Nixon Library Unveils Plans for ‘Face-to-Face’ Dialogue

YORBA LINDA —  Designers of a video-image exhibit of Richard M. Nixon at his planned presidential library say guests will be able to step forward and ask the former president a question or two.

They hope that those who do will feel as if they have actually talked to the former president. With the latest in computer wizardry and more than 400 video clips, the questioner will touch a screen and trigger an answer that appears from the former president’s lips.

“It’s as if by some form of fortune, you actually met the president,” designer Alex Cranstoun said.

On Tuesday, Nixon’s 77th birthday, officials at the Richard M. Nixon Library and Birthplace that is under construction here unveiled new architectural drawings and described for the first time their plans to develop Disneyland-style, high-tech exhibits with the latest in so-called “interactive multimedia.”

Cranstoun said that “The Room of World Leaders” should appear as a “cocktail party after a major summit meeting” in which visitors can touch a video screen and hear comments from the participants about Nixon.

Images of the Vietnam War, he said, will be displayed in an exhibit that duplicates the living room of a 1960s “middle-American home” where the war unfolded on television.

There will also be a room dedicated to the Watergate scandal that toppled Nixon’s presidency. It will contain elements from all sides of the issue, including a machine that will play excerpts from the famous White House tapes, said Hugh Hewitt, director of the library foundation.

The events of the scandal will be displayed in chronological order, starting with the break-in at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel and ending with a large photograph of Nixon waving from the steps of a helicopter as he left the White House following his resignation.

“We understand the greatest court of public opinion will focus on this room, and therefore there is the need for full and fair treatment,” said Hewitt.

Cranstoun, who worked on both the Johnson and Carter presidential libraries as well as the 1992 World Fair planned in Spain, said Nixon wanted the library to include a section on Watergate. He said Nixon has not put any restrictions on what it should contain.

The library will also include a research area for scholars that will contain original documents from before and after Nixon’s presidency. However, unlike other presidential libraries that maintain records from the presidential administration, the documents from Nixon’s presidency were turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration by an act of Congress.

Privately Funded

Nixon’s $20-million library is being completely funded by private contributors more than 15 years after his resignation.

The Ronald Reagan presidential library in Ventura County is expected to cost at least $40 million in private funds when it opens in February, 1991. However, taxpayers will foot the $1.5-million cost of maintaining the Reagan library.

The Nixon library is scheduled to open July 20 at a ceremony that the former president, who now lives in New Jersey, is expected to attend.

In addition to the construction of the library, the project is also renovating, for $400,000, the Yorba Linda home in which Nixon was born.

The Nixon library tour will begin with a 16-minute movie that is entitled--at least for now--”Comeback.” The movie will track Nixon’s career from his congressional race in 1942 through the present.

The largest exhibit space in the library will be dedicated to foreign affairs and Nixon’s meetings with world leaders. In one room, the life-size images of 10 foreign leaders will appear “to be engaged in casual conversation,” Cranstoun said.

The leaders will include Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, Anwar Sadat, Golda Meir, Zhou En-lai, Mao Zedong, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. A computer “touchscreen” will display profile information about each leader and comments they made about Nixon.

Like the other eight presidential libraries in existence, Nixon’s will display many of the gifts he received from celebrities and world leaders. The collection includes a vessel with the first oil drawn from a well in Saudi Arabia, a set of guns from Elvis Presley and the original copy of Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.”

Visitors Are Excited

The entourage of people attending Tuesday’s press tour included a few old friends of the former president, as well as Yorba Linda City Council members celebrating Nixon’s birthday for the first time as a legal city holiday.

“This is going to be a marvelous facility,” Councilman Henry W. Wedaa, who first proposed the holiday last summer, said during the tour. “Look at the quality that is going into the construction. You don’t see anything cheap going into this facility.”

Mayor Gene Wisner, who delivered welcoming remarks to the media, said he was surprised at how much larger the library building was than he had imagined.

“And it’s built to last 1,000 years,” Wisner said.

For Roland E. Bigonger, a Yorba Linda councilman, the library tour was a unique opportunity. Bigonger had been chairman of the original six-member committee that was formed in 1968 to preserve Nixon’s birthplace.

Until the Nixon foundation was formed a few years ago, the committee raised its own funds to keep up the place, and its members even took it upon themselves to pick weeds at the old property. Now, as part of the library project, the Nixon foundation is spending about $400,000 to shore up the wood-frame house for public viewing.

“This means the completion of a dream,” Bigonger said.

Although library designers acknowledged that the public’s greatest interest no doubt would be in the Watergate exhibits, a longtime Nixon friend, Don Bendetti, 61, of Laguna Beach, said the former president distinguished himself in foreign policy affairs.

“He ended the Vietnam War and he opened relations with China,” said Bendetti, a developer who has helped oversee the library’s construction. “This library will accentuate the good deeds and the good things he did in his Administration.”

Another Nixon friend, Jack Drown, 70, a retired magazine distributor from Rolling Hills, said, “I think (the library) has been a long time in coming, but it’s going to happen and we’re all excited.”