Overseeing the legacy of a disgraced president could hardly be dull work.
The crimes, the humiliation, the resignation. Whatever else Richard M. Nixon accomplished, those three things would define the 37th president, and they provide rich raw material.
But Timothy Naftali, who is in his fifth year of overseeing the archive of presidential papers and a museum commemorating President Nixon’s life and public works, is calling it a day on November 18. After stepping down as director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, Mr. Naftali will focus on finishing two books, one on the cold war, the other on John F. Kennedy, a president remembered rather more positively than Richard Nixon.
“I always knew I wouldn’t stay at the library through the end of my career,” says Mr. Naftali, who at 49 is becoming a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. “I had a set of things I wanted to accomplish.” He says others can judge whether he did that—and the consensus among historians clearly favors him. Also, “it was time to go back to being a private historian. I missed that.”
That seems a diplomatic way of saying that he leaves behind bitter differences over how the Nixon Library, in Yorba Linda, Calif., should portray its divisive subject. In 1990, the private Richard Nixon Foundation set up the library, but had to make do at the time without Nixon’s presidential records. The National Archives and Records Administration, which held those, feared that loyalists at the Nixon Foundation would take a hagiographic approach.
Indeed, they did. For example, in the early 1990s, steered by Mr. Nixon, they prepared a Watergate exhibit that apologetically, even deceptively, framed the events that led to his downfall. Historians condemned it, for example, for suggesting that the Watergate break-in was a Democratic conspiracy to overturn the 1972 election.
In 2006, after a long legal battle, the National Archives reached an agreement to take control of the Nixon Library, which became the 12th federally run presidential library. Mr. Naftali, who for seven years had headed the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, was appointed the director.
His mandate: to make the scholarly and educational resource one that met the highest professional historical standards—one that would not, for example, operate as a Republican institution by blaming the whistle-blower John Dean for Nixon’s Watergate woes or cancel a conference on Nixon’s role in the Vietnam War when speakers seemed likely to be critical of him.
Mr. Naftali’s scholarly work had often dealt with the presidency, so he knew that voters do not choose among saints. He set about creating a new Watergate exhibit. While working on that, he brought in speakers whom the Nixon Foundation had pointedly not invited to library events, like Mr. Dean, the fired White House counsel, and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post journalists who unveiled the details of the Watergate story.
The Watergate Gallery that Mr. Naftali developed finally opened last March, with such sections as “Dirty Tricks” and “The Cover-Up, Break-In, and Evidence.” Visitors can hear recordings of Nixon in incriminating conversations with White House aides.
Nixon loyalists assailed Mr. Naftali for ignoring the celebratory spirit of presidential libraries. Would he, some asked, run a library on President Bill Clinton that trumpeted the incident involving Monica Lewinsky?
How much presidential libraries might celebrate their subjects is an issue that should be considered separately from their mandate to provide unfettered access to presidential papers and “the facts,” Mr. Naftali says. But the discussion, he adds, is worth visiting: “I understand the debate among scholars, but so many more people use these libraries, and it’s their money as it’s our money.” He wonders whether all users, not just historians, but also members of the general public, “can reflect on what they expect and want for that money. That discussion up until now has been too narrow.”
The attention the new Watergate exhibition has attracted should help. It capped Mr. Naftali’s accomplishments at the library. Those achievements include consolidating the voluminous records of the Nixon administration and making them available, both at the library and online.
In the latest release, the library last week opened documents and sound recordings from Nixon’s 1971-1973 White House conversations that were examined by a 1975 grand jury. The library will also open reams of National Security Council materials and transcripts of telephone conversations involving Henry Kissinger, who has opposed such release since Nixon’s resignation. Meanwhile, at its College Park, Md., facility, the National Archives will open records from its Watergate Special Prosecution Force collection, including transcripts of Nixon’s 1975 grand-jury testimony.
But Mr. Naftali says he is just as proud of making the institution a go-to destination for 90,000 visitors each year, including many school tours, and of putting reams of material on the Internet. He says: “This whole experience has made me much more interested in public history, and the role that physical and virtual museums can play in teaching people about America, about their history, and the U.S. Constitution.”
Some Nixon loyalists have wished him good riddance in anonymous comments in newspaper articles. But Mr. Naftali is diplomatic about the criticism, saying that to do what he was asked to do, he tried to convince the Nixon faithful that presenting facts, rather than ignoring “the errors, flaws, and in some cases crimes of his administration,” would bring greater credit to the president and his positive accomplishments.
In any case, his departure seems one that Mr. Naftali chose, resulting from an urgency he feels to return to his primary interest: scholarship. He has two current book contracts to satisfy, and others seem sure to follow.
For observers of the long Nixon Library battles, the wonder is that he could prevail against the steep odds. In a typical expression of that, Stanley I. Kutler, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin who played a decisive role in having Nixon’s White House records released for public study, says: “Before, it was a Southern California theme park, but it became under his leadership a first-class research and educational institution.”
