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How the Old Guard at the Nixon Library Hoodwinked Historians

Nixon's campaign slogan was "Nixon, now more than ever," if historians really want to change things at his library, they should take up the rallying cry, "NARA, now more than ever."

If you listen carefully to all of the noise being made by academics who want to punish the Nixon Library by keeping them out of the federal system, you can hear members of the Nixon Foundation begging not to be thrown into the briar patch. In the past few weeks scholars have been lining up to denounce the library and send petitions to congress. While jumping on a band wagon is always fun, in this case it is doing more harm than good. Contrary to what some have alleged, the ordeal over the Vietnam symposium shows why the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) needs to take control of the Nixon library sooner rather than later.

The cancellation of the conference is a result of a rift between two groups of library employees; the Nixon Foundation loyalists, who want to maintain the status quo, and the scholars who want to mainstream the museum. As anyone who has toured the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace knows, it is the only presidential library that is run without federal funding. This is pointed out repeatedly to visitors and it demonstrates how defensive the museum can be. The library, like the president it celebrates, has taken this pride of self-sufficiency to an extreme. Their pride concerning their status as the only privately funded presidential museum is presented as a sign of greatness, and not as an example of how Nixon was ostracized by history.

Since the museum was privately funded, it could play by its own rules. The board of the Nixon Foundation contains friends and admirers of the former president, and they have created a presidential museum like no other. This has led the museum to bring in politicians who praise Nixon more than academics who might tarnish his image. More than most other presidential museums, the Nixon library has been equal parts historical site and activist center. The museum caters to its elite contributors and to Republican causes. Where else can you see John Dean get blamed for Nixon's Watergate crimes? What other presidential library would invite Oliver North to speak and sell his books?

This elitism even applied to the research aspect of the museum. When the archives opened, it was modeled after the Huntington Library, which granted access only to researchers with Ph.D.'s. The archives were organized in an inconsistent manner, but this was largely irrelevant since all of Nixon's presidential papers were (and are) held by the federal government. The work that was being done on the collections was mostly the work of one person and it would have taken several lifetimes to complete anything significant. The archives seemed to only remind the Nixon Foundation about the president's problems, and it remained understaffed and underfunded.

That all changed a few years ago when archivists were hired away from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in order to set up the archives to NARA standards. These people gave up their federal jobs with all of its benefits and came to work in Yorba Linda in the hope that the museum would become a federally run institution. Now researchers of any age are allowed in and the archives to have the same cataloging system that all other federal archives use. They have also speeded up the cataloging process significantly. These archivists hope to rejoin the ranks of federal archivists and look forward to the day when Nixon's presidential papers are brought west. Therein lies the reason why the conference was cancelled. If the archives department is successful in making the library ready for NARA, then many of those proud Nixon Foundation people who thump their chests and brag about their private funding will lose a lot of power.

The archives staff helped plan the Vietnam war symposium with Whittier College and it was designed to show that the library was a place of scholarship where divergent views could be heard. If the conference was a success, then the archives staff was one big step closer to federal recognition, and the rest were closer to losing their status as the keepers of Nixon's legacy.

No matter which version of the cancellation story you believe, they all end with the Nixon Foundation as the bad guys. Luckily for them, most academics were more than willing to play into their hands by denouncing the library and petitioning Congress to keep the Nixon library out of NARA's control. I suspect that nothing would please them more. These same people who don't care for academic dissent are the ones who will win if the museum stays free of NARA. The best thing historians could do is to push the government to take control of the museum as quickly as possible. This would remove the Nixon partisans from power and allow the museum to become the kind of place it was designed to be. While it is true that the Nixon Foundation would still exist, its power over the archives, and hence the presidential papers, would be nil. Petitions to Congress might make one feel better, but in this case it appears that historians are better at jumping to conclusions and making rash decisions than on trying to achieve their goals. Perhaps academics have become so accustomed to opposing Nixon and his museum that they are no longer capable of doing what is needed to keep this from happening again.

By their actions, historians are showing the Nixon Foundation that if they want to stay in power, they just have to remain hostile to academics. What we historians need to do is pressure the government to bring in NARA now so that the Foundation members will release their grip on the library and go get jobs at Fox News Channel.