Preserving Past and Influencing Future

MJ: Would you tell us something about the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace and what you do here?
JT: Well, I'm the director of an institution which has both a museum, which is open seven days a week here in Southern California, an archive of papers and letters and other materials about the life and times of Richard Nixon. And also a foreign policy institute based in Washington, called the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom. In this way, the Nixon Library is both involved in preserving the past and also having an impact on the future.

MJ: Tell us about this backdrop here, what are we seeing here?
JT: Well, as your viewers will probably recall from their American history, President Nixon left office in 1974. And he lived another 19 years and spent that time traveling the world, meeting with leaders all over the world including in Japan and also in the Soviet Union, later Russia, China. He wrote nine books during that period. And particularly in the last four years of his life played an historic role in encouraging a change in American attitude towards the historic transition toward economic and political freedom underway in the former Soviet Union.

And in his study in his home in New Jersey, which had been designed for him and decorated by his first lady Pat Nixon, the former President did much of that work. And so to honor that work and to underscore the vitality of the 19 years he spent as a former President, we created this study for our museumgoers.

MJ: So this is exactly the way it was on the day he died in his study?
JT: Exactly. He had a stroke on the 18th of April 1994. Incidentally, just after writing a letter to a friend who had also suffered a stroke and who was dispirited. We have that letter on display here. He had been working on his 10th book. And he had just turned in the page proofs for the book and his desk was still piled high with folders and books that he was using. We have preserved the telephone next to his desk and also the TV Guide with his reading glasses on it opened to the 18th of April 1994.

I know that the people of Japan have fascination with baseball, so too did Richard Nixon. He lived in the New York area, which had two teams, the Yankees, and the Mets and he would frequently have a problem on the weekend deciding what game to watch. He solved the problem with this grandson Christopher, who brought him a transistor radio, so they would watch the Yankees on television while listening to the Mets on the radio. And Christopher's parents, Ed and Tricia Cox, the daughter and the son-in-law of President Nixon, brought us that radio several months ago, so that it could be on display here.

Mountaintop and Deep Valleys

MJ: Tell us something about Presidential Libraries. Why do the American people have these and what purpose do they serve?
JT: Presidential Libraries are in a way temples of American democracy. They are a recognition of the fact that in our president we invest the powers and the symbolism both of head of state, and head of government. It would almost be as if the emperor and the prime minister were the same person. We don't have an emperor, we don't have a king, because we are a republic, but nonetheless, any people have a thirst for putting that kind of reverence and respect in the form of its head of state. And so we have enormous respect and reverence for our presidents.

At the same time, we treat them with the same amount of disrespect that, for instance in Japan in a parliamentary system, I think frequently the Prime Minister is the subject of a certain degree of ridicule. So we at the same time raise our presidents up and sometimes we also bring them very low. And in a way the Nixon presidency is the best symbol of that because President Nixon was a man who both walked in the deepest valleys and stood on the highest mountaintops, to paraphrase his own farewell to his staff on his last day in the White House. And in the Nixon Library you see both the mountaintop experiences and also the deep valley experiences.

MJ: It's often said about President Nixon that he staged the greatest resurrection since Lazarus. What were his thoughts about that?
JT: He was often accused of planning his comeback. It was much more visceral to him. He had to be in the arena. He had to have an impact on the course of events. And the final comeback was just one of a number of comebacks.

He made a comeback in 1962 after having lost for governor of California. It was an office he didn't particularly want but he had sought the office because he wanted to be in public service and it was the best opportunity to do so. Many people thought after that defeat that he was finished politically and yet within six years he was once again running and running successfully for President. So he was the comeback king.

And in 1974, even as he was in the deepest valley suffering really the most brutal disgrace of any American President, he was already thinking about ways that he might be able to come back and have an impact as a former president on the course of events. Hence his writing, his traveling, his successful consultations with all of this successors as president, both Democrat and Republican.

Even Bill Clinton, who had protested against the war in Vietnam and had worked for Richard Nixon's opponent, George McGovern, in 1972, came as president to respect the advice he got from Richard Nixon particularly on the transition to economic and political freedom in Russia.

MJ: Why was the city of Yorba Linda California chosen?
JT: The place where Richard Nixon is born, a little bungalow, which was built by his father Frank Nixon, stands on this property and visitors who come to the Nixon library 7 days a week to see our museum and garden, can also see the President's birthplace standing exactly where his father built it in 1912. And painstakingly restored filled with furnishings and house wares that was actually used by the Nixon family. It's a piece of what life was like in a turn of the century Southern California farm community, but it also tell a lot about the roots of a President, both personal and ideological. You see a lot about the man and the statesman the Richard Nixon became by learning about the 9 year old that he was at the time he moved away from the top. This house was very important to Richard Nixon and he felt strongly that his library should be built adjacent to the house so people could see the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. It was actually hid decision to be buried a few steps away from the house so the visitors can come and see both where he began and where he ended.

Fascinated by Presidents

MJ: What is the purpose of this place? Is it for students of history or is it for research or al of the above, or how do you see that?
JT: It is for all of the above Mark. Americans are fascinated with their history. We are a relatively young country, just over 200 years. And so we are very much taken up with the history that we do have. The Revolutionary periods, the Civil War periods is very big with Americans, we preserve our battlefields painstakingly from that South versus North struggle in the early part of the middle of the 19th century.

And we also are fascinated by our presidents. And there are now 11 presidential libraries and scores of other presidential sites, both burial sites and birthplaces and childhood homes. And people are fascinated by them because they help bring history alive. They're fascinated by them because they help bring history alive. They're fascinated by the way that people live while in the White House. What the President's family was like, what their life was like in the White House. They're fascinated, people are, with the presidents as people as well as a statesmen.

So we function on a couple of different levels. On any given day there can be a program going on in which a speaker is giving a talk about some aspect of presidential or American history. We can have researchers downstairs working with the presidential materials and with President Nixon's congressional and vice presidential materials. And we can have tourists going through the museum, having history come alive for them day after day.

MJ: Can you tell us something about yourself and how you came to be the director of this museum?
JT: I went to work for former president Nixon in 1979 when he was working on 1 of his 10 books. He hired me as a full time assistant in 1982 after he moved to New York. I worked for him for 10 years including as his chief aid and travelling with him to Russia and to China and on 2 occasions to Japan where he had meetings with the Prime minister, and then came to the library in 1982 and after it, it open.

MJ: 1980?
JT: 1990 I'm sorry.

MJ: So you were his top aid during those years?
JT: Well, for a period of time I was. There is a long history of chiefs of staff that has administrated the system to President Nixon. The last chief-of-staff Cathy O' Connor who was with him at the time that he died in April of 1994 is now a senior member of our staff here at the library.

MJ: And how did you make the transition to being the director?
JT: Well, by getting a crash course in Non-profit management. Unlike all the other presidential libraries, because of the particular nature of the way President Nixon left office, and because of the long time dispute over what would happen with his presidential papers, this is the only presidential library in the country to be operated without any funds from the government. We are a tax-exempt educational foundation and make out way entirely based on revenue from admission and also from other kinds of fund raising and so on. And so we make our own way each year, so a lot of what I do has to do with fundraising and with public relations and connections to fund raising.

MJ: How many visitors do you see in a typical year?
JT: We have about 200,000 visitors a year. In fact, after Disney Land and Knotts Berry farm, we are the third most popular attraction in tourist crazy Orange County.

50,000 People at Funeral

MJ: The funeral was here
JT: It was

MJ: Is that correct? What was that day like?
JT: It was an extraordinary day because we had real Old Testament weather. President Nixon's family brought him back home to Yorba Linda a few days after he died, on the 22nd of April. And his body was escorted and it was a casket covered with an American flag and it was placed here in the lobby, so 50,000 Americans who had come to brave the very rough weather could file by and pay their respects. And as the doors opened, Yorba Linda had the worst hailstorm that it had had in 100 years.

Obviously President Nixon's passing was being noted on a very high level as politicians like to say. And all through the night until the wee hours, 50,000 Americans passed by. There were many more tens of thousands waiting in line but finally the secret service had to close it down to make preparations for the arrival of President and Mrs. Clinton. The funeral itself was held in the afternoon under a very dark threatening sky. There were extraordinary eulogies given by President Clinton who had once been a political opponent, who now had come to respect President Nixon for his insights and his sheer grit and stick-to-it-iveness.

Also by, ironically, the man who would be running against President Clinton, Bob Dole, then the majority leader of the Senate, who gave a very moving eulogy in which he talked about how quintessentially American Richard Nixon's partners in peace, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and by the Governor of California, Pete Wilson, who was the one of the many younger leaders who had gotten their start politically at the knee of Richard Nixon. So one saw encapsulated 50 years of American history of Cold War history. One saw resonance's of the war in Vietnam against which President Clinton had once demonstrated and of the efforts that Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon made to make the world safer and more stable. It's just an extraordinary day.

Peacemaker Goal

MJ: You spent 10 years with President Nixon as an aide. What would be surprised to know about him? What were you surprised by or what would we be surprised to know about him?
JT: People would probably be surprised to learn what a warm and good humored and approachable person Richard Nixon was. He almost entirely without pretense. He never put on airs, the trappings of power never impressed him. He used to say that some kind of people ran for office to be someone. Others ran for office and sought political office in order to do something. Richard Nixon was part of that second group of people who wanted to be in politics because there was something that they wanted to do. In Richard Nixon's case, it was to make the world safer in his historic initiative toward China, toward Russia and to bring American involvement in Vietnam. That was Richard Nixon's goal as a statesman, The Bible says, "Blessed are the peacemakers, because they shall be called the children of God." And that was Richard Nixon's goal as president, to be a peacemaker. And the epitaph that Richard Nixon's family chose for him was from his first inaugural address in January of 1969 when he said that the greatest honor that history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.

And I think ultimately once all the passions of the Watergate and Vietnam eras have subsided, people will look back on the presidency of Richard Nixon and see that he indeed kept his promise to make peace. It was what drove him as a former president. Every morning he got up, read the paper thought about how he could write something or make a public statement, or place a call to someone who was serving their country at that time in political office and in some way or another advance the clause of peace. In some area in which he is interested in the subject.

Always Controversial

MJ: At one time shortly after Watergate there was polling done that suggested that President Nixon was hated on the level of Adolph Hitler. Has that changed over the years?
JT: Well, I don't think it was ever quite true. I think the American people understood the fundamental distinction between Adolph Hitler and someone such as Richard Nixon whose presidency was consumed in what was largely a political battle, which is what Watergate was. In which many of the passions of the Vietnam era were being fought out. So the comparison in and of itself probably isn't a particular worthy one.

President Nixon was always a controversial figure. He was beginning at the time he entered office as a young congressman and became known for the effort to get the goods on a spy named Alger Hiss who was accused of spying for the Russians during the 1930s and of being a secret communist.

The battle over the Alger Hiss case was what made Richard Nixon a controversial figure. Hew as controversial in 1948 because of the Hiss case. He was controversial in 1970 because of his efforts to end our involvement in the Vietnam War honorably. And he was controversial in 1974 because of the last great political battle called Watergate in which he had been engaged. Even as a former president he was somewhat controversial, at time because his conservative friends thought he has too accommodating toward the Russians. Some on the left thought that he was too tough on Russians.

Richard Nixon always took a very practical, pragmatic centrist line. Pragmatic politicians are not particularly popular, we tend to admire ideological presidents more and, in a way, Bill Clinton for being extremely flexible and pragmatic and trying to find the center way is attracting some of the same criticism from this left-wing true believers as Richard Nixon attracted from his right-wing true believers during the 1970s.

So it's never popular to be at the center, but that's by and large where the American people were. And if you look back at what Richard Nixon was able to accomplish both in foreign policy, which I've already talked about, but at home in his Supreme Court appointments, in his establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, his launching of the war on cancer. Richard Nixon's presidency really achieved quite a bit against very, very tough political odds.

MJ: Back to the library, what sort of visitors do you see?
JT: We see about 10 or 20% of our visitors from abroad. We see about 20-30% of our visitors from the local area. Many of the visitors from Europe but by and large a touring American were fascinated with American history and with the American presidency. And at this presidential library as at all the others, presidential history and American history comes alive. You see the people who are behind the events that we have all lived with. And particularly for my generation, people who grew up during the Cold War under the specter of nuclear annihilation grew up during the controversial era of the 1960's when our campuses were aflame over Vietnam. It's like stepping back in time and re-living that era once again and it really gives people a real emotional guilt to see that era come alive again.

MJ: What sort of comments do you hear from visitors after they have been through and what do you want to see in here?
JT: I want people to see a different side of Richard Nixon that they possibly gotten from their teachers or from their newspapers. I want them to see the family man Richard Nixon. A crusader for peace Richard Nixon, Richard Nixon who was born in a house that his father has built and got a very loving upbringing that helped prepare him both for the challenges of public life and also prepared him to deal with the disappointment of the public life. We see on him the influences of family, of God, the love of music, the love of political debate that he first learned seated at the dinning room table in his birthplace as his father talked about the affairs of the day. I want them to see the education of our future president and I want them to see what California was like at the turn of the century as well. It now seems to be this very built up and cosmopolitan place. Then, it was a distant frontier of the American Empire and no one thought a young boy growing up in a citrus flowing community of 200 pop Yorba Linda could never go on to be President. So the Nixon library shows that anyone can still be president no matter where you come from, no matter how before you were and it also shows that the influences of early life help make a president.

Oliver Stone Projecting Own Demons

MJ: What did you think of the Oliver Stone movie on President Nixon?
JT: Well, Oliver Stone is a mythmaker and he has a certain image of recent American history, which is designed to project his own demons about the war in Vietnam, in which he served. He sees Vietnam as having been a totally flawed exercise in which shadowy forces in America consisting of Mafia figures and Cuban refugees and big business figures assassinate President Kennedy because he was about to withdraw forces from Vietnam and then essentially turned Johnson and Nixon into stooges to fight their war for them.

It's sort of the encapsulation of the whole sort of paranoid ethnic about the '60s, in which great skepticism about the fundamental underpinnings of American society and American government were reflected.

So in a way, Oliver Stone is sort of a high priest of the '6-s and when we look back on that era we see many of the myths and preoccupations of those people reflected in what Oliver Stone does. It's not really about history, it's about attempting to perceive what's happened in America through a certain sort of mythological framework. He's turning, he's trying to turn American history into Shakespeare but he's going it about three or four centuries too soon.

MJ: Did he come here?
JT: He visited when he was preparing to make the movie. He visited unannounced and walked through and I don't think he learned anything.

John Taylor

MJ: Could you tell us something about your background and your family life and how you live your day to day life here. You had to move back and forth between New Jersey and Los Angeles is that correct?
JT: Well, my family and I lived for 10 years in the New York and New Jersey area between 1980 and 1990 when I was working for President Nixon. My 2 daughters 8 and 11 live nearby and they go to the Yorba Linda school. I come from a family of newspaper people and in fact worked in journalism for awhile before going to work for President Nixon. So because it sometimes had a very interesting relationship with people in the media, it will be helpful to meet and have a little bit of a glimpse of what life was like at the other side of that particular design.

Non-partisan Institution

MJ: So how did you first come work for him? Was it as a college intern or how did that happen?
JT: Purely happen stance. I was going to school at San Diego, he was still living in a town called San Clemente in Southern California and he hired me as an intern when I was still an undergraduate. Soon after graduation, he hired me to work for him full time. As a result of which Mark, all I know about is Richard Nixon.

MJ: Now are you a political person or is your job apolitical position or how do you see that whole job?
JT: Well, it's political in that, one can't be an advocate for President Nixon without being not only political but also highly political. On the other hand, we are a non-partisan institution. And particularly in Washington, where our policy institute, the Nixon Center, is located, we have a bipartisan board of directors, there are both Democrats and Republicans on the Nixon Center's board and President Clinton has addressed Nixon Center events, as have prominent Republicans.

So President Nixon believed strongly, particularly that in foreign policy, that politics stops at the water's edge and we need to have a bipartisan foreign policy and to the extent that the Nixon Center is involved in advising today's leaders about our foreign policy challenges, we have tried to apply that principle of bipartisanship to our work.

MJ: And what is the yearly budget and how is that money raised?
JT: The Nixon library Nixon center cost about $3.6 million to operate. The funds are raised from 2 annual dinners one of which this year in Washington will honor the senior minister and former Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kwan Yew. We also raise money from attendance, from sale. We write grants each year for some of our programs and also the Nixon library is available on the evening and on weekends for events ranging from board meetings and corporate meetings to weddings and senior proms. Many museums in this country perhaps the broad use of facilities after hours for those kinds of events. So we put our funds together from 5 or 6 to 7 different sources.

MJ: And what areas in the library are you most proud of?
JT: Well, I am proud of the museum because it brings history to life. I am probably most proud however of the birthplace because I know that is what President Nixon cared about most intimately. In fact, probably his heart was in the birthplace. Because his brain understood the importance of the rest of the library, his heart was in his birthplace because he remembered very fondly his years there. And he knows how important family was to him then and was to him all through his life in terms of his relationship with his first lady, Pat Nixon and his 2 daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower and Christian Nixon Todd. Bay Service Coach-chairs is a foundation that governs the Nixon library and the Nixon center, which is symbolic of the intent personal involvement the Nixon family has in this place. We are really a family and we share in the closeness that President Nixon had with his family.

MJ: How do you spend your days? What sort of work are you involved in? With the library in print and speech making or budgetary things? How do you spend your time?
JT: Well I can spend one day pre-occupied with preparing to brief our board on the budgets. I can spend another day perhaps going out and giving a speech about President Nixon. I might spend another day working with our curators on planning a special exhibition. In addition to our permanent gallery, we have had 35 temporary exhibitions in 6 years, ranging from everything from a baseball in the American presidency to popular music in the American presidency. We have an exhibition coming up in 1997 called Pacific Vision which is about how over 2 centuries of American presidents have related to their counterparts as heads of State and government in the Far-east. Because we are marking the 25th anniversary of Richard Nixon's historic visit to China but we are also broadening it to include the President's relationship with their counterparts in Japan and China and throughout the Pacific Asian regions.

Nixon-Presley Photo

MJ: There is a curious photo of Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley, could you tell us the story behind that?
JT: Well, our presidents are part politics and part culture. We turn them into cultural icons and the quintessential cultural icon of the 1960s and 1970s was the king of Rock' Roll, Elvis Presley. So when the political icon of the president and the cultural icon of Elvis Presley came together it was like worlds colliding.

And they met in December of 1970 and the photograph of their meeting in the Oval Office has become the single most-requested and most-purchased photograph in the history of the American National Archive system. Because if you have Nixon and you have Elvis and you put them together, you don't need anything else.

MJ: Did he just show up at the White House gate and wanted to meet the President?
JT: Well, he sent a note in to the President's staff saying he has arrived in Washington and had a few days on his hands and is interested in coming in to discuss some of the negative influences he felt were being applied to American young people. Not only politically but in terms of drugs and he through that he could be an emissary to young people who would have a legitimacy with them because of the musical bond. He was essentially offering up services to President Nixon.

MJ: John, what are your goals for the Library taking it into the future?
JT: Well, the Cold War era in our country was one of relatively easy answers. The post-Cold War era is one of more difficult choices. And President Nixon was very careful and methodical in the way he make choices about how the United States should be involved in the world, in Vietnam and in China and in Russia and in the Mideast and elsewhere.

So both as a museum of that era and also as a policy center focusing on the future, we want the Nixon Library to be a place where people can come and learn about the opportunities and the mistakes and the good choices and the bad choices we made in the past to help Americans make the right choices in the 21st century.

MJ: John thanks for joining us today.
JT: Thank you very much, Mark.