Reflections on Past and Present (and Future) After a Visit to the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

One of the places that my husband, mother-in-law, and I visited in California in June was the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, where Nixon was born. None of us had been there before, and we spent a pleasant half-day going through the exhibits. The topics covered included Nixon’s childhood, his early Navy and political career, domestic and foreign events during his Presidency, Watergate, and his post-presidential years. We all learned something during our visit.

The museum was originally operated by the private Richard Nixon Foundation. It wasn’t until 2007 that the museum was made a part of National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which oversees the Presidential Library system. NARA made significant changes to the exhibits in 2016.

I thought the museum as now formatted did a fair job of presenting the complexities of Nixon the man and the President. The exhibits portrayed Nixon from poor Quaker boy to rising political star to his Checkers speech to his comeback and winning the Presidency to disgrace after Watergate to elder statesman. As with most men, he did good and he did bad. Unlike most men, he did it all on the public stage, and his actions impacted the nation and the world.

My mother-in-law’s family knew Richard Nixon’s mother in Whittier, California, so her perspective in viewing the museum exhibits was more personal than mine. I recall my husband’s maternal grandmother saying it was a good thing Nixon’s mother hadn’t lived to see her son resign the Presidency. Whittier residents like my mother-in-law’s family felt personally betrayed by Nixon’s Watergate actions.

I have a personal memory of President Nixon also. I remember seeing him when he came to Richland, Washington, in September 1971 to discuss his energy policy and voice his support for the Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor then under development at the Hanford Atomic Works in Richland. I was fifteen at the time, and I do not remember a thing about President Nixon’s remarks, but they are available online.

What I do recall about that day was that it was probably the last time my father ever physically picked me up. Like when President Kennedy visited Richland when I was seven, there was a huge crowd out when Nixon came. I couldn’t see over taller heads than me. My dad held me up so I could see the President. But unlike when I was seven, my dad couldn’t hold me up very long. At fifteen, I weighed about ninety pounds, which was more than he wanted to heft for any length of time.

As I reflect back on that day when I saw President Nixon, I realize it is strange for me to think of the 1970s as history. How can it be history if it happened in my lifetime?

But history it is. Or was. And will be.

In addition to seeing Nixon in 1971, I have other less personal memories of his career. My earliest memories of Nixon were probably not until 1968. I know I’d seen him on television before, and I knew he’d been the Vice-President, but I didn’t know much more than that.

In early 1968, as the Presidential campaign geared up but before any primaries took place, I remember reading a magazine article on all the Republican candidates. The article seemed to focus on the three Rs—George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, and Ronald Reagan. But Nixon was in the bunch as well. I didn’t pay much attention to the political campaign, because I was only twelve, and politics was not on my list of priorities. It was enough to listen to the nightly news about Vietnam and riots in U.S. cities and assassinations.

By four years later in 1972, I paid a lot more attention to politics. After all, I’d seen the President by that time.

Then, during the summer of 1973, I watched the Senate Watergate hearings along with most of the nation. I was still too young to vote, but at seventeen I understood the seriousness of the situation. And I was well aware of President Nixon’s disgrace and humiliation when he resigned.

But through all those years, as history was being made, I was far more concerned with myself, as teenagers generally are. It is only now, some forty-five years after Nixon’s resignation, that I can look back and realize how tumultuous a period those years were for the nation. There was as much angst in the body politic as in my hormone-ridden teenage self.

Perhaps someday we will look back on the tumult of our current times with the same distance that I feel now about the Nixon Administration. We will see that our nation survived the differences and fissures of the Trump Administration, just as we survived the 1960s and ’70s. There will be pain in getting past the trouble, but it will happen. We will be changed by the process, but some of the changes will be improvements.

Yet forty-five years from now, it won’t be me looking back on 2016-18. It will be my children and nieces and nephews. Who are the preteens and teenagers who are aware of what is happening now, but who don’t feel involved? And what will their perspective be when they acquire the distance of maturity? For someday, they, too, will see their youth as history.

How has your perspective changed on historical events you remember from your youth?