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.

Nixon Made Everything So Complicated

In the late 1980s, after professionals at the National Archives had painstakingly prepared the Nixon White House records and tapes to be opened to the public, they began to get the distinct impression that 37 was exerting influence through their superiors to slow the process down.

Nixon's argument (I know it well, because as his chief of staff in New Jersey, I was helping make it) was that he should be treated the same as his predecessors when it came to the disclosure of sensitive documents and especially secretly-recorded tapes. Other presidents, incumbent and former, may have come to the conclusion that it would also be in their interests to to slow down the Nixon records express.

But as far as the Nixon archivists were concerned, the law of the land, and the regulations the agency has derived from it, were perfectly clear. Former Nixon tapes archivist Maarja Krusten tells the story in a detailed post at NixoNARA that should be required reading for federal employees at all presidential libraries, especially wealthy ones where the former president, his family, or his operatives bring financial or political influence to bear on archival or curatorial questions.

Krusten's conclusion:

I just don’t know all the reasons why those of us who argued for greater sunshine in the Nixon records release process lost our fight in 1989. That NARA later struggled to tell this story does suggest that perhaps there were some powerful forces at play, inside and outside government. But this simply may have reflected a phrase those of us at the Nixon project heard increasingly during 1989—”the presidential libraries way of doing things.”

Open government is a noble goal but not always easy to achieve when former presidents face disclosures from their records. And let’s face it, most of us probably would not find it easy to throw open for public display the candid deliberations we once took part in on the job. Would we find it easy, on top of that, to let the public know about our concerns about planned archival disclosures, even if regulations required it? My archival cohort argued for transparency in 1989. Others in government evidently saw it differently. Laws and regulations often posit a pristine environment for resolving such issues. But my experiences suggest that often, when it comes to sunshine, it really does ”get complicated.”

Obama Is The New Nixon

Reflecting on the politics and finances of presidential libraries, historian Maarja Krusten raises the question of whether the next one (probably either in Honolulu or Chicago) could end up being as controversial as the one in Yorba Linda:

Having come of age during the Vietnam war era, which saw some extraordinarily heated rhetoric used by some on the left against Richard Nixon, I never thought I would see so much vitriol again, with equally awful rhetoric now being used against Barack Obama by some on the right. The hatred, the reliance on lies or hyperbole, the disregard for the harm being done to the nation and to their side, seems much the same to me, it’s just coming from the other end of the political spectrum.

Nixon Library, Momentarily Redeemed

Take this, Stanley Kutler! In his critique of Bill Clinton's library, columnist Dave Gibson holds up Richard Nixon's as the gold standard of historical objectivity:

One of the exhibits deals with Clinton’s impeachment, which the library claims was purely political. Part of the permanent display claims: "The impeachment battle was not about the Constitution or the rule of law, but was instead a quest for power that the president's opponents could not win at the ballot box."

The truth is, Bill Clinton lied under oath to protect himself from a woman accusing him of sexual harassment. The investigation ended with his impeachment and the surrender of his law license… Period.

Historians have ranked Bill Clinton last, behind President Nixon on "moral-authority."

Nixon resigned in disgrace and later opened a library which presents a candid look at the facts about the Watergate scandal. Nothing is hidden, nothing is spun. Visitors to the Nixon Presidential Library are given the opportunity to draw their own conclusions.

The canny Nixonian blogger would just let that pleasing assertion lie (so to speak). But as Nixon's ex-chief of staff, having overseen and edited all the exhibits at the Nixon library when they were being written, designed, and constructed by contractors and assistants during 1988-90, I can tell you that we spun Watergate harder than a Whirpool on steroids. Our talking points were exactly the same as the Clinton library's: The president's opponents used the scandal for political payback.

As with all good spin, ours embodied some truth. Impeachment is always a political act. Just ask Andrew Johnson. While our Watergate gallery was never popular with journalists and historians, critics such as David Greenberg tried and failed to identify errors.

The problems were matters of thoroughness as well as tone. After Nixon died in 1994 and we decided that his privately operated library should be part of the National Archives, it was obvious to the feds and me (I was then running the library) that the exhibit had to go, if for reasons of common sense alone. In museum exhibits, polemics work just like in newspaper columns like Gibson's and blogs like mine. If you agree, you're satisfied; if you disagree, you're offended; and if you're open-minded, you're inclined to be suspicious that you're not getting the whole story.

That why in 2006, at my suggestion National Archives official Sharon Fawcett assigned the Nixon library's first federal director, historian Tim Naftali, to create a new Watergate exhibit that would (using Dave Gibson's words, ironically enough) give visitors the opportunity to draw their own conclusions about modern political history's worst scandal. Nixon's White House aides, some of them personally involved, resisted it, just as Clinton spurned a neutral narrative about his troubles.

It took the Reagan library until this year to uncover the Iran-contra scandal, which occurred 24 years ago. Thirty-eight years after Nixon's resignation, Naftali's Watergate installation is now underway. Perhaps he should invite Gibson to the ribbon cutting -- along with his NARA colleagues in Little Rock and elsewhere who might learn from his experience, warts, scars, and all. Deficit permitting, hazardous duty pay may even be in order.

If It's Professor Evil, He Reaches Gazillions

Duke Blackwood is a former USC official who now serves as director of the Reagan library in Simi Valley. In testimony he prepared for a congressional committee studying the future of presidential libraries, he reveals something he calls the downstream affect (though I think he means "effect"):

In our numbers driven society it is fair to ask how many scholars use presidential materials. While it is a good question, it shouldn’t be asked alone. You must also judge the impact of the use of our materials - not just by how many researchers are visiting. This is what I refer to as the downstream affect. A single scholar might publish multiple articles, books or blog entries that will reach hundreds, thousands perhaps millions of people. That same scholar may appear on radio broadcasts or television shows reaching even more people. That is impactful. Perhaps in the future we should take a look at collecting the downstream data as a way to provide you with another yardstick to measure our impact.

Happy indeed is the hard-working academic who reaches millions, especially when the typical user of the Reagan library reading room is probably working on something with a title such as "Conflict, Cooperation, And Conciliation: The U.S. And Latin America, 1983-85." But then you get the downstream...whatever. What would that be, tens of millions?

He wishes. Maybe libraries have gotten wind of budget cuts and are trying to boost their profile. It might perk up a couple of House committees on a Monday morning if you pretend that professors reach more consumers than "Toy Story 3." But you've got to worry about your credibility affect.

"The Road Goes on Forever," Joe Ely

The classic Robert Earl Keen tune about the bad guys winning, performed by Mr. Ely of Lubbock, Texas.

During the first Bush administration, the National Archives invited me to a couple of presidential libraries directors' meetings, even though the Nixon library was then a nongovernmental institution. The Clinton administration put an end to all that.

My second and final opportunity to mingle with the grownups was at the LBJ library in Austin in 1992. On our evening off, I made my way to La Zona Rosa, now closed, where, just as I arrived, Ely and his band swung into this number as the UT students in in the audience held their Lone Star bottles in the air.

I think I was a Texan in a prior life.

The Altar Of Purity

From my comments in an exchange today with historian and former Nixon tapes archivist Maarja Krusten on her new blog, NixoNARA:

[An important] NixoNARA issue is where a great person’s legacy ultimately resides — in the sum of his or her principles and actions or in the surviving interests of family members and staffers. What’s inescapably true is that, before too long, history will have nothing to grapple with but what Nixon did, which is why it was vital to get the records to Yorba Linda under the public’s stewardship, in a setting that would be as collegial as possible as well as congenial both to Nixon’s and the public’s interests.

Collegiality has been sacrificed on the altar of purity and payback. But thanks to Tim Naftali and the hard work of others who believed in the cause, the records are there. Thanks to them, the Nixon library is the Nixon records.

Saving Presidential Paper In A Post-Print World

In advising President Obama to dispense with a Presidential library, Mark Feeney overlooks one teenie-weenie problem: Then who's going to pay for the warehouse to house his records? The George W. Bush Library, for instance, will have 145,000 square feet for his records and museum, which probably means 80,000-100,000 square feet just for the documents and artifacts. At Presidential libraries, these repositories are built with private funds. Feeney writes:

Quite simply, presidential libraries are undemocratic and unnecessary (the National Archives and Records Administration already has fine facilities, thank you very much).

That may well be, but it has no room for a new Presidential collection every four to eight years, either at its main facility on Pennsylvania Ave. or at Archives II in College Park, where NARA probably can't wait to get the massive Nixon Project on its way to Yorba Linda in 2010 so it can use the space for other purposes.

If the President's rich friends don't provide a building for Obama's records, I guess his successor can pass an archival stimulus bill. But once it's paid for, where do we put his 120,000-square-foot warehouse? Where do we put the 140,000-square-foot one after that? How about in facility in a community associated with the President in some way, built with private funds and envisioned as a museum and public programming center as well as an archives? Make sense? It does, hence the logic of the Presidential library system. (Here's an historical review by NARA's Nancy Kegan Smith.)

What could alter the paradigm is an administration, with the advice of NARA records experts, figuring out how to conduct a post-paper Presidency, which could dramatically decrease the number of shelf-feet needed for those rows and rows of grey Hollinger boxes (though the government would still need to find room for tens of thousands of gifts and other artifacts for each President). The main difficulty would be to figure how how to make sure we can always read the digital media that would contain our nation's precious history. Anybody got a 5.25-inch disc drive handy?

Feeney does like the Nixon Library's little white house, RN's restored birthplace.

Balancing Scholarship And Spin

As she celebrates a distinguished 40-year (so far) career with the National Archives, Sharon Fawcett, the assistant archivist of for Presidential libraries who helped shepherd the Nixon Library into the federal fold in 2007, discusses challenges and opportunities at these unique institutions.

Hat tip to Jack Nesbitt