Nixon’s Presidential Library: The Last Battle of Watergate
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Should the National Archives be in the business of presenting objective public history at the nation’s presidential libraries? Or should the private organizations that fund many of these institutions be able to lionize their man in the White House? In an exclusive from the upcoming issue of Miller-McCunemagazine, learn how the fractious new partnership between the Archives and the foundation intent on rehabilitating Richard Nixon’s legacy has become the issue’s bellwether.
Even before Bob Bostock saw the new Watergate exhibit at the Nixon Presidential Library, he knew he would hate it.
He had been a Nixon loyalist since the age of 14, when, as a political junkie “counter to the counterculture,” he campaigned for Tricky Dick’s 1972 reelection out of a storefront office in Hackensack, New Jersey. Later, Bostock worked as an aide to the post-presidential Nixon and wrote the text of the original Watergate display, which opened along with the library itself in 1990.
His Watergate gallery covered most of the familiar topics—the break-in at the Democratic National Committee, the 18-and-a-half-minute gap in the White House tapes, the “smoking gun” recording that led to Nixon’s resignation. But his version, vetted by Nixon himself, was seen by many academic historians as an effort not just to tell Nixon’s side of the story, but to bring about a wholesale shift in public perception of the scandal. Bostock heaped blame on the Democrats, and included a quote in the exhibit suggesting that The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein may have offered bribes to obtain their scoops.
It has been almost five years since the public last saw the display. In the interim, the library and its museum have been transformed from a strictly private institution controlled by Nixon’s old entourage into a private-public partnership overseen by the National Archives and Records Administration, as are the 12 other presidential libraries. Nixon’s presidential papers, which had been sequestered in a government facility in College Park, Maryland, have now been sent to the library in Yorba Linda, California, and the process of opening them to academic researchers and the public has been accelerated considerably.