The Yorba Linda library built at his birthplace tackles Nixon's complex time in office, both the triumphs and the scandal. It leaves judgment to others.
Fifty years ago, on Aug. 9, 1974, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency.
For many, he is mostly remembered as the only president to ever resign the office. No doubt, Watergate endures as a scar on American history while, in pop culture, the -gate suffix has become synonymous with scandal.
But, Nixon also left behind a complicated political legacy outside of Watergate, and the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda is tasked with making sense of it all.
Nixon appointed four conservative justices to the Supreme Court yet pedaled a fairly liberal domestic policy platform, including establishing the Environmental Protection Agency and signing Title IX. His sizeable record on foreign policy included carpet-bombing Cambodia, but he yearned to be remembered as a peacemaker for ultimately withdrawing U.S. forces from the Vietnam War and normalizing relations with Chair Mao Zedong of China.
At Nixon’s funeral in 1994, then-President Bill Clinton eulogized, “May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than his entire life and career come to a close.”
Doing so is a mammoth undertaking.
The president was a political enigma — remembered as an introvert in an extrovert’s world and a conservative, but an activist. And, he left behind one of America’s largest troves of presidential records due to his clandestine recordings of 3,700 hours of White House conversations and his penchant for taking copious notes during meetings.
The Nixon Library, along with the National Archives, is challenged with the prodigious task of compiling Nixon’s entire personal and professional history and painting the full picture of the president to more than 150,000 visitors each year.
Since the library opened in 1990 at Nixon’s birthplace in Yorba Linda, its story of the only native Californian to win the presidency has evolved to become what many museumgoers say is a more balanced narrative of the embattled president.
In the past 10 years, the library underwent a $25 million renovation to improve the “educational presentation that reflects President Nixon’s life and times,” said Nixon Foundation President Jim Byron. “The museum is like a roller coaster ride through history.”
It’s a fair assessment considering Nixon’s political career was shaped by monumental highs and lows.
Ken Khachigian, a political strategist and speechwriter for Nixon, said the former president had to overcome three “hardships” while in office: a wartime presidency, a Democratic House and Senate and a less-than-friendly press.
“Only if you’ve been in the deepest valley can you know how magnificent it is to be on the highest mountain,” Nixon said to America during his final television address the night before he resigned the presidency.
The library seems to capture the essence of that poignant quote in form and function. Nowhere is that more evident than in the walk that leads from one colorful exhibit about Nixon’s landslide 1972 reelection down a somber hallway chock full of information about his undoing two years later.
Byron said balancing a narrative about Nixon’s accomplishments with his infamous downfall is a challenge and something the foundation “does very carefully.”
“I would hope that our visitors come here with their eyes open to history and with an open mind,” Byron said. “The Nixon presidency was no doubt one of the most consequential periods in American history.”
But as that era in history moves further away in time, the library remains forward-looking — much like the old president himself.
Nixon wasn’t one to dwell on the past, said Khachigian, but rather focused on the future — what was next in Republican politics, what was next for him. In a way, the Nixon Library is building on the mantra, increasingly inviting more high-profile politicians, government officials and others who have their fingers on the pulse of American politics.
Sure, the library has played host to Nixon historians and ardent defenders. But it’s also given a platform to contemporary conservative figures like former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who, while in office in 2020, went to Nixon’s birthplace to deliver an address on U.S.-China relations that the State Department called “one of the most significant foreign policy announcements of the Trump administration to date.”
And when the Republican presidential primary was in full swing last year, several contenders made stops at the Nixon Library, including former Vice President Mike Pence and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
On Friday afternoon, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is expected to speak at the library about his new book, “Over Ruled,” in which he argues that America’s increasingly complex legal system is creating a burden on Americans.
“The growth in prestige and impact of the Nixon Library has been amazing,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a frequent guest speaker at the library. “In many ways, President Nixon was an extraordinarily thoughtful leader in foreign policy and national security, and the library has built on that knowledge.”
“The library is an important venue,” Gingrich continued, “to make substantive policy speeches which are streamed nationally and often have significant impact.”
On Monday, a few days shy of the anniversary of Nixon’s resignation, Betty Hilman, 90 years old and a lifelong Democrat, visited the Nixon Library.
“I remember the Nixon years rather well, or about as well as I remember anything these days,” she said. “I was happy that he opened up China. That was quite surprising.”
Younger Democrats at the museum with Hillman said they were “amazed that he was such an environmentalist” and “very impressed with what a statesman he was.”
Fifty years on from the end of his term, historians say there is a lot left to unpack about Nixon’s legacy, including many liberal accomplishments highlighted by the library.
“We find ourselves in a very different time culturally and politically than America was in 50 years ago,” Byron said. “I think that as passions have cooled over the last 50 years, the American public writ large can take a step back and maybe look at the Nixon years with a fresh perspective. That’s what you see occurring very much right now.”
Luke Nichter, a presidential historian at Chapman University who teaches a class called “The Age of Richard Nixon” and for years has run an online archive of Nixon’s White House tapes, said research interests around the former president have moved away from Watergate and toward his platform.
“Ninety percent of the inquiries I got from media and scholars 20 years ago was about Watergate, and today there’s almost no interest at all,” Nichter said. “The interest has completely shifted to other subjects whether that be foreign policy, the opening to China, ending the Vietnam War, his forward-looking domestic policy — may I say for a Republican — the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and lots of other things.”
Nichter added that Nixon perhaps represented a brand of the GOP that has all but disappeared today.
“They called themselves practical progressives,” Nichter added. “Nixon called himself a ‘liberal, just not too liberal.’ I can’t imagine any Republican running in 2024 who’s going to call himself a ‘practical progressive.’”
As much as the times and political landscape have changed in 50 years, one cannot walk through the Nixon Library without noticing — perhaps as much because of circumstances as by the museum’s design — uncanny parallels between the world in which Nixon governed and the world today: a presidential election where the Democratic incumbent decided not to run for re-election, a war in Israel, a world order in flux due to U.S. relations with China and Russia, questions about criminality and the presidency. All of these themes figure heavily into the museum’s exhibits and raise questions about Nixon’s legacy today.
So what exactly is that legacy?
“I’m probably going to spend most of my career working on that question,” Nichter said. “I think there’s not a legacy — there’s legacies — and it depends on who you ask.”
