YORBA LINDA – A year in the making, the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum has been reborn.
And so too, perhaps, has its legacy: from staid and stodgy to hip and incisive. The presidential library is, its patrons and officials hope, ready to engage and inform future generations of visitors about one of the most complex leaders in American history.
The Nixon Library reopened Friday in Yorba Linda after a $15 million re-imagining – more interactivity, eye-catching graphics, historical honesty – that includes nearly 70 new exhibits, more than 300 artifacts that have never before been displayed, and an even-handed approach to illustrating the 37th president’s success and failures.
“The whole point of presenting his legacy is to look at him as he was,” said John Barr, treasurer of the private Nixon Library Foundation. “Warts and all.”
Barr stood in front of a computer touch screen during a VIP tour Friday morning; he pressed buttons that allow viewers to select and read about significant dates in U.S. foreign policy history – making their own judgment call and seeing how Nixon came to his decisions on ending the draft and bombing bases in Cambodia.
“People can take it all in and then make up their minds about his legacy,” Barr said.
The VIP tour included one of the museum’s most iconic visitors – who is also present throughout the Nixon narrative.
Infographic: What’s new about the renovated Nixon Library
Henry Kissinger strode into a new exhibit on Nixon’s historic trip to China like a rock star – with a gaggle of cameramen, photographers and writers with flashing cell phones crowding around him.
Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state, stood in front of a mural of the Great Wall, taking it all in. He was the architect of the president’s China policy and his trip in 1972, which included a walk along the landmark.
He didn’t answer questions, but his presence there, along with former California Gov. Pete Wilson and former Ambassador George Argyros, helped underscore the significance of Nixon’s legacy.
“He had an indomitable spirit,” Wilson said during the opening ceremonies. “When he resigned, he wasn’t quitting. He resigned because he thought it was best for the country.”
Thousands of people waited through the ceremony, with its remarks from Nixon family members and dignitaries, USC marching band and ribbon cutting with confetti canon, to tour the museum.
“I couldn’t believe it when I saw it, the difference between the old library and the new one,” said John Hasegawa, a Culver City resident with a doctorate in international affairs who studied Nixon’s policy toward Japan when he was at American University in Washington, D.C. “You pick up the phone and can listen to the living voices and interact. It’s like looking in on history at the moment it is happening.”
For hours after the opening ceremony, visitors from throughout Southern California meandered through the museum, taking pictures in the life-sized Oval Office, tearing up during a video of U.S. forces leaving Vietnam, and standing silently as the president announces his resignation.
“It‘s transparent,” Jerry Mauter, 55, of Yorba Linda, said of the balance between being open about the Watergate scandal and highlighting Nixon’s achievements. “It was obviously a disgraceful period. They talk about it, but he also did a lot of good.”
The library opened in 1990 as a privately run museum, stirring concern from scholars that it might gloss over the president’s mistakes, including Watergate and the hole it left in the American psyche.
But in 2007, Nixon’s birthplace joined the National Archives and Records Administration, becoming the depository for 46 million pages of documents, collections of photos, and hours of audio and videotape. The change also put federal archivists in charge, leading to tension with the private Nixon Foundation over the shaping of the president’s legacy.
The overhaul to the library marks a successful partnership between the National Archives and the Nixon Foundation, which raised the money for the renovations.
Alongside Nixon’s wins – opening relations with China, lowering the voting age to 18, reducing segregation in the South – is a lengthy and straightforward narrative of the Watergate scandal.
“It’s pretty impressive,” said Paul Updegrove, a Sherman Oaks resident who retired from the Federal Trade Commission 20 years ago. His voice held a hint of surprise. He called himself a “tried-and-true Democrat” who “never really cared for Nixon.”
“It is still a museum lauding him,” he said. “But it’s good they put in a lot of the negative. I’d highly recommend it to young people who aren’t familiar with him.”
