Nixon library offers candid new take on Watergate

Associated Press

YORBA LINDA, Calif.

For years, Richard Nixon’s presidential library was accused of committing another Watergate cover-up. But now, archivists say, the stonewalling is over.

The library opened an expanded new exhibit Thursday that scholars say provides a more balanced and accurate account of the scandal that brought down a president.

“The public deserves nonpartisan, objective presidential libraries,” said library director Tim Naftali, who alluded to the original display as “inaccurate and whitewashed.” Among other things, the old exhibit portrayed Nixon’s epic downfall as a “coup” by his enemies and suggested the press behaved unethically in pursuing him.

The $500,000 makeover was undertaken by the National Archives after it took control of the library in 2007 from the private organization of Nixon loyalists that had overseen the place since its opening in 1990.

The new display features sections called “Abuse of Power,” “The Cover-Up” and “Dirty Tricks,” complemented by taped interviews and text. In one interview, Nixon aide Alexander Haig, who died last year, says the president once asked him to burn White House tapes. “I said no,” Haig recalls.

Some material has never before been shown publicly, and it includes interviews with such figures as Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy and Nixon aide Charles Colson, who went to prison for crimes that came to light as the scandal unfolded.

The scandal began with a burglary at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel complex in Washington and eventually exposed widespread wrongdoing in the Nixon White House, including abuse of government agencies for political purposes. Nixon resigned Aug. 8, 1974.

Dismantled several years ago, the library’s original Watergate exhibit was the largest of any at the site at the time, consisting of documents, text and photographs along a long, darkened hallway. But academics ridiculed it.

When the site opened, Nixon biographer Stephen E. Ambrose said the commentary on one heavily edited Watergate tape “would almost convince a listener that Nixon never ordered a cover-up or a payment of hush money.”

“The presentation makes the best possible case for Nixon, mainly in Nixon’s own words, and is entirely self-serving,” Ambrose wrote in a Los Angeles Times column.

The private Richard Nixon Foundation, which used to run the site, has argued that the exhibit was “President Nixon’s perspective” and that no one had found any factual errors in its text or exhibits.