Mad And M.A.D. In Yorba Linda

Rereading my April 19 post about the war against the Nixon Center by the White House and Bob Haldeman operatives controlling Nixon's foundation in Yorba Linda, I've come to regret suggesting that what is now the un-Nixon center (thanks to angry Watergate revanchists who forked over $2 million of a non-profit organization's assets to diss center president Dimitri Simes) had violated the parties' non-disparagement agreement.

On Monday, the center's journal, "The National Interest," published a post by veteran journalist Marvin Kalb, titled "Diminishing Nixon," about the Nixon-Haldeman foundation's embarrassing, impotent campaign to block the federal government's new Watergate exhibit.

That indeed looked at first like a first strike. But then I reread Ben Smith's analysis at Politico of the foundation's war on Simes, the U.S.-Russia relations expert Richard Nixon chose as center president. Smith names Simes foes such as Tricia Cox (wife of New York GOP chairman Ed Cox) and longtime Cox water carriers Rob Odle (a former CREEP official) and the Nixon White House's Ken Khachigian. All three are foundation board members.

Some of the hits on Simes aren't attributed. If he got wind of the smears as the article was being prepared and concluded that they were coming from persons associated with the foundation, he would naturally have surmised that they considered the agreement they had signed to be (as Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler might have said) inoperative. Whether or not Simes would have been correct in such assumptions, Kalb's blog post would then have been (in the increasingly apropos mutually-assured-destruction language of the Cold War) a Simes counterstrike.

Nixon, Yorba Linda, And Washington

The Nixon Center, established by former President Nixon in 1994, lost that designation in March, when it announced its independence from those now running Nixon's foundation in Yorba Linda. Writing today at "The National Interest," the center's blog, veteran journalist and media think tanker Marvin Kalb reviews recent events in Yorba Linda:

Unlike most other presidents, Richard Nixon seems never able to rest in peace. Apparently, not even at the Nixon Library. Recently, a new Watergate Exhibit was opened, and predictably [Ron and Anne Walker] were outraged. According to Mrs. Walker, who was in attendance, the current Director, Timothy Naftali, in his introductory remarks, never “missed using one accusatory buzz word” after another: “abuse of power,” “dirty tricks,” “whitewash,” and “cover up.” Naftali was even asked whether Nixon was anti-semitic, and, lo and behold, noted Mrs. Walker, a “very few days later, several news stories contained newly released quotes on that very subject.” She had hoped that the new exhibit would be “fair and balanced,” (a description familiar to any Fox viewer), but “it did not come out that way”...

Ron [Walker] was head of Nixon’s advance team at the White House. Sharing his loyalist views are other former staffers, now gathered around the Nixon Foundation: Larry Higby, who was Bob Haldeman’s deputy, and Dwight Chapin, who was deputy assistant to Nixon, among others.

As I've noted at the "National Interest" site, while I strongly supported Naftali's efforts to install the new exhibit, Kalb attributed words to me elsewhere in his post that were written by historian Robert KC Johnson.

Kalb concludes:

Rather than think about the Nixon Library as a weapon in a political war, the Walkers might try to let Nixon be Nixon, blemishes and all, and then have faith in the library visitor to reach a “fair and balanced” judgment of Richard Nixon’s place in American history.

Kalb says that 37's greatest victories were in foreign policy. Not only did Nixon agree, he hoped the work would continue. With the support of Henry Kissinger and other high-ranking associates, he founded the Nixon Center to apply his principles of enlightened pragmatism to the challenges the United States faced in the post-Cold War world. It's hard to be sure what he would've thought about the Watergate exhibit in Yorba Linda. But there's no doubt he'd be deeply disappointed that his living legacy has lost its toehold in Washington.