A Conjuration of the Past

By Lance Morrow/Yorba Linda

A seance on a hot day in Orange County, Calif. Everything in the cloudless morning seemed like a memory of itself from long ago. Gene Autry stood and waved his white Stetson. Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale materialized. Bob Hope shambled slow-motion across the stage like an amiable pink hologram. Four Republican Presidents were there, and four First Ladies. The centerpiece, Richard Nixon's career, was laid out in a sort of waxen splendor. Scarcely a trace of the fatal accident showed.

The ceremony to dedicate the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace was a strange conjuration of the past, subdued and defiant at the same time, like the man himself: an assertion of greatness, a denial of disgrace. Watergate sat inconspicuously in the audience (H.R. Haldeman, Ron Ziegler, Rose Mary Woods, among others from the memorable cast), but only George Bush mentioned the subject in passing. A flock of white doves went blurring over the University of Southern California Trojan marching band. The other Presidents praised Nixon as statesman and peacemaker. What seemed like several billion red, white and blue balloons were cut loose and sailed away in the flawless blue.

It was to be Richard Nixon's day of vindication, his ultimate emergence from the "wilderness" that followed Watergate. It has been 16 years since he flew west to San Clemente in disgrace. He worked long, stubbornly and bravely, to rehabilitate his reputation. He wrote seven books, traveled the world, kept himself on a relentless forward trajectory. He was performing yet again his old miracle of self-resurrection.

The ceremony at the library, however, felt like a culmination. The compound at Yorba Linda is a single-story, pink sandstone museum and library that cost $21 million and looks like a suburban mini-mall. It stands beside the small, white frame farmhouse where Nixon was born in 1913. Having consecrated the place -- his life from birth through presidency all handsomely compacted there -- Nixon completed a circle. As he spoke last week, he seemed a little tired and rambling. It had after all been an exhausting 77-year circuit from the room where he was born to this ritual of fulfillment. But even in the mellowness of the moment, Nixon still gave off emanations of the film-noir pol that a part of him has always played, the shadow of that something in his character that is remorseless and bruised and unforgetting.

* Nixon's has been an astonishing story of ambition and endurance. His fascination derives from some primal quality in him to which Americans have always responded, sometimes with a hatred so fierce as to be nearly inexplicable on rational grounds. The Nixon on view in Yorba Linda is a version carefully controlled by Nixon himself. His is the only President's library built and operated entirely with private funds, except for the Rutherford B. Hayes library in Fremont, Ohio. The library is Nixon's show. It will contain only a very careful selection of the presidential papers. The original papers are stored in a government archives in Alexandria, Va. Nixon has succeeded in blocking the release of 150,000 pages of documents. One can understand why a man who failed to burn the White House tapes that eventually doomed his presidency would in later life grow careful about information and its control.

The Nixon compound is thus more a museum than a serious scholar's archives. The 293-seat theater continuously runs a movie called Never Give Up: Richard Nixon in the Arena. A hallway gallery displays 30 of the 56 TIME covers on which Nixon appeared. Exhibits lead visitors through the whole saga with photographs and artifacts, including a hollowed-out pumpkin, microfilm and a Woodstock typewriter (the famous items of evidence that nailed down the case against Alger Hiss), and an old woody station wagon like the one Nixon used for his 1950 race for the Senate against Helen Gahagan Douglas. A 1952 television set plays the "Checkers" speech, the mawkish little masterpiece that saved Nixon's vice-presidential candidacy in 1952. Another television set plays the 1960 debates against John Kennedy, which may have cost Nixon the election. In a Watergate section, one can listen to three excerpts from the White House tapes and see a montage of the last day in the White House.

One room displays bronze-tone, life-size statues of 10 world leaders, including Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Winston Churchill and Mao Zedong. Trying to hurry history's verdict, Nixon has always had a habit of dressing the set with giants, setting the delay timer, and then jumping into the picture himself.