National Archives Implicated In Nixon Coverup

In the fall of 2009, after a search conducted by a company he used to work for, Nixon-Haldeman operative Ron Walker was awarded a jumbo-salary "president" job at the Nixon foundation, which declared war on the director of the federalized Nixon library, Tim Naftali. Walker's former White House colleague, Sen. Lamar Alexander, provided secret if unavailing assistance.

That December, the revanchists also tried to rewrite the history of Nixon's difficult relationship with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which was now running the library. Walker's wife, Anne, claimed:

It is estimated that President Obama's presidential papers will be 80 percent electronic, something that the Nixon Presidential papers-people did not have to worry about. But, one can not help but wonder if we would have had more access to them in that format, instead of them being secreted away in College Park, guarded and hidden from the president and the other people who created them. The only access to papers was when the archives were about to release some of them. At that time, the archives would notify members of the administration whose names were about to be made public.

The truth is that after Nixon White House records were seized by the federal government following his resignation, they were never hidden or kept from the former president. He and his editorial assistants and agents (including me and anyone else he chose to designate) had access whenever they wished. As for opening Nixon's records to the public, NARA would have been pleased to do so within a few years after Nixon's resignation. But he devoted 19 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to delaying it. To claim that this was the government's doing is a war-is-peace statement. Maybe there's a George Orwell foundation somewhere they should be running.

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

Dudes Look At A Lady

The legacy of Pat Nixon according to a quartet of male factotums. Mary Brennan, call your agent.
As of March 13, when I rechecked, a female factotum has been added to the program.

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

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.

The Refiner's Fire

Fifteen years ago this Christmas, during my toughest professional crisis, the soundtrack was Handel's "Messiah," inevitably. I've been listening to the king of oratorios through and through over and over in the car during Advent and Christmas for years. (Trevor Pinnock's recording this year. Wow!) But its triumphal choruses and sweet arias will always resonate with the lessons I learned that life-changing Christmas about the preciousness of true friendship and the abundance of grace.

To start with, it was President Nixon's doing. After his death in April 1994, I was surprised to learn that he'd named me co-executor of his estate, along with his personal attorney, Bill Griffin. His daughters were also surprised. That spring, Julie Eisenhower invited me to her late parents' Bergen County townhouse. As we sat in the sun room, she said how angry she and Tricia Cox were that their father hadn't picked them.

Over time, and naturally enough, it proved easier for them to get angrier at me than stay angry at him. For the next two and a half years, I kept running Nixon's private library while trying to settle two presidential records-related lawsuits the estate had inherited. In our periodic conversations, Nixon's attorney son-in-law, Ed Cox, did everything possible to inflame the wound Nixon had inflicted on his family by putting Griffin and me in charge of his estate. I can only speculate (and speculate I do) about why Nixon made the choices he did. Whatever his motives, as the reality of the situation settled in, Eisenhower (who had been friendly for years) was painstakingly and methodically brought around to the view that I wasn't "responsive enough to the family."

In the fall of 1996, Ed Cox blocked a deal I'd worked out with the Justice Department and National Archives that would have federalized and endowed the Nixon library. At issue were the tens of millions that would flow through the estate as compensation for the value of Nixon's White House documents, tapes, and other materials, which Congress had seized after his resignation. As executor, I had to protect both the family's interests and the library's, which Nixon had made his largest beneficiary. David Eisenhower told me that Cox, whose firm was representing him and Julie, had promised a substantial sum over the amounts specified in Nixon's will.

Why do the nations so furiously rage together? For a while it looked like it would be paid over my dead body. Cox cut off direct negotiations in early October 1996 after I insisted on including a Nixon foundation attorney. Before long, I began to hear that I had "problems with the family." Tricia called some of my colleagues at the library and promised that, once I was gone, they would be "protected."

Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. Cox had already tried to get me to resign as executor. Now the family called in a resentful consultant and ex-speechwriter, Ken Khachigian, to fire me at the library. I got the impression that he told everybody else in Orange County first. Herb Kalmbach, Nixon's White House-era attorney, drove to Yorba Linda to warn me. "The long knives are out," he said. Khachigian had a chance to plunge them in at Wheelspinners, a holiday party for politicians and journalists at the Biltmore in LA. Instead, after eying me sullenly from a redoubt hard by the appetizer bar, he asked about a pending Watergate-era project of his. He had been wondering how often his name came up in a new batch of tapes and asked if I could get a report to him by Friday. "I want to know why my political enemies might use against me," he said.

On Friday, I got a call from a friend on the library board, who said that Khachigian had asked him to tell me the Nixon family wanted my resignation. I wondered later what they had needed Khachigian for, since he hadn't even been up to the job of lowering the boom. Instead, I had to place the call to my own evidently timorous executioner, waiting by the phone at his San Clemente office. "I'll be overseeing the transition," he said optimistically. He told me that Nixon had let him go from his ex-president's staff in the late 1970s. Now it was my turn. I replied that Nixon had given me both my jobs and that if he had wanted a Cox, an Eisenhower, or Khachigian to handle his affairs, they would have been. In a lengthy fax over the weekend, I said I wouldn't resign. I also suggested that he make an appointment with the library's archivist to listen to the Watergate tapes himself.

That same weekend, Julie Eisenhower decided that I could stay. By then the Nixon foundation was awkwardly overseen by a super-board composed of Nixon's daughters, former Treasury secretary Bill Simon, and ALLERGAN chairman Gavin Herbert. Simon and Herbert had complained to me about Cox's pressure for more money. Based on a conversation I'd had with Simon in 1993, I assumed Khachigian wouldn't make much progress if he tried to get Simon to team with Tricia to fire me. Finally the Coxes maneuvered Herbert into quitting, which gave the family a 2-1 governing majority.

Nixon had never said he wanted his family to run his library. They didn't for long. For months Ed Cox had faxed me instructions purportedly issued by both women. He told people I'd been fired but refused to leave the premises. Meanwhile the Eisenhowers kept in touch with Kathy O'Connor, Nixon's last chief of staff, and me, urging us to stay the course. After Nixon's first postmortem crisis hit the newspapers in April 1997 (see here and here), Kathy and I put Simon and Eisenhower together and reorganized the foundation under its first independent fiduciary board. O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion!

No one familiar with families' struggles over money, power, and hurt feelings would be surprised by this story. If there's one thing more awkward than siblings who disagree, it's the third party whom a beloved parent has interposed. I couldn't tell which Cox spouse took it more personally that Nixon had overlooked them as custodians of his estate. Even though I served his father-in-law and family for nearly 30 years, Ed called me a johnny come lately in an e-mail he sent Nixon's brother Edward. Anyone in Yorba Linda who'd dealt much with Cox (currently the New York State Republican chairman) had no difficulty thinking that he was taking the lead oar. But I urged people not to underestimate Tricia. What John Moorman, scholar of the Church of England, wrote about the 16th century’s Mary Tudor applied to Nixon’s elder princess as well – “a tight-lipped, severe woman who had passed through the fire of suffering and is now in the grip of a firm determination."

She shares Henry VIII's pragmatism. Until his death in 2009, Nixon aide-turned-columnist Bill Safire was one of the Nixon family's few media friends. During the awkward months before we reorganized her father's foundation, Tricia pressured me to consult Safire, an anti-Beijing hawk, on the speaker list for a conference we were planning on Sino-U.S. relations. When I said that Safire’s views on China were opposed to her father’s, she didn't even bother to argue that they needed to be taken into account for balance's sake. She just said, “My father’s dead."

The struggle with her and her husband continued for years. I was called out of a final exam at seminary to take phone calls about the suit we filed, with the Eisenhowers' encouragement, to secure the $19 million Bebe Rebozo had left the library upon his death in 1998. He had given Nixon's daughters and another friend, aerosol valve inventor Bob Abplanalp, a voice in its disbursement. Tricia Cox made clear that she wanted to use her leverage to overturn our 1997 governance reforms. We settled the suit, got the money, and kept our independent board, but it wasn't pleasant. She and her legal team, which the dutiful Khachigian helped organize, spread the story that Rebozo, famous for stowing $100,000 from Howard Hughes in his safe, had said he didn't trust me with his money. Abplanalp, who repudiated the Cox tactics in a letter, said that Rebozo had admired me and just wondered during my early years at the library how much experience I had managing large investment accounts. I'd had a similar conversation with Rebozo myself. The Cox spin on Rebozo's question turned it into character assassination.

With all that behind us, when I left the library in 2009 after 19 years to begin full-time ministry, the women joined in a gracious statement:

We will always be grateful to John Taylor for his loyal and creative service to our father. He worked closely with him on his eight post-Presidential books and then provided dynamic leadership at the Richard Nixon Library in Yorba Linda since its opening in 1990. He will be missed and we wish him well in his ministry.

As Ron Ziegler might've said, their statement is now inoperative. I was surprised to find recently that a sinister force had erased it from the Nixon foundation web site, although the press release it which it once appeared remains.

Recent reports make clear that the Coxes now have considerable influence at what former Nixon library director Tim Naftali calls the Haldeman foundation. Its current attorney, CREEP administrator and Cox buddy Rob Odle, helped stop the Nixon Center from using Nixon's name. Tricia disliked the center's president, Dimitri Simes. So did Khachigian, who called me once to say he'd been surfing the web to see how many (or how few) media hits Simes was getting. He was despised, rejected! As the Nixon foundation conducts its programs while promoting the agendas of family members and John Dean-hating aides of disgraced White House chief of staff Bob Haldeman, at least the Nixon library is now safely under federal government control. When Ed Cox blocked our 1997 National Archives deal, it cost the foundation millions and the public a ten-year delay in taking control of the Nixon library. In 2007, thanks to our independent board and $1 million in lobbyist fees, Kathy and I, having expanded the library, finally handed it over to the National Archives. Hallelujah!

Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory. Being on the Nixon family's enemies list wasn't as bad as health and other setbacks experienced just last week by members of the church I serve. But after working hard for Nixon from 1979 until his death and investing so much of my heart in the process, being the object of Borgia-like secret maneuvers and ice-hard ruthlessness might have crushed me. At least it felt like it would at the time, as all one's own emergencies usually do. Instead, the experience sparked a call to ordained ministry and taught me some important lessons besides -- and not just how to survive in the Church, which these last 20 centuries has perfected the art of institutional bloodletting. In a gut fight, if you're in someone's way you don't get credit for past service or having your heart in the right place. I also discerned the decisive difference between a friendship and an alliance and came to believe that truth-telling can stimulate understanding, growth, and forgiveness. One may even discover, as did the Jews returning from Babylon with Isaiah's redemptive prophecy ringing in their ears, that all things really do work together ineffably. Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplish'd, that her Iniquity is pardoned.

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.

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.

Nixo-Politico

It's Nixon day at Politico, with an extensive story on last night's Woodward and Bradlee traveling salvation show and an exceptionally revealing analysis of the Haldeman foundation's war against the only aspect of the Nixon library's work Nixon actually cared about. More later!

Nixon Vs. Johnson

Historian Robert KC Johnson, writing at the History News Network about the Nixon library's new Watergate exhibit:

The Nixon Foundation greeted the new exhibit with a blog post from Anne Walker, wife of the foundation chairman. Walker faulted the Library for not effectively representing the true victims of the affair—Nixon and his advisers. (She recalled “the days of reading about our pals in the Washington Post every day, seeing them accused and vilified.”) In a bizarre argument, Walker suggested that critical Watergate defendants didn’t commit wrongdoing, since they were merely convicted of perjury. “Anyone,” she reasoned, “would eventually perjure themselves after countless grand jury sessions,” at which people are asked things like “how much you paid for a ham sandwich on a specific lunch hour.”

Walker’s contentions, of course, are ludicrous. But they also starkly illustrate a tension within the Presidential Libraries and Museums system. Presidential libraries have two constituencies—the public on the one hand, and the President’s family and closest friends and supporters (who help fund the libraries’ facilities) on the other.

A best-case scenario would be figures such as Lady Bird Johnson and former LBJ Library director Harry McPherson. Both were committed to preserving Lyndon Johnson’s legacy—but believed that the best way to do so came through honesty with the public and ensuring that scholars had full access to the available documents in the LBJ Library. The Nixon Foundation approach clearly represents the other extreme--Walker's blog post wildly portrays Nixon Library director Tim Naftali as coordinating a conspiracy designed to spread in the media unflattering (but accurate) quotes from Nixon. (It could be said, I suppose, that Nixon's associates have unusual expertise on the issue of conspiracies.)

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

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

Chapin Away At The Truth

The Nixon foundation's campaign against the Nixon library's new Watergate exhibit became public in an Aug. 6, 2010 New York Times article. The foundation has now published a portion of its 132-page complaint, dated Aug. 2. Among other things, Nixon's White House aides criticize library director Tim Naftali's use of his oral history interviews with, well, Nixon's White House aides, including some involved in Watergate or Watergate-related activities.

Naftali's subjects all signed gift and release forms, which the foundation described as follows:

We note that the “Gift” document conveys the interview to NARA “for eventual deposit” with NARA and that the Donor’s wish is that the “Interview be made available for research as soon as possible, and to the fullest extent possible, following its deposit with NARA."

The foundation's argument is that even though the interviewees agreed that their comments should be made available to researchers and scholars to the fullest extent possible, they shouldn't have been been available to Naftali, the researcher and scholar whom the archivist of the United States asked to assemble a Watergate exhibit. The foundation refers to Naftali's proposed exhibit videos as "snippets" and "brief excerpts."

I guess it depends on what you mean by snippet. The videos and White House tape segments which Naftali had chosen for the exhibit have been available for months at nixonlibrary.gov. Among them is a two-minute, 40-second super-snippet in which Dwight Chapin, who organized dirty tricks for the 1972 Nixon campaign, claims that President Nixon was present when Chapin was ordered to ramp up. Chapin says:

One day the buzzer goes off, and I go into the president’s office, and he’s sitting there with [chief of staff Bob] Haldeman. And they say, “Do you know—“ -- by they, Bob says it, the president’s sitting there – “Do you know anyone who can do Dick Tuck-type stuff? We should have somebody like that.”

Chapin describes hiring Donald Segretti, his USC roommate, and arranging for Nixon's personal attorney, Herb Kalmbach, to pay him. Chapin continues:

I gave [Segretti] some direction. I aimed him at [Democratic candidates] Muskie…[and] Humphrey…He went and innovated and did whatever he did…I never questioned this, because to me, Dick Tuck had always been— This had been part of what I had grown up with….Their request to have a Dick Tuck type-guy was not that insane of an idea. Now you can look at it and say, “You mean to tell me the president of the United States is sitting in his office with his chief of staff; you’re coming in there; and they’re talking about dirty tricks stuff and there’s a Vietnam war and why the hell aren’t they running the war and why are they focused on this stuff?” Can’t answer that. I mean, we had all been in campaigns. Nixon had always had this little rinky-dink crap pulled on him….I don’t know what prompted it that made them buzz me in there, but I went in, that’s what they asked me to do, and that’s what I did. It’s not a good excuse, but that’s what I did.

Watch the video here. Chapin's charge is explosive. During the long months of Watergate in 1973-74, Senate, House, and special prosecutor investigators tried but failed to obtain evidence of Nixon's direct involvement in arranging campaign dirty tricks.

It's also important to remember that Chapin did federal time for perjury. He doesn't say when he was buzzed into Nixon's office, but if it was after February 1971, when the taping system was installed, then the conversation would've been recorded. No such tape has turned up so far, except Chapin and Naftali's. When the new Watergate exhibit is unveiled on Thursday, it will be interesting to see whether those now controlling Nixon's foundation have managed to persuade the National Archives to withhold Chapin's interview and, perhaps, others (such as White House aide Fred Malek's unrepentant conversation with Naftali about counting the number of Jews at the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

If Chapin himself has had second thoughts about his late hit on Nixon, he was well positioned to have an influence on the exhibit's final contents. We also learn from the foundation's Aug. 2 memo that a member of the five-person task force brought on board to critique Naftali's work was none other than Dwight Chapin.

Nixon Abandoned

Beginning from my first days as Richard Nixon's chief of staff from 1984-90, his lack of enthusiasm about his presidential library presented a considerable problem. It was his least favorite post-presidential subject. In his private discourse, he would sometimes actually modify the word "library" with one of those famous deleted expletives.

While generous with his own funds, he refused to raise library money beyond appearing at a few fat cat events and the grand opening in July 1990. Even then, he would dematerialize a few minutes before Bill Simon or Maury Stans, his cabinet members-turned-Nixon library volunteers, made the pitch. One time after another, I was the guy who got to tell Simon, Stans, and others that when it came to the library, Nixon was unable to add anything to his schedule. They'd sometimes wonder why they were raising $23 million for a disgraced president who actually made them feel a little dirty for even mentioning it.

Getting him to focus on architecture and exhibits was rough sledding, too. He realized that any ex-president could get his rich friends to build a museum for him, hold reunions and cocktail parties for his family members and operatives, and say whatever they wanted about the ups and downs of his presidency (such as, in his case, Watergate). As a lifelong reader, Nixon understood that his historical reputation would reside not between museum walls but book covers. That's why, after I became director of the newly opened library in 1990, he reluctantly acquiesced in my plan for an archive of his pre-presidential records. It's also why his last chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor, and I devoted so much energy to getting his White House records home to Yorba Linda by making the private library part of the National Archives, a mission we completed in 2007. We did so despite considerable resistance from Nixon family members and factotums alike.

What would Nixon have thought about the federal library? His feelings would have been mixed, of course. His love of history notwithstanding, he didn't especially love historians. What did he love? Being relevant. Making a difference. His eyes only began to sparkle in conversations about his library when George Argyros (later foundation chairman and U.S. ambassador to Spain), Soviet expert Dimitri Simes, and I asked him to bless our plans for a affiliated foreign policy center that would apply his principles of enlightened national interest to America's challenges in the post-Cold War world.

He agreed immediately. That work, he told us, was worth doing. That work, he said, would have an impact on the course of events. When we were planning the Nixon library, it was hard to get him to drive 50 blocks to midtown Manhattan to attend a meeting. He came all the way from New Jersey to Yorba Linda to announce the creation of the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom in January 1994, on the 25th anniversary of his first Inaugural.

When he died that April, some questioned whether a brand-new Nixon organization in Washington could succeed without him. The momentum his enthusiasm had given us helped us persevere, and in November 1994 the Nixon Center (its shortened name, eventually) opened its doors. In the years since, with Simes at the helm, its experts did exactly what we promised Nixon they'd do: Analyze current events through a Nixonian prism. As recently as last year, when Nixon's White House tapes reminded a new generation of Americans of the less worthy aspects of his legacy and temperament and the Nixon White House operatives now controlling his foundation waxed silent in response, the Nixon Center called attention to the continued relevance of his robust, carefully shaken mixture of Wilsonian idealism and Kissingerian realpolitik.

Nixon would have been proud of its work. Too bad the Nixon Center apparently isn't proud of him. In fact, it just threw its first and greatest patron over the side. At a fundraiser last night, it announced that it was in receipt of "new resources" and also proclaimed its new name: "Nixon Who?", aka "The Center for the National Interest." The National Interest is a foreign policy journal founded in the 1980s by neocon godfather Irving Kristol. Ironically, the Center Formerly Known As Nixon acquired it several years ago and turned it into the voice of principled, Nixonian realism. His kind of thinking became unfashionable in the Republican Party years ago. Who would've thought the foreign policy establishment, not to mention his friends, would finally abandon Nixon as well?
Photos: Nixon in Moscow in 1989 with Dimitri Simes (John H. Taylor photo) and in his suburban New Jersey study

Nixon's Best And Worst Ex-President's Days

Richard Nixon's best recent ex-president's day may have been the Feb. 2 Metropolitan Opera premiere of "Nixon In China." There's no doubt about his worst: The December 2010 opening of a secretly recorded White House conversation in which he and Henry Kissinger talk about whether it would've been an issue for the United States if the Soviet Union decided to murder all its Jews.

Reconciling the grand and tawdry in Nixon's complicated legacy should be the business of both historians and his dwindling cohort of intimates. Instead, Nixon's operatives chose to fight the battle of Yorba Linda over the contents of a Watergate gallery in which some of them play starring roles alongside 37. Here's hoping future Presidents Days will see that matter settled, at least, and historians hard at work in the Nixon library reading room, sifting through the immense record of the most copiously documented public person in the history of humankind.

As that record will show, Nixon was a great man, for good or ill. Being the subject of an opera makes him a grand one as well. In 1987, when I was his chief of staff, John Adams' "Nixon In China" was premiered in Houston and then in New York, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I conducted a reconnaissance by attending one of the BAM performances. I'd bragged to Nixon that I'd gone to prep school with the director, Peter Sellars, the infant phenomenon of 1980s international opera. But attending Sellars' one-man "Winnie-the-Pooh" in the Andover theater lab hadn't prepared me for the moment when a big, flat Air Force One glided onto the stage to thrilling orchestral fanfares and Nixon (baritone James Maddalena) stepped through the door and began to sing.

While I didn't care for the way the Nixons and especially Henry Kissinger were portrayed, I figured that having an opera written about you had to be a net plus unless your name happened to be Othello. But Nixon received my report with even more of his studied reserve than usual. He assumed his enemies were up to something, and besides, as he understood better than anyone, nothing could beat the drama of the real Nixon going to the real China in the real airplane.

At least to me, he never expressed any interest in seeing it himself. When his last chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor, was serving as acting executive director of the Nixon foundation in 2009, she also took a pass when the foundation was offered the opportunity to collaborate with a Long Beach Opera production. She feared that those closest to the Nixon family would appear to be blessing the opera's sometimes cartoonish characterizations. In particular, Kathy said the producers would have to be willing to change portions of the third act, in which Pat Nixon appeared to be drunk. The Nixon family had long battled against allegations that the first lady drank heavily in the White House during Watergate. One of my own first decisions as Nixon library director in 1990 was to remove the Nixon library cocktail glasses a marketing consultant had ordered for the gift shop.

Kathy's decision on the Long Beach production proved to be final. But some at Nixon's foundation still craved the spotlights, greasepaint, and mao tai (a fiery rice wine used by the Chinese for toasts that Nixon, as I saw during a 1985 trip to China, couldn't hold). They finally got the chance to raise their glasses in New York two weeks ago when assorted Nixon factotums, and even members of the Nixon family, attended the glittery Met premiere and were photographed backstage with Maddalena, who reprised his role as Nixon, and other cast members.

One especially knowledgeable guest, former Kissinger aide and ambassador to China Winston Lord, was deeply offended by what he saw. Like my theater critic father and godfather used to do, he was taking detailed notes on his program. Lord later found a sympathetic ear in journalist Gay Talese, who described his views in a "New Yorker" article:

[M]aking Kissinger a lecherous, cruel character is beyond the pale. It turns a heroic figure into a cardboard monster. There is no artistic rationale that explains this. One can only suspect a personal vendetta by the creators.

Lord stuck up for Kissinger where I'd failed to in my 1987 report to Nixon. Kissinger, in turn, had far more advocates than Nixon in December, when both attracted international condemnation for their taped remarks about Soviet Jews in 1973, in the midst of debates about Soviet emigration policy. Kissinger is heard saying that a Soviet holocaust would have been at best a humanitarian concern and by no means a U.S. interest; Nixon replies that it wouldn't be worth a thermonuclear war.

Their conversation was gross but not impossible to explain. Kissinger's friends weighed in, but no one now running Nixon's foundation stepped up to the plate to say that the Nixon they'd known and served wouldn't have permitted such a a foul genocide.

He wouldn't have. That the tapes make it appear otherwise pinpoints the greatest problem for Nixon's legacy and the greatest opportunity for scholars who are willing to open their minds to the ambiguity bequeathed to them by Nixon's tapes and temperament.

His taping system was the worst idea in the history of the modern presidency. He either had no idea how his private discourse would play publicly or no conception of ever losing control of the tapes. For someone who was so careful about his public persona, it was the ultimate nightmare. In the early 1990s, I got a call in Yorba Linda from Carlos Narvaez, who worked for Nixon in the National Archives. "The tapes must never come out," he said. "His reputation will never recover." After Nixon died in 1994, I prayed our friend Carlos was wrong as I negotiated a deal under which the tapes were opened beginning in 1996 and were supposed to be fully opened by 2000.

It now looks as though it will take the National Archives until at least 2012 to complete the laborious process. That's too bad. The battering Nixon's reputation takes from each successive tapes opening -- Watergate reporter Bob Woodward called it the gift that keeps on giving -- keeps a balanced view of his legacy under wraps. So does history's failure to appreciate his deeply introverted temperament, which made each of his public appearances a trial, each meeting with associates an intricate minuet of conflict avoidance, and each conversation with the few people he really trusted an opportunity to release all the tension and anger of being a wartime INTJ.

Nixon's toxic theories and statements about race are especially problematical. It will take scholars decades to sort it all out. When they do, I remain hopeful that they'll understand that he was a far more serious, diligent, and gracious person than history now remembers. For 37, there should be countless better Presidents Days ahead. In the meantime, remember that Nixon went to China, and they're still singing about it.

Above left: Nixon in Hangzhou, China in 1993 with his chief of staff, Kathy O'Connor. Behind them is a tree he planted during his historic 1972 visit.

Bob Woodward, Me, And Nixon's "Nonsense"

As she writes this morning at NixoNARA, historian Maarja Krusten was still working at the National Archives' Washington-area Nixon Project in 1988 when journalist Bob Woodward came looking for details about the investigation President Richard Nixon had ordered years before into how many Jews were working for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It was the last year of the Reagan administration. The Nixon aide who received and followed the order, Fred Malek (above), was up for a top GOP job. I was then Nixon's post-presidential chief of staff. After the story by Woodward and his Washington Post colleague, Walter Pincus, was published, I wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Times accusing the Post of recycling a story that Woodward and Carl Bernstein had first reported many years before in their book The Final Days.

The afternoon my article appeared, Woodward called me. While he said that he hadn't recalled the reference to White House Jew-counting in The Final Days until he read my article, he insisted that Malek's prominence in party circles made it news once again. He also questioned my labored contention that Nixon's obsession with Jews could be entirely accounted for by his obsession with liberals.

When I asked Woodward if he thought Nixon was anti-Semitic, he said, "I don't know." As for Malek, he told the Post in 1988 that Nixon's fears about a cabal of Jews manipulating economic statistics to his detriment were "ridiculous" and "nonsense." But more recently, as Krusten notes, Nixon library director Tim Naftali couldn't get Malek to repeat his criticisms on camera:

Malek comes across better to me in what he told Woodward in 1988 than in Ben Stein’s “Leave Fred Malek alone” column in 2010 (shades of “Leave Britney Alone”) or in the oral history interview he later gave [to Naftali] on the BLS matter. (I’ve described Malek’s stance in the latter as “no harm, no foul.”) Yet Malek had more at stake, as he was being considered in 1988 for chairman of the Republican National Committee.

According to an on-line catalog at nixonlibrary.gov, Malek's interview with Naftali is among those to be included the new Nixon library Watergate exhibit. It also features convicted perjurer Dwight Chapin's dramatic charge that Nixon was present when Chapin (right) was ordered to set up a dirty tricks operation for the 1972 presidential campaign.

So far, the new exhibit at the federal Nixon library has evidently been blocked by friends and former White House colleagues of Malek and Chapin who now control Nixon's foundation.

Waterloogate

In a straw poll, 100% of archival professionals predict that the Nixon library Watergate exhibit, opposed by Nixon's foundation and his White House aides, will be installed more or less as director Tim Naftali has designed it.

Trojan Sources

There's irony or aptness, depending on your perspective, as Dwight Chapin returns to his alma mater, the University of Southern California, to participate in a Nixon foundation co-sponsored panel discussion about President Nixon's China initiative. A 1963 USC graduate, Chapin hired classmate Donald Segretti to run dirty tricks during Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign. It was often said that they first stocked their bags of political tricks as undergraduates.

Chapin was jailed for perjury in Watergate's wake. He's making news at the Nixon library by charging that Nixon was present when chief of staff H. R. "Bob" Haldeman gave the order to create the dirty tricks unit. Until now, Nixon was never directly implicated.

Nixon's foundation is currently enjoying a Haldeman renaissance. Joining Chapin at the USC event will be Haldeman's aide Larry Higby, who also features in the library's proposed new Watergate exhibit.

Friday Afternoon Massacre?

Bruce P. Montgomery, a professor and archivist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, just put out this alert to colleagues around the country:

Word is that U.S. Archivist [David] Ferrerio is throwing Tim Naftili (sic), director of the Nixon Presidential Library, under the bus on the Watergate exhibit. Ferrerio has criticized Naftili for the "rocky relationship" with the Nixon Foundation.

In other words, Naftili has refused to whitewash Nixon's criminal activities in putting together the interactive exhibition or otherwise bow to the Nixon loyalists on their particular spin on history. Evidently, Naftili is to blame for his own integrity.

The new boss, same as the old boss.

It Depends On What The Meaning Of "War" Is

"Los Angeles" magazine, July 2010: "[Nixon foundation president Ron] Walker says he and [library director Tim] Naftali get along better than Naftali and [former foundation executive director John] Taylor. 'It got to be a war between them,' Walker says."

NewsMax.com headline, August 2010: "Nixon Library Battling Over Watergate Exhibit"

The President Called

Being trained for ordained ministry includes being schooled in the language of vocation and call. Both for ordained people and the laity, priesthood isn't a job but a vocation, something we grow into, work that becomes richer and deeper in the doing and that also helps us reach further into ourselves, work that is supposed to etch and mold you, to change the way you look at the world and at God's own work in creation. A baptized person's priesthood, whether ordained or not, is supposed to envelop and interpenetrate us. So we don't decide we want a job in the church. We set out to discern whether we are called, through our priestly vocation, to serve for a time in a place alongside the people of God.

Many years before I knew any of this lingo, I knew I was called to serve President Nixon. In the spring of 1979, I was a 24-year-old senior at the University of California, San Diego. I'd fallen a year behind my peers while working on the student newspaper and then two more while working full-time as a reporter in National City, California.

Sam Kernell's class in the American Presidency met twice a week that spring. As my classmates and I awaited his arrival one Tuesday, this thought came into my head, as clear as Johnny B. Goode's guitar: What if you are ever offered a job working for Richard Nixon? I wasn't a Republican, and I'd never been involved in politics. Whose voice was calling me? You tell me. Two days later, Sam walked in and said that the 37th President, then five years out of the White House and living 50 miles up the coast in San Clemente, was looking for research assistants to help with a future book (published in 1982 and titled Leaders).

I wrote two research papers, then went to work for him in New York City as a research and editorial assistant. I was his chief of staff from 1984-90 and came back to California to run the Nixon Library in September 1990.

And then he died. I may have thought I had been called to serve President Nixon. I may have considered him a vocation. I may even have understood that the experience had changed me forever. But as also sometimes happens on the path to Christian vocation, others had discerned differently. That week in April 1994, in separate conversations, two members of the President's extended family (though neither of them his blood relations) denounced me in a razor cold way that I had never experienced before, even from an angry teenager. It's what a prince's retainers experience when he dies and his successors turn out to have retainers of their own. For her part, Kathy O'Connor, RN's last chief of staff and by that time a loyal aide for 14 years, who had once spent her days fielding invitations for President Nixon from all over the world, found herself presiding over an office where the phone did not ring for weeks as she packed up his files and artifacts. (She is now the Nixon Foundation's chief, a distinct improvement over her predecessor.)

It wasn't a good time, and not just because the boss was gone. My first marriage began to unravel. My best friend among our volunteers, Don Bendetti, who had confidently promoted me for the Library job for reasons I never fully grasped and was yet another of my surrogate fathers, went into the hospital not long after RN's death and had a five-way bypass. Everything tasted of ashes.

Then I learned that the President had named me as a co-executor of his estate and in doing so had called me his friend in his will. All those years, I had been a loyal, sometimes zealous aide. I had traveled with him around the world and to China and Russia. I had talked with him for thousands of hours and kept my share of secrets. I had been his spokesman and helped him with books and articles and any number of nettlesome difficulties. I cared about him very much. But I never would've been so presumptuous as to call myself a friend.

Then, from the grave, he did. He had called me.

Some family members told me, or made clear in other ways, that they were unhappy about the choice President Nixon had made to settle his affairs. Perhaps he had hoped to spare them. Surviving him were lawsuits over the access to his White House tapes and reimbursement for his Presidential materials. We settled one case and ended up trying the other in federal court. The successful outcome paved the way for getting the Nixon Library into the federal system, which happened last year. My fellow executor, the President's stoic personal attorney, Bill Griffin, and I only managed to close the estate in 2008, after 14 years. Executors' fees were $67,000 each, lest anyone think that riches were in store beyond that cherished "friend" in the last will and testament of a complicated, peace-making statesman.

Intuitively understanding my sense of pride, soon after the President's funeral Don Bendetti had a plaque made taking note of my humbling new status as a Friend of Richard and dubbing me a "blue heart" for being true blue, a designation the President had once used for a couple of White House aides who felt dispirited during the Vietnam years. Ultimately, and especially after I began to follow a call to Holy Orders (I was ordained in January 2004), I understood that my job had become less a means of feeling valuable and useful, more an authentic expression of the servant I was meant to be of a larger purpose.

We learn to discern our calls by listening to our hearts, and to our bishops, if we're lucky enough to have one. Late last year, through both my heart and bishop, God seemed to be saying he wanted me to be a full-time priest. As I say goodbye in mid-February to my work at the Nixon Foundation -- 30 years after first meeting a great if imperfectly understood man who had made the world safer for my children and theirs, a man who deserved my best energies and far, far more -- my heart sounded blue.

Pastor Karen's Doing, Marvelous In Our Eyes

My St. John's colleague Sue Cook invited me to submit a message to our weekly parent, faculty, and staff newsletter, the BUZZ:

Greetings from your full-time vicar!

Since coming to St. John’s in the fall of 2004, I’ve had one foot in the Tigris and the other in the Euphrates, spending half my time at our wonderful church and school and the other half as executive director of the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace Foundation.

As with almost everything in life, having two jobs had advantages and disadvantages. The greatest disadvantage was that I couldn’t spend as much time on campus as I would’ve liked.

Finally, this week – on Presidents Day, appropriately enough, which President Nixon proclaimed into being in 1970 – I ended my work at the Nixon Foundation so I could finally plant both feet firmly in the Jordan River here at St. John’s.

Just to show the indirect way God sometimes works when he calls us – and call to each of us, God definitely does – my employment decision was actually made for me, by our beloved Pastor Karen Ann Wojahn. [She is pictured above, talking to God, as I try to listen in.] Both she and I had been working half time at St. John’s. When her four-year ministry came to an end in December, I had two choices: Find another half-time priest as capable as Pastor Karen (which would have been impossible) or heed the call of our Bishop, Jon Bruno, to give serious consideration to beginning full-time ministry myself.

My work for the 37th President and his family and legacy was, like my priesthood, a vocation, a calling. It began in 1979, when he hired me as a research assistant, even though I had no background in politics. That moment (which had an element of the miraculous about it) ended up pointing to a life’s work. I was his chief of staff in New York City and New Jersey from 1984-90 and came to the Nixon Library soon after it opened in 1990.

That’s right: 30 years serving 37. To be honest, I’m already feeling a little nostalgic. But my stronger feelings this Tuesday morning (as a hail storm has given way to brilliant sunshine flooding our School courtyard) are thanksgiving and curiosity. Thanksgiving that God is enabling me to spend more time in ministry with you, your children, and my St. John’s parishioners and colleagues. Curiosity about what God has in store for us all.

Please stop by if you need me or anyone in the church office. Consider joining us Wednesdays at noon at our healing service in the Chrysostom Chapel, or join us for worship Saturdays at 5 p.m. and Sundays at 8 and 10 a.m.

Most important of all, ask yourself this question every morning: What is God’s call to me today? If we really listen, we’ll be astonished at what we hear.