Nixon's Library -- the only privately-run presidential library -- is overhauling its Watergate exhibits as part of its changeover to a National Archives facility. Very interesting article!
http://tinyurl.com/23oukbThe Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda has long been the most kicked-around of presidential libraries, and nothing invited more ridicule than the dim, narrow room purporting to describe the scandal that drove its namesake from office.
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"Everybody who visited it, who knew the first thing about history, thought it was a joke," one Nixon scholar, David Greenberg, said of the Watergate gallery. "You didn't know whether to laugh or cry."
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Yet from the start, the library had trouble being taken seriously. Its first director, Hugh Hewitt, announced that researchers deemed unfriendly would be banned from the archives, singling out the Washington Post's Bob Woodward as a candidate for exclusion. Scholars cried foul; Hewitt revoked the plan.
snip
Before he had the Watergate gallery ripped out, Naftali ordered workers to take digital photographs of every image, every line of text. He will display them on a plasma screen when the new gallery opens in a few months. He sees it as an important window into the 37th president's mind, Nixon's version of history now a historical artifact itself.
I find this somehow comforting. No doubt this is how Junior's library will be viewed... as a joke... and its peculiar take on reality will be nothing more than a reflection of Dimson himself.
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