Creating an archives at the Richard Nixon Library and birthplace

Abstract

On August 9,1974, in an atmosphere filled with the Cheshire cat grins of his opponents who had dismally failed to defeat him at the polls, Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States, resigned his Office in disgrace over what catalogers would subsequently subject-title the “Watergate Affair.” Their victory, though, has proven to be a Pyrrhic one for contemporary Nixon scholars, who must now deal with the tempest which befell the president’s papers and cut off their lines of supply to records offering illumination into the true character of their subject, who even today is known by many only in caricature. Inevitably the winds of the tempest subsided, revealing two years ago the Nixon chronicle dispersed in three different geographical locations. Everything pertaining to the presidential years had been taken by the government and was located at the Nixon Presidential Materials Project, a section of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Alexandria, Virginia. The earlier material, known as “The Pre-Presidential Papers of Richard M. Nixon” and divided in 1968 between “deeded” and “undeeded” sections when President-elect Nixon gave portions of it to the government, was housed in the mammoth ziggurat building of the National Archives Pacific Southwest Region Center in Laguna Niguel, California. Finally, all correspondence, trip files, and notes and manuscripts relating to the former president’s impressive publishing activity of the postpresidential period were burgeoning in his busy office in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey. That was two years ago. The preceding year in the unpretentious city of Yorba Linda, California, and a matter of yards away from the restored house where he had been born, former President Richard Nixon was finally honored with the opening of his own “Library” (see Figure 1). Although not a part of the Presidential Libraries system for it did not house