixon library director and in the midst of our second attempt to turn it over to the taxpayers, NARA's presidential libraries chief, Sharon Fawcett, and I agreed that the new federal director, distinguished Cold War historian Tim Naftali, was the best person to plan and install the second-generation Watergate exhibit.

But while a pro-Nixon Watergate exhibit was one thing, the no-holds-barred rendition Naftali envisioned (based on extensive interviews with Nixon men such as Dwight Chapin, shown here) was quite another. The public learned last August of Nixon operatives' attempts to derail the new exhibit. One can also imagine secret maneuvers. Were other presidential foundations perhaps given the impression that Naftali and Fawcett were trying to take away presidents' traditional droit du seigneur when it comes to their precious reputations? Just think of a Nixon hand clutching a glass of chardonnay and whispering in the ear of someone from the George W. Bush foundation, "If they get their way on Watergate, you'll have to open your museum with a torture exhibit."

But that was never the point. At 21 years old, the Nixon library has reached the age of historical maturity. Besides, no matter how defensive some of his men may be about their own reputations when it comes to the full range of Watergate-related activities, the reputation of the Nixonite who actually thought of going to China can withstand telling the full story. And now Ronald Reagan has beat him to it.