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."

All Haldeman's Men

When those in control of Richard Nixon's foundation posted a small portion of their 158-page critique of the Nixon library's new Watergate exhibit, it seems to have piqued reporters' curiosity about the rest. Chris Goffard of the LA Times obtained it and learned that Nixon's White House men, a number of them Bob Haldeman acolytes, were as interested in rehabilitating their mentor as 37:

The foundation called for the removal of a section titled "Dirty Tricks and Political Espionage" and suggested "something complimentary" be said about Nixon's top aide, H.R. Haldeman, who served 18 months in prison for covering up the Watergate burglary.

As for the extent of the Nixon-Haldeman operatives' influence on the final exhibit, the New York Times' Adam Nagourney, who broke the news of the war on Nixon library director and exhibit curator Tim Naftali last August, reports:

Almost none of the requests made by the foundation was reflected in the final exhibition.

Photo of dirty tricks and political espionage section of the Nixon library Watergate exhibit by Gina Ferazzi, LA Times

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.

Anatomy Of A Sneer

The LA Times continues its federophilic coverage of the Nixon Library with this ungenerous reflection by Karin Klein.

Last Thursday, her colleague Christopher Goffard left readers with the misleading impression that the transfer of the library to the National Archives has resulted in the opening of more Presidential records than would otherwise have been the case.

Klein called us later in the day to ask some follow-up questions. As she recounts it,

“What kind of changes to the library did you want to ask about?” a spokesman for the foundation inquired guardedly when I called for information Wednesday. And then, sardonically, “Oh, yes, I would expect the L.A. Times to be asking about Watergate.”

Well, considering that the archives had just released notes and recordings detailing Nixon’s attempts to smear perceived “enemies” — anyone who disagreed about the Vietnam War — that would seem the natural question.

My colleague couldn’t possibly have been more sardonic than Klein was in her piece. As a matter of fact, his question was natural precisely because her questions were coming from the LA Times — which, for instance, last year falsely attributed to reporter-hating Nixonians a famous scholar’s quote about the the Washington Post’s Watergate ethics.

Klein says she visited the Nixon Library to observe our old Watergate gallery. She evidently observed poorly:

When I first visited the library nearly five years ago, its greatest quirk was the Watergate exhibit, which asserted that the break-in and coverup that ushered in an era of mistrust of government were actually caused by the zeal of two unethical Washington Post reporters “to create a Watergate story.”

That’s an image — zealous Carl and Bob dressed up as zealous Hunt and Liddy. Actually, neither we nor anyone else on the planet ever claimed that “the break-in and coverup…were actually caused” by newspaper reporters. But at the LA Times, you can write whatever you want about Nixon Foundation folks, no matter how fanciful or confusing, and it gets past editors and copy editors and goes right into the first draft of history. Why? Because we’re a small band of people — or, as Klein says in her article, “cronies” — who believe that notwithstanding his sins and omissions the 37th President deserves a balanced portrayal in view of his course-changing policies as a statesman and wartime commander-in-chief. For whatever reason, our perspective is evidently inconvenient to the LA Times.

Our old Watergate exhibit did include a quotation about “Woodward and Bernstein’s failure to address any of the ethical deficiencies of their investigative reporting, including offering of bribes, illegally gaining access to telephone numbers, and talking to members of the grand jury.”

We admit it. We definitely had that quote in the gallery. And it was taken word for word from Stanley Kutler’s widely praised book The Wars Of Watergate.

Klein does seem to have intuited that we had something against Woodstein. Goffard was more clear if not more accurate. In an article last year in which he accused us of despising poor Mr. Bernstein just on the evidence of the Kutler quote being in our gallery, Goffard went so far as to proclaim that our charges against the reporters were false.

Goffard and Klein should have taken it up with the person who had actually made the charges. But Kutler is one of the most respected scholars in the country. So the LA Times wraps his inconvenient statements around our necks. If it were you, you'd be sardonic, too.

The LA Times And The New Nixon Records

From the LA Times’s Christopher Goffard, more misleading reporting about the Nixon Library:

The library opened in 1990 as a privately run facility in the hands of Nixon loyalists, containing only his pre- and post-presidential papers and featuring a Watergate exhibit, widely ridiculed by scholars, that portrayed the scandal as a “coup” hatched by Nixon’s enemies. The exhibit has since been dismantled.

The library entered the National Archives system last year, with its first federal director, Timothy Naftali, promising historical accuracy and openness. Although the library released a batch of Nixon’s personal and presidential documents last year, Monday marked the library’s largest release of materials so far.

“The strength of our democracy is that these kinds of documents get preserved, and they are released, whether or not they shed good light on the government,” Naftali said. “In many countries in the world, these documents would have been destroyed. We’re pleased we can make these documents available and others can judge.”

So the opening of the federal library in Yorba Linda, with its new spirit of openness, means more records are coming out, right? Isn’t that the message these paragraphs seem designed to convey?

If so, Goffard’s intimation is false. Access to Nixon White House records has never had anything to do with whether the Nixon Library was federally run. The opening of thousands of hours of tapes began in the mid-1990s under a settlement negotiated by the feds, University of Wisconsin professor Stanley Kutler (who had sued to have more records opened before President Nixon’s death in 1994), and the Nixon estate. There hasn’t been a tapes opening for several years — not because of who’s running the library but because of myriad challenges facing government archivists who are in charge of preparing the records for public listening.

As for the Nixon family, foundation, and estate, they have taken many steps over the years to clear the way for the opening of records. Even when the government wants to open non-governmental records still belonging to the Nixon Foundation, such as RN's so-called wilderness years records from 1962-68 or Mrs. Nixon's files, we have readily agreed.

Why did we decide to push for the library's absorption into the federal system in the first place? So that all the records would be in one place (in an archives addition now under construction in Yorba Linda) and so President Nixon’s library would be run in the same way as the libraries of his modern predecessors and successors.

We hard bitten, secretive Nixon loyalists have been Goffard’s targets before, such as when Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein visited Yorba Linda in October 2007 as a guest of the federal library and the private Nixon Foundation. As I wrote earlier this year,

Goffard…[reported in 2007] that Bernstein had long been an “arch-villain” who “elicited special loathing” at the private Nixon Library.

The evidence for Goffard’s attacks? You guessed it: Our old Watergate exhibit, which, Goffard wrote, “falsely accused” Woodward and Bernstein of wrongdoing. It’s certainly true that the exhibit (written by a diligent and highly ethical political insider, Bob Bostock) contained a quotation about “Woodward and Bernstein’s failure to address any of the ethical deficiencies of their investigative reporting, including offering of bribes, illegally gaining access to telephone numbers, and talking to members of the grand jury.” But was this the work of a snarling Nixon partisan? Not hardly. The quote came from The Wars of Watergate by historian Stanley Kutler. A reliable critic of the late President, Kutler was praised for his book’s meticulousness by the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh. Just to be perfectly clear, this means Christopher Goffard has called Stanley Kutler a liar.

Reviewing Goffard’s novel Snitch Jacket, “Publisher’s Weekly” said he “has a keen ear for telling detail.” In my experience, his reporting has been a bit too novelistic.

When he called me for a quote back in March 2007, when we authorized the government to remove the old Watergate gallery, I could tell he wanted me to wax miserable about the lost exhibit. He kept asking me how I felt as it was being destroyed. It was an excruciating conversation, because he already had my line of dialog written. He just had to figure out how to coax it out of me.

Snitch Jacket is advertised as a romp through the seamy side of Orange County. For the author, that obviously includes me and my colleagues. I’ve ordered a copy in the hope of figuring out why he seems so obsessed with turning a small band of admirers of President Nixon and his transformative work as a statesman into cardboard characters in one of his yarns.

Welcome To The New Nixon

My first blog post ever, at The New Nixon, which I launched at the Nixon foundation on February 18, 2008:
While the handover of the Nixon Library to the National Archives last year was a high point in our institutional life, it was a drag for us personally at the Nixon Foundation, what with being called liars, haters, and belligerent and hostile paranoids who had been mean to Carl Bernstein.
The attacks began in July when a reporter for the Associated Press, Gillian Flaccus, published an article containing a ham-handed poke at our integrity by historian David Greenberg. The private Library’s Watergate exhibit (removed by Uncle Sam a year ago) had text telling visitors that the famous 18 1/2 –minute gap on a Watergate tape might have been accidental. “It’s not only not true,” Flaccus quoted Greenberg as saying, “it’s the opposite of truth. There was a lot along those lines in the library, which was not a matter of interpretation, but flat wrong, a lie.” Having overseen creation of the original museum, and since some experts indeed said it was possible the erasure was accidental, I wrote an article about Greenberg’s charge for the Nixon Foundation web site. In an e-mail, he chastised me for getting “worked up” and said that Flaccus had misquoted him. He told me what he had meant to say was a lie was our exhibit’s presentation about a group of Democratic House members who in 1973 tried to persuade their leadership to leave the Vice Presidency empty long enough following Spiro Agnew’s resignation to enable the Democratic Speaker, Carl Albert, to become President in the event RN resigned. Writes one authority, “This is the closest to a coup d’etat that the country has ever come.” So that wasn’t a lie, either.

In addition to his denunciations via the AP at the time of the handover last summer, Greenberg wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Will the Nixon Foundation…stay out of all questions of access to tapes and papers? Or will it continue to throw up roadblocks for scholars?” Writing to him again, I said that he hadn’t yet correctly identified a lie in our museum and that, contrary to his derogatory implication, he was well aware that the Nixon family and Foundation had enabled the opening of massive caches of records. Contradicting his own article, Greenberg wrote back, “I did not imply that you are intending to ‘roadblock scholars on documents’.” For attempting to hold him accountable for falsely accusing us of being liars to tens of millions of newspaper readers, he accused me of “belligerence…hostility and paranoia.”

More such unpleasant qualities in your Nixon Foundation servants were identified by LA Times reporter Christopher Goffard in an October 2007 article celebrating Carl Bernstein’s appearance at the Nixon Library. My wife and colleague Kathy and I had hung out with Bernstein in Austin once. We even had invited him to go see Steve Earle at La Zona Rosa with us (he politely declined). We weren’t in Yorba Linda for his visit because Director Tim Naftali arranged it while we were on a cruise that had been scheduled for months. Goffard implied that we had snubbed Bernstein intentionally and went on to report that Bernstein had long been an “arch-villain” who “elicited special loathing” at the private Nixon Library.

The evidence for Goffard’s attacks? You guessed it: Our old Watergate exhibit, which, Goffard wrote, “falsely accused” Woodward and Bernstein of wrongdoing. It’s certainly true that the exhibit (written by a diligent and highly ethical political insider, Bob Bostock) contained a quotation about “Woodward and Bernstein’s failure to address any of the ethical deficiencies of their investigative reporting, including offering of bribes, illegally gaining access to telephone numbers, and talking to members of the grand jury.” But was this the work of a snarling Nixon partisan? Not hardly. The quote came from The Wars of Watergate by historian Stanley Kutler. A reliable critic of the late President, Kutler was praised for his book’s meticulousness by the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh. Just to be perfectly clear, this means Christopher Goffard has called Stanley Kutler a liar. Work it out peacefully, okay, guys? And next time, leave us out of it.

For including Kutler’s words in our museum, did my colleagues and I deserve to be attacked in the news columns of the LA Times? For our positions on Watergate issues about which gentlemen might differ, why did an historian call us liars? I guess there are folks who are even more emotionally invested in this Nixon stuff than we are. Richard Norton Smith, historian and visionary head of five Presidential libraries, is right: History really is too important to be left to the historians – or for that matter, to the journalists. That’s where you come in. Welcome to The New Nixon.