Dear John Taylor: A Letter to the Executive Director of the Nixon Library

Late last week the Nixon Library and Birthplace abruptly cancelled a conference on Vietnam that was to have featured more than a score of prominent academics, including well-known critics of the Nixon administration. John Taylor, Executive Director of the Nixon Library, explained that he cancelled the event because only seven people had thus far signed up to buy tickets. In response to the Library's decision, Thomas Blanton, one of the scheduled panelists, wrote the following letter to Mr. Taylor.

Dear Mr. Taylor:

Thank you for appending me on your response to Professor Berman yesterday.  I remember with fondness my day at your Yorba Linda facility a few years ago, after which I emerged from my immersion in your selection of the Watergate tapes understanding for really the first time ever, that John Dean had actually masterminded the Watergate break-in and all the other dirty tricks and had stuck his victimized chief executive with the blame.  Ever since, I have featured your exhibit as a case study at the summer institute on archival research that we teach here at George Washington University, and no few of those graduate students have ventured to Yorba Linda to hear the selection for themselves, the better to tell the story to successive generations.

Thus, I was sad to find out in November 2003 that the Nixon library and birthplace sought to become a professional archival repository, part of the Presidential Library system.  All of the other presidential theme parks have taken the treatment, but surely President Nixon would have appreciated the outlier status that you have cultivated.  Perhaps it was a budgetary matter, and the opportunity to dip into the public till (even minus the percentage that your lobbyists at Cassidy must take) was too tempting to pass up.  Whatever the motivations, there was a silver lining that at least the deal promised to reunite, at long last, the spliced Nixon tapes, putting back into the National Archives (or at least into an adjacent storage room) the personal and Republican Party portions of the tapes that had been eviscerated from the corpus over the past 30 years.

But my gloom lifted with the joy of realizing that Nixonianism is not dead, in fact, as William Faulkner would have remarked, it's not even past.  Your plug-pulling on the Vietnam conference brought back memories of going off the gold standard without telling the Japanese.  Your laser-like focus on advance ticket sales (as of March 3 for an April 28 event) brought back memories of Donald Segretti's monitoring of attendance at Ed Muskie's events in 1970.  Your brilliant efforts to string along your ostensible colleagues from Whittier College, your outstanding dramatic performance in a minor role to pretend that the likes of Stanley Kutler were actually welcome in Yorba Linda, your extraordinary marketing, advertising, and public relations blitz to gain the largest possible audience for the conference (how big exactly was that email list that produced seven registrations seven weeks in advance?) -­ all reminded me of President Nixon's own face, lifted toward the chandelier, intoning solemnly, "If we need the money we can get the money.  We can get it in cash.  I know where it could be gotten but the question is who can handle it?" (Later, of course, he remarked, "And it would be wrong.")

Indeed, your cancellation convinces me to agree with you that it would be wrong for Yorba Linda to host real scholarly conferences.  Bar mitzvahs are far more lucrative.  Of course, you are also suggesting that it would be wrong for Yorba Linda to host real archival records, and you may well have a point there as well.

You really don't want scholars around, anyhow.  They have this annoying habit of clustering near the truth.  And that would definitely mess with your marketing, such as it is.

Thomas S. Blanton
Director, National Security Archive
George Washington University