i am not a crook

A strange sight while hav­ing lunch off of Rit­ten­house Square.

I look up and to my amaze­ment Richard Nixon is float­ing by. I am relieved, he’s only an advert for a his­tory series at the Con­si­tu­tion Center.

Just the lat­est note on Nixon:

EDITORIAL; The Nixon­ian White­wash, Scrubbed

The saga of the unex­pur­gated Richard Nixon
never seems to end. A fresh sup­ply of 78,000 doc­u­ments and 11 1/2 hours
of Pres­i­dent Nixon’s secret White House tape record­ings — not for
those of del­i­cate sen­si­bil­i­ties — have just been released. This time,
how­ever, eaves­drop­ping on more of his tragi­comic con­spir­ings is
sec­ondary to the fact that they are part of an agree­ment to finally
legit­imize the pri­vately run, pro­pa­gan­dis­tic Nixon library.

The
library at Yorba Linda, Calif., has been turned over to the National
Archives after serv­ing for years as the cen­ter of bowd­ler­ized Nixo­nia.
The insti­tu­tion insulted his­tory by ped­dling ludi­crous white­wash­ings –
describ­ing the Water­gate crim­i­nal con­spir­acy as a ”coup” by Nixon’s
polit­i­cal rivals fed by fake scoops pur­chased by the Wood­stein
inves­tiga­tive duo at The Wash­ing­ton Post.

That approach
has been prop­erly packed away as part of the price of com­ing clean to
join the other 11 pres­i­den­tial libraries run accord­ing to the
schol­ar­ship stan­dards of the National Archives.

One of the
early acts of Pres­i­dent Bush and the for­mer Repub­li­can Con­gress was to
allow the Nixon tapes and papers to be trans­ferred to Yorba Linda from
the archives’ stor­age in Wash­ing­ton. His­to­ri­ans who had to sue after
Water­gate to get at the tapes were prop­erly sus­pi­cious (and have hardly
been com­forted by the Bush administration’s Nixon-class mania for
secrecy and doc­u­ment denial).

But Tim­o­thy Naf­tali, respected as
an apo­lit­i­cal his­to­rian, has taken over at the library, promis­ing to
show­case the new tapes for the pub­lic — ”the good, the bad and the
ugly.” This is good news, and as Mr. Naf­tali deliv­ers on this mis­sion,
the nation can rel­ish, or not, the lat­est rev­e­la­tions. In one of these,
a few days before his re-election, Mr. Nixon asked an aide, ”What
about Water­gate?” The pres­i­dent was assured no one was find­ing out
much.

Link to arti­cle here.

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tech­no­rati tags:his­tory, Nixon, con­sti­tu­tion, nixon library, wire­tap­ping

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