Welcome To the New Nixon
While the handover of the Nixon Library to the National Archives last year was a high point in our institutional life, it was a drag for us personally at the Nixon Foundation, what with being called liars, haters, and belligerent and hostile paranoids who had been mean to Carl Bernstein.
The attacks began in July when a reporter for the Associated Press, Gillian Flaccus, published an article containing a ham-handed poke at our integrity by historian David Greenberg. The private Library’s Watergate exhibit (removed by Uncle Sam a year ago) had text telling visitors that the famous 18 1/2 –minute gap on a Watergate tape might have been accidental. “It’s not only not true,” Flaccus quoted Greenberg as saying, “it’s the opposite of truth. There was a lot along those lines in the library, which was not a matter of interpretation, but flat wrong, a lie.” Having overseen creation of the original museum, and since some experts indeed said it was possible the erasure was accidental, I wrote an article about Greenberg’s charge for the Nixon Foundation web site. In an e-mail, he chastised me for getting “worked up” and said that Flaccus had misquoted him. He told me what he had meant to say was a lie was our exhibit’s presentation about a group of Democratic House members who in 1973 tried to persuade their leadership to leave the Vice Presidency empty long enough following Spiro Agnew’s resignation to enable the Democratic Speaker, Carl Albert, to become President in the event RN resigned. Writes one authority, “This is the closest to a coup d’etat that the country has ever come.” So that wasn’t a lie, either.
In addition to his denunciations via the AP at the time of the handover last summer, Greenberg wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Will the Nixon Foundation…stay out of all questions of access to tapes and papers? Or will it continue to throw up roadblocks for scholars?” Writing to him again, I said that he hadn’t yet correctly identified a lie in our museum and that, contrary to his derogatory implication, he was well aware that the Nixon family and Foundation had enabled the opening of massive caches of records. Contradicting his own article, Greenberg wrote back, “I did not imply that you are intending to ‘roadblock scholars on documents’.” For attempting to hold him accountable for falsely accusing us of being liars to tens of millions of newspaper readers, he accused me of “belligerence…hostility and paranoia.”
More such unpleasant qualities in your Nixon Foundation servants were identified by LA Times reporter Christopher Goffard in an October 2007 article celebrating Carl Bernstein’s appearance at the Nixon Library. My wife and colleague Kathy and I had hung out with Bernstein in Austin once. We even had invited him to go see Steve Earle at La Zona Rosa with us (he politely declined). We weren’t in Yorba Linda for his visit because Director Tim Naftali arranged it while we were on a cruise that had been scheduled for months. Goffard implied that we had snubbed Bernstein intentionally and went on to report that Bernstein had long been an “arch-villain” who “elicited special loathing” at the private Nixon Library.
The evidence for Goffard’s attacks? You guessed it: Our old Watergate exhibit, which, Goffard wrote, “falsely accused” Woodward and Bernstein of wrongdoing. It’s certainly true that the exhibit (written by a diligent and highly ethical political insider, Bob Bostock) contained a quotation about “Woodward and Bernstein’s failure to address any of the ethical deficiencies of their investigative reporting, including offering of bribes, illegally gaining access to telephone numbers, and talking to members of the grand jury.” But was this the work of a snarling Nixon partisan? Not hardly. The quote came from The Wars of Watergate by historian Stanley Kutler. A reliable critic of the late President, Kutler was praised for his book’s meticulousness by the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh. Just to be perfectly clear, this means Christopher Goffard has called Stanley Kutler a liar. Work it out peacefully, okay, guys? And next time, leave us out of it.
For including Kutler’s words in our museum, did my colleagues and I deserve to be attacked in the news columns of the LA Times? For our positions on Watergate issues about which gentlemen might differ, why did an historian call us liars? I guess there are folks who are even more emotionally invested in this Nixon stuff than we are. Richard Norton Smith, historian and visionary head of five Presidential libraries, is right: History really is too important to be left to the historians – or for that matter, to the journalists. That’s where you come in. Welcome to The New Nixon.
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- Washington Post: Nixon Library Joins the Club
- Business Leader, Nixon Friend Carl Karcher Dies at 90
- Korean Ambassadors at Nixon Library Jan. 25
- Nixon Library Welcomes Former Leader of Spain’s Catalonia
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12 Comments
2008-02-18
11:10:36
[...] still miffed about how the foundation’s controversial Watergate exhibit was described by historians last July. (That 18.5 minute gap in the Watergate tapes? “…some experts indeed said it was [...]
2008-02-18
11:22:22
Best of luck and Gods Speed, Mr. Taylor. It's high time that people get to see the ethical, pragmatic, and patriotic side of RM Nixon! And yes, also the human side of him. By his own published admissions, Presisdent Nixon made some monumental mistakes. But in my estimation, it never stopped him from trying to do the right thing for our great nation, even at the expense of his own personal sacrifice...
As for historians, I would say that confusing historians with history is much akin to "confusing the menu with the meal" at a restaurant; You can eat the menu, but it won't taste anything like the meal!
I look forward to future contributions in this forum.
2008-02-18
11:52:44
Mark: Thanks for being among our inaugural posters. Your comment reminds me of RN's rueful comment on the last night of his Presidency, when Dr. Kissinger assured him that history would remember him well: "It depends on who writes the history!"
2008-02-18
13:20:29
President Nixon's library is a great place to visit. I hope the same will be said about this blog.
2008-02-18
16:43:02
Do you really think that a web site and blog is going to change the consensus of years and years of factual evidence?
Somehow, I don't think so, but good luck to you.
Nixon will always be "Not a Crook" to most Americans, rhetoric and lies written in gigabytes not withstanding.
2008-02-18
19:26:51
Praduh,
I don't think Nixon is in the mind of most Americans as you say.
Regardless of what you say he is still an American patriot and a former President.
Most Americans don't have a myopic view of the 37th President. You simply have such a deep disdain for this man, that it inhibits your thought process and produces a very myopic view of US history.
For all his mishaps, Nixon was a cold warrior and a shrewd diplomat. The historical record does show that despite your attempts to revise it.
2008-02-20
19:23:45
Some men and woman make history, some men and women write history and some men and women revise history. The majority of us observe and read history.
President Nixon made history and wrote about it as well.
There is a total eclipse occuring over North America right now (Feburary 20, 2008). I do not believe that Watergate will eclipse all of the other bright events that President Nixon contributed his time and pen to. Nonetheless, it was extremely interesting watching the shadows of those darker times.
Hopefully this blog can shed some light on the good and bad times of both the old and new Nixon.
2008-02-21
11:43:46
Thanks for your support, Raymond.
2008-08-17
11:58:40
This may be of interest, I posted this on the forum.
John J. Cafaro, who served 19 years as Westwood, New Jersey police chief and then guarded former president Richard Nixon died last week. He was 82.
Mr. Cafaro, a navy veteran of world War II, joined the Westwood police department in 1954, and climed through the ranks becoming chief in 1967.
Soon after retiring in 1986, Mr. Cafaro joined Nixon's security detail in Park Ridge, NJ, where the president and his wife, Pat spent their final years.
Mr. Cafaro drove the president and his family and got to know Mr. Nixon quite well.
He was with the detail for six years and ended up owning autographed copies of all the president's books.
His wife, Janet died last year.
Asked how Mr. Cafaro came to work for the former president, daughter Barbara Greve said, "My dad knew alot of people, people in the right places."
source: Bergen Record, Hackensack, NJ
2008-08-18
07:29:30
Thanks, Larry. My wife Kathy, who was RN's chief of staff then, remembers Chief Cafaro well. We were saddened to learn of his death.
2008-08-18
17:08:44
[...] In an effort to resolve his conundrum about whether to laugh or cry, Greenberg called us liars to the AP, couldn’t prove it, implied in an op-ed piece that we were throwing up roadblocks to scholars, claimed he hadn’t written anything of the sort, and finally accused us of belligerence and paranoia for questioning him about his charges. As for accusing Woodstein of offering bribes, that was the other scholar whom Garofalo admiringly quotes, Stanley Kutler. We just quoted Kutler’s well-reviewed Watergate book in a museum exhibit. The LA Times erroneously implied that Kutler’s words originated with us. Review it all here. [...]
2008-12-03
15:36:34
[...] hard bitten, secretive Nixon loyalists have been Goffard’s targets before, such as when Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein visited Yorba Linda in October 2007 as a [...]