"Voice From The Past," Erased And Restored

From p. 1 of this morning's "Register"

Quoted in a Jan. 4 article in the Orange County Register, a Richard Nixon-Bob Haldeman operative claimed that the Nixon foundation, which I ran for 19 years beginning in 1990, had no role in naming Tim Naftali as the first federal Nixon library in 2006. Actually, Naftali's was the only name we submitted to the National Archives. NARA loved the idea -- he was a foreign policy scholar and an expert in secret presidential tapes -- and hired him within days of my phone call.

It wasn't the first time someone had written me out of the history of the Nixon wars. In their recently published book of White House tapes, Douglas Brinkley and Luke Nichter tried to erase one of mine by writing that Naftali's Yorba Linda appointment was "serendipitous," as if it had been a rare and wonderful example of immaculate bureaucratic conception.

This week, a more knowledgeable scholar, Anthony J. Clark, author of a forthcoming book about presidential libraries, The Last Campaign: How Presidents Rewrite History, Run for Posterity, and Enshrine Their Legacies, brought the Nixon operative's whopper to the attention of Register political reporter Martin Wisckol, who'd written the Jan. 4 article. Wisckol graciously modified the on-line text and e-mailed me questions for a follow-up column, which appeared today. Here's our complete exchange:

Can you tell me how you became aware of Naftali? I'm told the foundation brought him in to speak in May 2005. Were you involved in that decision or was that your first exposure to him? Also, [operative Ron] Walker told me this morning, "The (Nixon) girls were upset that they were never involved in the selection. I heard it from them." Care to respond to that?

If by "the girls," Walker means Mr. Nixon's daughters, I can't recall precisely whom I talked to among my Nixon foundation colleagues about Tim, but I consulted pretty widely, and people seemed to agree that he was a good fit because of his unique standing as a non-ideological Cold War scholar and an expert on presidential tapes. If Tim and President Nixon had ever had a chance to sit down and talk, I don't think they would have disagreed about very much. He might even have understood why, if his library was to be part of the federal system, it would probably be necessary to have speakers such as John Dean and a more thorough Watergate gallery.

I first met Tim when he and his boss at UVA's Miller Center, Philip Zelikow, later executive director of the Sept. 11 commission, reached out to me in the hope that Mr. Nixon's estate (of which I was co-executor) would enable them to have access to White House tapes that hadn't yet been opened to the public. I visited them in Charlottesville. That would've been in the early 2000s.  

Overall and when all was said and done, was Naftali an asset to the library?

Naftali meets the press

He proved to be indispensable. Tim showed that the library could welcome Nixon critics such as Bob Woodward and John Dean without the world coming to end. He also took on the harrowing assignment of installing the comprehensive Watergate exhibit that was a condition of the agreement whereby the government took over the library. Given the intense pressure placed on him by those now running Nixon's foundation who were outraged by the Dean invitation and wanted to stop the exhibit, I don't know if very many others in his position could have stayed the course and succeeded as he did. President Nixon prized toughness. Tim was tough indeed. Their campaign against a federal director -- ranging from disparaging him personally to enlisting Sen. [Lamar] Alexander to pressure Tim and filing FOIA requests so they could read his e-mails -- may be unprecedented in the history of presidential libraries.

Any regrets in recommending him? 

No.  

Was the Watergate exhibited far and unbiased? Were Naftali's efforts to present Nixon overall fair and unbiased?

The exhibit is an unblinking and comprehensive look at a dark chapter in American history and President Nixon's legacy. If the Nixon foundation had worked collegially with him, the exhibit might have ended up with softer corners. Instead, his critics guaranteed that the experts and media would be looking carefully to make sure the exhibit included warts and all, which it does.  

What do you think of Ron Walker and the Nixon daughters who felt that Naftali was unduly harsh and too focused on Nixon's shortcomings?

It was Tim's job to be focused on Nixon's shortcomings, because the archivist of the U.S. and the Nixon foundation agreed that he would have to create a Watergate exhibit. The then-archivist, Allen Weinstein, told Tim he wanted a thorough exhibit, and the government was paying for it.

Some people do continue to insist that Watergate was overblown, even that President Nixon did virtually no wrong. But every fifth grader knows (and I've asked a lot of them!) that Richard Nixon was the only president to resign and that he did so because of Watergate. When students visit the Nixon library, they see the great achievements as well -- China, detente, reorienting the Vietnam War, and President Nixon's pragmatic politics and domestic policies. What message would we send schoolchildren, not to mention the museum's other visitors, by minimizing what they already know is one of the most important events in modern political history?

No, thanks, Mark

The wiser course is to stipulate the tragedy of Watergate while focusing attention on Mr. Nixon's globe-transforming achievements and enduring principles. That's one reason President Nixon and we launched The Nixon Center in 1994. (Sadly, it is no longer allowed to use his name.)

As for the apparent continued attacks against Tim that you mention, it's obviously not just about him. The Nixon foundation successfully scuttled [University of Texas Vietnam scholar Mark Atwood] Lawrence's appointment because it wouldn't brook his criticism of President Nixon, either.

So now both the foundation and federal library are in the hands of chiefs, handpicked or anointed by Mr. Nixon's White House associates, with little apparent background in museum or archival work, academia, or national public policy. The question remains whether Yorba Linda will be a place where President Nixon and his tumultuous times can be explored and understood in all their dimensions or a hermetically-sealed bubble for loyalists. When those of us who knew and served him pass from the scene, the tapes and other records stored at the Nixon library will speak more loudly than our advocacy or self-defensiveness. The reason we brought the library into the federal system to begin with was so we could be part of that conversation, not muffle our ears.

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.

Presidents Are Acting Not Illegally More And More

When Richard Nixon told David Frost in April 1977, "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal," he was talking not about political burglaries and campaign dirty tricks (though his operatives did all that, too) but a leader's sovereign powers during wartime. That Ron Howard and his screenwriter, Peter Morgan, suggested otherwise in "Frost/Nixon" was one of the few disappointments in an otherwise fine movie. Continuing his argument, Nixon said:

[I]t has been...argued that as far as a president is concerned, that in war time, a president does have certain extraordinary powers which would make acts that would otherwise be unlawful, lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the nation and the Constitution, which is essential for the rights we’re all talking about.

Tom Campbell, Chapman University's law school dean, battled President Clinton over Kosovo when he was serving in Congress. He argues that when presidents grasp for broader foreign policy and war-making prerogatives, judges and Congress wax timid, and especially so since Sept. 11. On the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, John Dean, who turned on Nixon during the the Watergate investigations of 1973-74, says recent presidents have widened the realm of "not illegal" far more than 37. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Executive orders issued by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of Sept. 11 claimed power for the Oval Office to ignore U.S. laws and international treaties.

President Obama has retained some of those extraordinary wartime powers, and his use of drones to attack terrorist suspects has drawn accusations of international law violations.

"I don't think Richard Nixon, in his darkest hour, would have authorized torture," said Dean...

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.

Chuck Colson's Redirected Zeal

Mark Ellis on the conversion experience of Chuck Colson, who died Saturday:

[A]s Colson awaited arrest and prosecution for his Watergate involvement, Tom Phillips, then president of Raytheon, invited Colson to his home and witnessed to him about Jesus Christ.

“I left his house that night shaken by the words he had read from C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity about pride,” Colson wrote in 2008. “It felt as if Lewis were writing about me, former Marine captain, Special Counsel to the President of the United States, now in the midst of the Watergate scandal. I had an overwhelming sense that I was unclean.”

After Colson left Philips, he got into his car, but couldn’t drive away. The conviction of the Holy Spirit came upon him and he began to weep, “I couldn’t (drive). I was crying too hard – and I was not one to ever cry.” “I spent an hour calling out to God. I did not even know the right words. I simply knew that I wanted Him. And I knew for certain that the God who created the universe heard my cry.”

At that pivotal moment, Colson was born again. “From the next morning to this day, I have never looked back. I can honestly say that the worst day of the last 35 years has been better than the best days of the 41 years that preceded it. That’s a pretty bold statement, given my time in prison, three major surgeries, and two kids with cancer at the same time, but it is absolutely true.”

The former counselor to the most powerful man on earth began to serve the King above every earthly king, which gave Colson’s life renewed purpose. From that day forward, he knew he belonged to Christ and he was “on earth to advance His Kingdom.”

And that he did, as a model of repentance and a prison ministry innovator whose work blessed the lives of tens of thousands of convicts and their families. Some were skeptical about the sincerity of his conversion, possibly because he seemed no less intensely results-driven than he'd been in politics. But grace had transformed Colson's priorities, not his temperament. Like St. Paul after he'd forsaken his persecution of Christians in favor of church-building, Colson was as zealous for Christ as he had been for Nixon. He even took on some of the trappings of the executive. When we hosted a Prison Fellowship donor event at the Nixon library, smooth-talking Colson aides arrived a day early wearing  blue blazers and PF lapel pins. They were as focused on pulling off a well-choreographed event for the boss as Nixon's factotums had been back in the day -- all the advance-man basics such as making sure the microphone was properly positioned and the drinking water in place, holding room properly arranged, and schedule double-checked.

When I was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 2004, Colson sent me a Bible with a gracious inscription and called to offer congratulations and blessings. He said he was sure I'd be a good evangelical preacher. While I sent him some sermons, I can't recall if he responded. I assume he found my big-tent Anglicanism to be a bit pallid. He and my church definitely differed on whether gay and lesbian people should be afforded full sacramental status. In one of his last columns, he continued to assert that homosexual relations were inherently sinful. Giving in to Nixonian hyperbole for old time's sake, he vowed not to be cowed into silence by those writing press releases for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, preposterously implying that its criticism of his statements about homosexuality was comparable to his being on an IRA hit list or receiving death threat during Watergate.

When he called in 2004, Colson told me that he was pleased that another Nixon associate had joined the ranks of the converted or ordained -- meaning himself, another Watergate figure, Jeb Magruder, who became a Presbyterian minister, and Jonathan Aitken, a disgraced British politician who was Nixon's friend and biographer and later wrote a book about Colson. (During his celebrated visit to the Nixon library in 2009, John Dean asked Kathy to be sure to tell me that he'd been an Episcopal acolyte.) I chose not to say that, of this quartet of Nixon Christian soldiers, I was the only one who hadn't been in the slammer. My call to ordained ministry hadn't to do with being loyal to Nixon to the point of criminality but to a considerable extent with being viewed as disloyal by members of his family.

Give rest, O Christ, to your servant with your saints, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.

Hat tip to Carolyn Dennington

Who You Calling An Ambassador?

Max Holland's book about Mark Felt, Bob Woodward's secret Watergate source, gets kudos from former Nixon counsel John Dean (shown here), who compares it favorably with what he describes as a sloppy account of the scandal in Tim Weiner's new book about the FBI. Among other things he lauds Holland for making his own Watergate transcripts:

Weiner quotes Nixon from a conversation when he was reacting to information I had learned on October 19, 1972, which unequivocally established that Mark Felt was leaking information. At one point, Nixon said to Haldeman, in Weiner’s (incorrect) version: “You know what I’d do with him [Felt]? Bastard!” In fact, what Nixon really said to Haldeman was much more telling, and interesting. He didn’t say “Bastard!” Rather, he said, “Ambassador.”

In short, Nixon would have done with Felt what he would later do with CIA director Richard Helms, to keep him happy and get him out of the way: make him an ambassador in a foreign land.

According to Dean, Weiner doesn't identify his sources for Watergate transcripts. NARA tapes specialist Samuel W. Rushay, Jr. writes that two scholars have made this particular error, one of whom is Stanley Kutler, who rushed out a book of transcripts in 1998. More about Kutler's errors here. Kutler also erred when transcribing a comment of Nixon's about the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate committee, Howard Baker. One day in 1973, Nixon told his aides that Baker needed bucking up, one of his classic idioms. Kutler picked another consonant. Funny how these mistakes never make 37 look better.

An Historian Errs On The Nixon Library

Former Nixon archivist Maarja Krusten raises questions about historian Benjamin Hufbauer's review in a scholarly journal of the Nixon library's Watergate exhibit, particularly the transfer of the private library to the National Archives. We first tried to get the library into NARA in 1995-6, not 2005, as Hufbauer writes. This passage in his review is especially egregious:

[M]embers of the foundation thought they could still have a shrine to Nixon but have the government pay for it. They were wrong. In 2006 when NARA took over, the newly installed Archivist of the United States, Allen Weinstein, personally recruited Timothy Naftali to be the first director of the Nixon Library under federal management. Naftali and Weinstein agreed that the primary goal for the museum would be a detailed and historically accurate account of the Watergate events.

It is Hufbauer who is wrong. As library director and Richard Nixon's co-executor, I conducted the negotiations with NARA along with Kathy O'Connor, Nixon's last chief of staff. Before the handover, we agreed that the Watergate exhibit would be replaced. For the first federal director, I recommended one name to deputy archivist Sharon Fawcett: Tim Naftali, Cold War historian and presidential tapes expert. Within days, she'd placed a call inviting him to be considered. Archivist Allen Weinstein told me later that my idea had been brilliant and that the same notion "had occurred to me."

After Naftali was named, I suggested to Fawcett and Weinstein, and they agreed, that Naftali should redo the Watergate exhibit rather than our trying to design one that would be acceptable to the government. Before NARA had even taken possession of the museum, Natftali asked my permission to tear out the old exhibit, which I granted.

Hufbauer's account was apparently informed solely by the Bob Haldeman revanchists who took over Nixon's foundation in the fall of 2009 after Naftali invited John Dean to give a speech (see here, here, and here), who battled him relentlessly over the Watergate exhibit, but who had no involvement in the handover negotiations with NARA.

Thanks to my sister blogger Maarja for sending me the article.

Photos: Nixon library handover ceremony, 2007: (f) Foundation chairman Don Bendetti and Archivist of the U.S. Weinstein; (b) Fawcett, Taylor, Naftali, and O'Connor. Right: Naftali and O'Connor

Naftali's Revenge

John Dean, Bob Woodward, and Carl Bernstein met recently in the Nixon library's Watergate exhibit.

The Continuing War Against John Dean

Nixon White House staffer Geoff Shepard (left) says his ex-colleagues "did some horrible things." The colleague the Nixon-Bob Haldeman operatives now controlling Nixon's foundation consider maximus horribilis is John Dean (below), who helped send their friends to jail for their Watergate crimes. In 2009, they went to war against former Nixon library director Tim Naftali after he invited Dean to give a talk. Among the schemes disclosed so far was getting another former Nixon aide, Sen. Lamar Alexander, to pressure Naftali or worse by putting a secret hold on President Obama's nomination of a new archivist of the U.S. Shepard also tried to keep the public from seeing Nixon's 1975 grand jury testimony.

Beginning tomorrow, the Chapman University law school in Orange, California is convening a 40th anniversary Watergate symposium that features Dean. We learn today that Shepard's been trying to get onto the bill so he can call the former White House counsel a nutcase and fool to his own bad face. But the professor convening the confab said no thanks:

"Look, I don't want to hurt people's feelings," [he] says of Shepard's draft, but there wasn't much intellectual content and it was marked with innuendoes.

The politics still swirling around Nixon in the county of his birth is, to borrow the columnist's word, complicated. Who can say what will happen next as the struggle over his legacy continues? The irony is that while there's a good case to be made in defense of some of Nixon's actions during Watergate, attacking Dean doesn't help him anymore. It just helps his men.

John Dean Was Not A Football Fan

Okay, I admit it. I Googled my name and Mr. Nixon's. And I found this letter that the New York Times published on April 23, 1995:

That the famous White House "enemies list" was kept not by football fan Richard Nixon, as Robert Lipsyte suggested, but by his accuser, John Dean, ought to have been abundantly clear from Joe Namath's being listed incorrectly as a Giant. If the President had laid eyes on the list even once, can anyone imagine that error surviving?

JOHN H. TAYLOR
Director, the Richard Nixon Library
Yorba Linda, Calif.

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.

Separating The Woman From The Boys

Journalist Andrew Gumbel has published an article about the last battle of Watergate: Impotent efforts by aging acolytes of disgraced Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman to chase off Nixon library director Tim Naftali before he could install a new Watergate gallery. Importantly, Gumbel reveals what happened after I left my job as Nixon foundation chief in February 2009 and was replaced by Richard Nixon's longtime aide and last chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor. Among her first (and last) challenges was managing the outrage of Haldeman's minions over Naftali's speaking invitation to former White House counsel John Dean in June 2009:

She established a more fruitful working relationship with Naftali, but quickly met a wall of resistance from some at the foundation because she expressed understanding for the Dean invitation. Naftali said she was called a “wimp” in a meeting he attended and effectively frozen out by her foundation colleagues.

That sounds just like the Haldeman boys' name-calling. But she's nobody's wimp. Instead, she was encountering the Watergate generation at their weakest and angriest. To Kathy, Dean was an inevitable if ill-timed choice as a speaker at the newly federalized library -- a major historical figure, after all, thanks to his pivotal Watergate testimony. But to those who soon seized control of Nixon's foundation, he was a rat who had helped send their buddies to jail for their Watergate crimes. One operative's wife complained on the foundation web site about how hard the criminal investigations and trials had been on the defendants and proclaimed that perjury wasn't even a crime -- pleasing news, one imagines, to Dwight Chapin, newly influential at the foundation, who was among those who did federal time for perjury. He's shown here telling Naftali in an oral history interview that Nixon was in on the 1972 campaign's dirty tricks from the very beginning.

Kathy went to work for Nixon six years after his resignation and was holding his hand when he died 14 years later in April 1994. It's true she hadn't been with the old man in the White House when it really counted, as Watergate-era veterans often grumbled. By the same token, she hadn't organized any dirty tricks, ordered any burglaries, participated in any coverups, counted any Jews in federal agencies, or sicced the FBI on any journalists. As a result, her focus was on the old man's peacemaking legacy, not his aides' spotty reputations. Besides, over the years a few of them had kept scheming. Kathy and I were frequently pressured to get Nixon's campaign and non-policy aides more involved. The Nixon foundation had plenty of involvement with highly-respected heavyweights such as Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Jim Schlesinger, and Pete Wilson. But we'd spent too much time protecting Nixon and his library from certain lower-level elements of the so-called old guard to be enthusiastic about letting them near the safe in Yorba Linda.

As Gumbel suggests, Kathy's advocacy of a mature response to the Dean invitation presented an opportunity for Nixonian payback. An operative publicly denounced Dean for being disgraced and disbarred, failing perhaps to recall that the same could be said of the library's namesake. Soon Kathy's career of distinguished, confidential service to 37 and his fractious family was drowned in a post-Watergate gusher of twilight testosterone as the good old boys massed in Yorba Linda. Ironically enough, Naftali's decision to commemorate the 37th anniversary of the Watergate break-in with a visit from Dean helped transform the Nixon foundation into the Haldeman foundation. A key if unwitting player in this process was a socially ambitious Orange County printer then serving as the foundation chairman who quit in a huff in 2010 after the operatives spurned his bid for a new, jumbo-salary foundation "president" job.

Their first move against Naftali was the secret enlistment of powerful friends in Washington to get him fired, but the wiry youngster from Quebec outmaneuvered the lumbering veterans. Then they assembled a truth squad featuring perjurer Chapin and tried to force the feds to water down the Watergate exhibit. In this effort, Andrew Gumbel and others report, they won key support from Sharon Fawcett, the National Archives official in charge of presidential libraries. Gumbel reveals that the archivist of the U.S., David Ferriero (a stand-up dude, as historian and blogger Maarja Krusten might say), sided with Naftali against Fawcett, who quickly retired and was offered a consultancy by Haldeman's operatives.

We need more details about how they won Fawcett (shown here with Kathy in happier times, at a Nixon Center dinner). If her pivot had worked, Naftali would have been finished. Instead, he finished the work he was called to do: Establishing the Nixon library as an equal partner among other presidential libraries by moving Nixon’s records home to Yorba Linda and installing a Watergate exhibit that would pass muster with the scholarly community. In that accomplishment, Kathy O'Connor, who had served Nixon best of all by being tough enough to protect him and his library from more than one scheme and embarrassment, shares considerable credit.

Hissing And Moaning

As reported last week, the anger of former aides of Richard Nixon and his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, toward Nixon library director Tim Naftali (left) reached a fever pitch in mid-2009 when he invited former White House counsel John Dean to give a speech. They consider Dean a rat for testifying against Nixon and helping send their friends to jail for their Watergate crimes.

Like Barack Obama's least successful critics, Nixon's men and their fellow travelers used Cold War rhetoric against the apostate. Historian Maarja Krusten writes at NixoNARA:

Susan Naulty, who used to work as an archivist at the private Nixon library, wrote critically in The Washington Times in 2009 of Tim’s decision to invite...Dean to speak at the library. In what seemed to me to be a fundamental misunderstanding of Naftali’s actions, she complained, “The question, though, nags: Why promote John Dean? Why does hostility toward Mr. Nixon continue unabated on the left?” My reaction was very different. I didn’t see the invitation to Dean as promoting him but merely one of providing an opportunity for one of many players in historical events to speak at the library. And of course, having once been mistaken for a liberal by Nixon’s side, I shook my head at the use of terms such as hostility and “the left.”

I'm the one who publicly lodged that accusation against Krusten, who campaigned for Nixon in 1968, when she was 17, and voted for him four years later. I've since apologized.

Another Naftali critic, writing on the foundation's blog, called on him to go run a museum honoring Alger Hiss (above), who was a Soviet communist agent. Crude as it was, the comment helped clarify the factors that rendered Naftali's critics impotent in the last battle of Watergate.

First up is the sheer injustice of the smear. Naftali is an empiricist and a civil libertarian who loves his country and would despise a traitor like Hiss. Author of a respectful biography of George H.W. Bush, Naftali presents, as Nixon usually did, as a non-ideological moderate and foreign policy realist. He and Nixon would probably have found relatively little to disagree about in either domestic or international affairs.

The Hiss smear did have one obvious salutary outcome. It motivated Krusten, a knowledgeable insider with strong ties in the archival community, especially at the National Archives, to start her blog to provide Naftali with rearguard support in Washington as he researched, wrote, and defended the library's new Watergate exhibit.

Another irony of the ideology-based campaign of Naftali's critics is that most writers in the first wave of Nixon revisionism in the 1980s, especially when it came to his domestic policies, were moderates or liberals. When I first recommended Naftali to the then-archivist of the U.S., Allen Weinstein, as the first federal library director, it wasn't because of his views about Nixon but because, as one of the brightest Cold War experts of his generation, he would take Nixon seriously, no matter where the massive record he left behind led scholars. The case is often made that a presidential library director should like or love the president in question. I'd say it's the job of the president's family and friends to care about him. It's the federal director's job to care about history.

Historical inquiry certainly hasn't been the strong suit of the lower-echelon, non-policy White House aides now controlling Nixon's foundation. Instead, they've devoted much of their energy to trying to rehabilitate their mentor Haldeman, muzzle their enemy Dean, and keep the museum-going public from seeing brand-new videos in which their friends Fred Malek and Dwight Chapin discuss counting Jews in the federal government and Nixon's alleged involvement in dirty tricks. But the restoration of Nixon's legacy will ask something more of his advocates than tending 40-year-old grudges and alliances. Too bad Nixon's foundation has just apparently cut itself off from the one institution, the former Nixon Center, which devoted itself not to refighting old wars but applying Nixon's principles to help keep the U.S. from becoming overextended in new ones.

Third, Nixon operatives with ties and interests in the Reagan and Bush-Cheney camps may not grasp how far the GOP has drifted from 37's centrist moorings. If few Republicans outside the pressure cooker of the Haldeman alums' mutual admiration society were willing to join them in denouncing Naftali as a leftist, it may be because some of them have decided that Nixon was one, too.

Fourth, while Nixon's red-baiting was generally rooted in substance, the Naftali critics' left-baiting was just the result of his allegedly not being devoted to Nixon. And yet it's easy even for his friends to admire Nixon's qualities of mind and heart and his peacemaking achievements and still be disappointed by his failures and errors. There's not much resonance anywhere, left, right, or center, for a purist position on our most controversial modern president.

Instead, Nixon legacy building will be generational, arc-of-history stuff, the work of many decades, as he himself understood. It will grow out of careful study of his times, policies, and temperament by scholars rather than maneuvers by operatives whose reputations may be just as weighted down by Watergate as his without being buoyed by anything like his brilliance and dogged vision.

Finally, Haldeman's men claimed to be fighting a battle for Nixon's reputation that was actually lost years ago. Ask the average fifth grader what she knows about Nixon (I have, many times), and she'll usually say Watergate. Like it or not, he's taken that hit. If his library tried to cover it up with a whitewashed museum, most visitors would know it. When they see Naftali's all-in exhibit, most of them will say, "I already knew about that." Why spend months battling an exhibit that does nothing to worsen Nixon's reputation? If we're confident about how history will ultimately view him, we needn't fear people knowing the truth about the trip to China, the break-in at the Watergate, or anything in between.

Naftali's foes may have thought they could end the left-wing threat by bringing what they took to be their political savvy and insider contacts to bear. But for all these reasons and perhaps others, they didn't get much if any traction. So John Dean gave his speech. Tim Naftali opened his Watergate exhibit. And now it's pretty clear who's in charge at the Nixon library.

Naftali Is Not The New Graboske

Tomorrow's opening of a new Watergate exhibit at the Nixon library in Yorba Linda should bring to an end a generation of courtroom and backroom wrangling over the residue of modern history's most comprehensive political scandal. In the 1980s, the argument was about what scholars and researchers would see in the archives instead of what the public would see in presidential museums. But in both cases, the same principle may well hold. Full disclosure for Nixon might end up facilitating full disclosure for his successors, and what prudent president would want that?

In the late 1980s, historian Maarja Krusten (shown below) was part of a team at the National Archives headed by Fred Graboske that prepared Nixon's White House tapes to be opened to the public. As they finished their work, NARA was under pressure from President Nixon and his lawyers (I was then his chief of staff) to slow down the process. Our argument was that, new laws and regulations notwithstanding, Nixon had a moral right to expect his materials to be handled more or less like those of predecessors such as Kennedy and Johnson, whose more controversial records, including tapes, remained under tight family control.

We were fighting a losing battle. Most in the federal government, the media, and academe seemed to believe that Watergate, Nixon's resignation, and congressional action had made him sui generis when it came to how his records would be processed.

That all changed in 1989 in the George H. W. Bush administration under archivist of the U.S. Don Wilson and his presidential libraries deputy, John Fawcett, a veteran of the LBJ library in Austin. We were assured that Nixon did deserve some grace after all, that the new laws and regulations actually did permit him to have something approximating the latitude that pre-reform presidents and their families enjoyed when it came to his most sensitive and controversial records.

To say that we were pleased is an understatement. And yet in politics, good news for one person is almost always bad news for someone else. The government's policy change had come at an awkward time, since Graboske's team had completed its work on the tapes, the most explosive records of all. You can study the nuances at Krusten's blog, NixoNARA, but the upshot seems to be that rather than saying to the award-winning Graboske and his colleagues that they'd done well but that the brass had decided to put the tapes back on a shelf for a decent interval, NARA officials decided the tapes needed to be re-reviewed. In other words, the tape review team, it was suggested, had done an inadequate job.

A few years later, after University of Wisconsin professor Stanley Kutler had sued Nixon and NARA to pry loose additional so-called abuse of power tapes that processors had identified, court proceedings as analyzed by Krusten show that the government wasn't entirely on the government's side:

Not only did the government not admit in 1992 that it had considered the Graobske-era processing final, despite contemporaneous documents showing it repeatedly used that term, lawyers working for the George H. W. Bush Department of Justice (DOJ) made selective use in their pleadings of information gathered in the discovery phase of the litigation. They rarely if ever quoted witnesses such as I, who had stated under oath that Graboske displayed no prejudice or bias against Nixon and never had said the president “has no privacy.”

Looking back, I've found it astonishing how solicitous the first Bush administration was toward 37, who had almost no policy or political leverage outside of his trademark issue of foreign policy. I doubt that it was an act of friendship by an incumbent to a former, since the Nixon-Bush relationship struck me as cordial but cool. Another possibility -- and here is where journalists and historians must go where bloggers rarely tread -- is whether the Bush administration had come to the natural-enough conclusion that slowing down the train delivering former President Nixon's records to scholars might have been a helpful precedent for future formers.

If so, the records battle was finally lost (or won, depending on one's perspective). We settled the Kutler lawsuit after Nixon's death in 1994, paving the way for the tapes to be opened by the early 2000s (they'll finally be entirely open in 2012). Presidential records are now managed according to congressional and agency mandates, and while there will always be judgment calls and controversies, the process has been largely regularized for presidents both Republican and Democratic.

But that still leaves the curatorial side of presidential libraries' work and the possible perceived precedent of the no-holds-barred Watergate exhibit that former archivist of the U.S. Allen Weinstein commissioned from the first federal director of the Nixon library, Cold War scholar Tim Naftali. In 2009, the Nixon foundation approached the other private library foundations and tried to get them to criticize Nixon's federal director for inviting Watergate figure John Dean to give a speech. The obvious intent was to panic friends of other formers into thinking that Uncle Sam's John Dean event in Yorba Linda presaged a keynote by special prosecutor Ken Starr in Little Rock and other post-White House horrors. As Naftali proceeded with planning the Watergate exhibit, did those controlling Nixon's foundation try yet again to rally the post-presidential faithful by raising fearful specters of worst-case museum cases: Displays featuring Monica's dress at Clinton, even more room for Iran-contra (a worse scandal than Watergate, some believe) at Reagan, and alleged Bush-Cheney torture policies at Texas's newest presidential library?

If so, then one can imagine that considerable pressure may have been brought to bear on Naftali over the last couple of years. But at least we can say that he's not the new Graboske, because the exhibit's opening tomorrow.

All The President's Felons

From a wide-ranging post at NixoNARA by historian Maarja Krusten, two reflections on Nixonian management. First up is an insight from one of Nixon's budget chiefs, industrialist Roy Ash, that should be noted by every tycoon who thinks she can use her CEO chops to make government work at last. It's excerpted from a 1988 oral interview with Ash conducted by Maarja's former National Archives colleague Fred Graboske:

After leaving government, I went out and talked to business groups. . . . many of whom thought, and still think, "Why doesn’t the Government run like business?” . . . I said, "Imagine your board of directors comprising your customers, your suppliers, your employees, and your competitors. Now, how are you going to run your business?"

And then this important reflection on CEO Nixon himself:

Nixon was an intelligent and well-read man, someone who might have made a good history professor, as David Gergen once observed. I can’t speak to what led to his darker side, the side that made him ask Fred Malek to undertake Jew counting at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I don’t know if in different circumstances, and absent the Vietnam war, he might have kept that part in check or not. As to his downfall, we may never know everything about Watergate. (A new book offers some startling allegations about the “third rate burglary” at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.) What matters is that he need not have covered up the portion of the Watergate story of which he was aware. It’s important to remember that it was a different age, when executives clung more tightly to managerial infallibility than they do now.

It's absolutely true that Nixon trusted his management system, and it helped destroy him. As one of our most profoundly introverted presidents, he organized his White House to make it easy to limit the number of people he would see. To get the information he so desperately needed about Watergate, he naturally turned to his coterie of aides, people such Bob Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Dean, Chuck Colson, and Dwight Chapin -- all bound for federal prison.

Nixon wasn't blameless. Many of his aides thought they were doing what he wanted. But as Maarja suggests, he might've been more attentive to his own accountability and thereby saved his presidency if he hadn't been surrounded by men who were principally concerned with protecting themselves.

Shultz: "Dean Has A Problem With Me"

George Shultz (later Ronald Reagan's secretary of state) was serving as Richard Nixon's secretary of the treasury when White House counsel John Dean asked him to order 50 politically motivated tax investigations. Shultz told Dean to pound sand. In this interview with Nixon library director Tim Naftali, now available on the library's YouTube site, Shultz said, "It was an improper use of the IRS, and I wouldn't do it."

According to on-line background materials, the library's new Watergate exhibit, opposed by Nixon's White House aides, covers such matters as Bob Haldeman aide Larry Higby's more successful effort to get FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to conduct an investigation of CBS News correspondent Daniel Schorr.

The Nebulous Baker Boys

Russ Baker is a conspiracy-minded writer whose 2008 book about the Bush family stepped outside the bounds of believability and indeed propriety by hinting that George H.W. Bush had a role in President Kennedy's assassination.

But Baker also poses questions about the military and intelligence communities' actions during the Nixon administration that deserve more attention that they've gotten from mainstream scholars. This piece of the Watergate puzzle doesn't have to be the whole picture, but it deserves to be part of it.

Yet anyone who writes about it at all, such as Baker, Len Colodny, and James Rosen (who's still waiting for a New York Times review of his painstakingly researched study of John Mitchell, John Dean, and Watergate), runs the risk of being called a noncanonical outlier. Former Sen. Gary Hart reprimanded the late Peter Rodman, a respected Kissinger aide, for even raising the issue of detentenik Nixon's hawkish institutional foes.

So in the vein of a beggar not being too choosy, here's an excerpt from a Russ Baker blog entry about the cozy relationship between Watergate reporter Bob Woodward (shown here) and the military establishment:

Bob, top secret Naval officer, gets sent to work in the Nixon White House while still on military duty. Then, with no journalistic credentials to speak of, and with a boost from White House staffers, he lands a job at the Washington Post. Not long thereafter he starts to take down Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, Woodward’s military bosses are running a spy ring inside the White House that is monitoring Nixon and Kissinger’s secret negotiations with America’s enemies (China, Soviet Union, etc), stealing documents and funneling them back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

That’s not the iconic Woodward of legend, of course — so it takes a while for this notion to settle in the mind. But there’s more — and it’s even more troubling. Did you know there was really no Deep Throat, that the Mark Felt story was conjured up as yet another layer of cover in what became a daisy chain of disinformation? Did you know that Richard Nixon was loathed and feared by the military brass, that they and their allies were desperate to get Nixon out and halt his rapprochement with the Communists? That a bunch of operatives with direct or indirect CIA/military connections, from E. Howard Hunt to Alexander Butterfield to John Dean — wormed their way into key White House posts, and started up the Keystone Kops operations that would be laid at Nixon’s office door?

Hat tip to Len Colodny

Clapping For A Seal

One important (though sometimes overlooked) Watergate scholar says Richard Nixon's 1975 grand jury testimony should remain closed at least until John Dean is dead:

[N]ot all Nixon historians support release of his testimony. James Rosen, author of "The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate," says not enough time has passed as it had in the Hiss case when the main figures were long dead.

"In this case, President Nixon's chief accuser — John Dean — remains very much alive," said Rosen, a correspondent for Fox News. "The court should wait until all participants in Watergate have died before making public the testimony that President Nixon gave willingly and with the assurance that it would, like all grand jury testimony, remain sealed."

Grand Passions

Should the 300-page transcript of Richard Nixon's 1975 testimony before (sort of; he was in San Clemente, they were in Washington) the Watergate grand jury be made public? Chums John Dean and Stanley Kutler think so.