History of an Enigma, at the Nixon Library

A well-told take on a figure hated and adored, plus George Bush’s angst art

I write not only about art but about museums displaying and interpreting heritage, and few are more telling than presidential sites. I visited the Nixon presidential library and museum three weeks ago. It’s in Yorba Linda in Orange County, Calif., with not only a handsome, informative, and engaging museum but an auditorium, reception space, garden, and the house Nixon’s father built and where Nixon was born in 1913. The Nixon family lived there, next to an orange grove, until 1922.

Nixon (1913–1994), more than many of our presidents, was sui generis and seismic. This year is the 50th anniversary of his downfall. His exit followed the drip, drip, drip of scandal and revelation, with the dénouement on August 9, 1974, when the man who said “I’m not a quitter” quit.

Nixon’s the star, of course, but there’s Ike and Khrushchev and Mao and JFK and LBJ and Elvis and men on the Moon. And Pat Nixon. I’d forgotten that she had a husky smoker’s voice. Of course, there’s Watergate. Haldeman and Ehrlichman, pioneers of goose-step aerobics, are there, as are Hunt and Liddy and the finks Dean and Felt. John Mitchell had a crazy wife, Chuck Colson went crazy religious, and Spiro Agnew was crazy about bags of cash. They come and go, as do the snakes Cox, Sirica, and Lowell Weicker. Rosemary Woods proved herself an expert contortionist, Jerry Ford the unlikeliest president, and Elliot Richardson a Brahmin wimp, though we always knew that.

Nixon, as we learn in packed but exceptionally clear galleries, was famous from 1948, when he beat Helen Douglas — she who was “pink right down to her underwear” — for a Senate seat. Nixon was so crisis-prone that he named his first autobiography Six Crises, which covered Alger Hiss and the Pumpkin Papers, his “kitchen debate” with Khrushchev in 1959, and the 1960 election. Nixon was the ultimate Comeback Kid, or the eternal cockroach, depending on your point of view. As president, he led a war on cancer, excised us from the war in Vietnam, and battled inflation with, of all things, wage and price controls. By his death in 1994, 30 years ago on April 22, he’d written a dozen books, grown chummy with Bill Clinton, and seemed remarkably rehabilitated. In triumph, trauma, and humiliation, he was a paragon of good or evil.

I’d been to the Nixon Library once, in the mid ’90s, not long after it opened, but it has been expanded since then and, a few years ago, completely reinterpreted with audio and visual components. So much with Nixon, of course, was fraught. He fought the federal government for years to get control of his presidential archives — 46 million pages and the notorious White House tapes — and finally got them. Once completely private, the site is now integrated into the National Archives system along with a dozen other presidential libraries. Still, the family is very much involved via the Nixon Foundation.

How’s the library doing? First, multiple confessions. I was Connecticut’s youngest member of Youth for Nixon in 1960, a charter member of Nixon Now in 1968, and then there was Nixon Now More Than Ever in 1972. The Go, Go Goldwater Club in 1964 was the hottest social group in town only because Nixon was still licking his wounds. Barry Goldwater, by the by, came to despise Nixon. Putting all of this aside, and wearing my usual fair-and-balanced hat, I’d call the Nixon historic site pretty fantastic.

The museum begins with a gallery called Waves of Change and a barrage of images from the 1960s — as decades go just about the bottom of the barrel, except for the ’70s, and our 2020s, which wallow rather than roar. There’s a balance of interpretive wall texts, videos, and newspaper front pages telling a story of endless war, assassinations, campus rebellions, and race riots. Then, no one called them “mostly peaceful” protests. They called them riots. A giant mural at the end of the gallery shows the iconic Nixon V-for-Victory salute, a double hander, as he greets crowds during a ticker-tape motorcade days before the 1968 election.

Years ago I visited the LBJ presidential library in Austin. It’s impressive, as is Nixon’s, for the cascade of events happening during what was, for both, only five years. The Nixon galleries, as do the galleries in Austin, dive deeply into the Vietnam War. The dreadful weekly casualties, negotiations, the POW crisis, the invasion of Cambodia, and the 1973 peace deal occupy a huge gallery. It’s not a slog but chilling and tense, and there’s nothing celebratory since we know how it ended, after Nixon left office.

Not everything is flat and on a wall. Moon astronauts in full regalia are fun. Bronze sculptures of American soldiers in Vietnam and, later, Nixon greeting Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing in 1972 are insipid, but Rodin wasn’t available, and they’re there to enliven the space, not as great art. Nixon’s official Sea King helicopter is there, too. It was the presidential helicopter from the early ’60s to the mid ’70s and flew the Nixons from the White House grounds to Air Force One the day he resigned. The museum centers Nixon’s push for the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, both big policy changes with many mothers and fathers. On the issue of Nixonomics, it’s hard to dress a dumpster fire as a debutante. He pushed affirmative action, too, and pushed it hard.

The museum’s chronology is backwards in that Nixon’s modest but by no means poor background is toward the end of the museum. There’s what I’d call a substantial dollhouse view of his early childhood home. The actual house is at the other end of the nine-acre campus and accommodates only a handful of people at a time. I wonder how many visitors actually get there.

I’d seen the “Checkers” speech before but watched it again. “My girls are crazy about him,” Nixon closes, referring to the pet dog his daughters got as a gift. “And we’re not going to give him back.” He smiles, even so defiantly, and I can see why they called him “Tricky Dick.” He’d just dodged not a bullet but a fusillade over a slush fund. The speech was a huge hit with its target audience — rank-and-file Republicans — whose calls and telegrams saved Nixon from getting dumped from the ticket. Ike pronounced “he’s my boy” — meaning Nixon, not Checkers — and a heartbeat from the presidency was he.

The museum reconstructs the Oval Office as it looked in Nixon’s time as president. Mrs. Nixon did the decorating, and, alas, decorating wasn’t among her many strengths. It’s standard 1950s and ’60s bland, with a blue-and-gold palette — “California’s colors,” the museum says. With stark white walls and shelves displaying ceramics of birds, it’s not timid but reserved, spartan, and antiseptic.

I liked the gallery on Nixon’s family. It’s standard fare, with photographs and a space for dresses. Mrs. Nixon, invariably seen merely as a trooper, is canny and smart. She enjoyed being at the center of history. Their daughters married well and, over 50 years, have served up no scandal, light years in difference from Biden, Inc. I’ve been to the Reagan Library in Simi Valley once, though a few years ago, and it’s fine, but the Nixon Library is a warmer, more ingratiating place because it’s where Nixon was born.

The Reagan Library conveys sound history, but it’s a place mostly for movement conservatives. The Nixon Library is a stickler for history and seems to me to have much more depth. This is probably a function of deep family involvement. Yes, family members tend to gild the lily, but the Nixon Library is more scholarly. The two Nixon daughters know the issues of their father’s era and the history and have invested the time not necessarily to get the spin right but at least to get the facts straight.

This leads me to Watergate. A third-rate burglary or a national crisis? Both, it seems, and a litany of cover-ups, conspiracies, and betrayals. This iteration of the Watergate scandal replaces the story crafted in part by Nixon himself for the site’s opening in 1990. Nixon, the initial version claimed, was the victim of what amounted to a coup executed by liberals in the government and the news business. As part of the library’s admission into the federal presidential archive system in 2007, the Watergate gallery was thoroughly revised. The Nixon Foundation wasn’t happy, since this interpretation, opening in 2011, is considerably more detailed and incriminating. It reflected new information from the White House tapes and more than a hundred oral histories, many of Nixon appointees.

This gallery, the biggest in the museum, dives into the various cover-ups, what congressional hearings discovered, and what the tapes tell us. In the gallery, visitors can access recordings. The notorious 18-minute gap in the tape of an intensifying White House cover-up conversation is treated, in part, through a photograph of Nixon’s secretary reenacting what she thought was her position at her desk while she erased — accidentally, she claimed — the tape. The excruciating months from late 1973 to August 9, 1974, are parsed in much detail.

None of the information is untrue, I’m sure. For me, having lived through Watergate once, I was fascinated with the new information. That said, I wonder whether younger and less engaged visitors would find the details, as well as the number of personalities, overwhelming. I’m a skeptic and a cynic, as every good journalist should be. Fifty years after Watergate, “no man is above the law” seems like a hollow cliché in these days of one-sided lawfare and galloping corruption. On the plane back to California on August 9, the Nixons — husband and wife — sat across from each other. “It’s so sad, it’s so sad,” Mrs. Nixon muttered over and over. That’s about my take. And after 50 years and so many Washington scandals, Nixon’s sometimes seem quaint. He wouldn’t be into “10 percent for the Big Guy” from Russian, Chinese, and Ukrainian oligarchs.

After so much history, I was happy to walk through the lovely rose garden leading to the Nixon graves. It’s very pretty and a tribute to Mrs. Nixon, who died in 1993. The rose selection isn’t exotic — there’s Celestial Light, Mr. Lincoln, French Lace, and Comte de Champagne — but it was restful, and the graves don’t seem unquiet.

The museum does a great job in defining Nixon’s turbulent era and in helping us to define Nixon himself, neither a small feat. Combative, suspicious, intellectual, formal and awkward, swarthily handsome as a young man, a brilliant poker player, called Iron Butt in law school for his capacity for study, disciplined, and in for the long game, Nixon was an incessant presence and unique. The museum, as one of its many strengths, leaves us much to ponder about Nixon’s age and our own.

The Nixon library has good, versatile exhibition space, not too big or too small, and it looks like the expansion’s planners thought carefully and well about balancing multiple missions. The Nixon display doesn’t change. It’s a history museum. Still, a slice, not a chunk, of the complex goes to temporary exhibitions. There’s nothing wrong with variety.

Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors was on view. It exhibits portraits by George W. Bush, nearly all of soldiers wounded abroad during his years as president. I’d never seen them, though the exhibition has been traveling. They’re hobby art, a hobby that began when Bush, in retirement, felt “antsy,” as he put it, but they’re mission art, too. Whether from repentance, grief, therapy, art-washing, or a mix of each, Bush paints with passion. They’re gloppy and gooey, no surprise since he’s not known for a lightness of touch. Heads are misshapen. Are they tortured? I like juicy painting, meaning impasto and sprezzatura, like Renoir, Sargent, Tintoretto, Hals, and Bellows. Bush’s portraits are the art of angst, though his paint is so heavy that he seems to be trying to hide something, or bury it, or dispel a demon through pigment and gesture.

I don’t follow politics aside from what a good, educated citizen should and must, and I write only about art, which means I think about artist intent. The artist Bush and the president Bush are the same person. Bush sent these brave patriots into two bungled wars we lost and couldn’t help but losing. And the economy collapsed under his reign, creating panic and misery.

“Oh, they’ll toss flowers in our path,” we were told. I didn’t believe it. Baghdad’s FTD branch specialized less in roses and more in TNT. Its “Light of My Life Box Bouquet” exploded on delivery. All those poor, heroic Americans killed in action didn’t even get the 77 virgins since they’re infidels, and so many of these crazy places where we sent our troops remain in the Stone Age. The maimed live, but they and their families were and still are upended.

“They’ve got weapons of mass destruction,” we were told of Iraq, but Saddam didn’t. This more than undermined the need for an invasion. It annihilated it. After borrowing and spending trillions on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where are we? I, for one, was in Yorba Linda, looking at portraits by the “decider” depicting, given Bush’s mangled syntax, the “consquendees.”

I was uncomfortable looking at them. They’re not very good, so however much I’m trained to focus on the object — and subject — on the wall, the painter before the easel became both. I believe in repentance and forgiveness, and Bush reads the Bible each day, as I do. He has entered the arena, as an artist, and he has more talent as a painter than I do. I know about Bush’s Wounded Warrior and PTSD fundraising but, looking at the portraits, can’t get much beyond thinking how much Bush has to repent for, and how much these portraits have to do with his own guilt. I hope that the next time I see them, I’ll think differently.