Nixon Sending Tricia, Julie to Ceremony for His Library

Come Friday, only 11 days after President Reagan turned a shovelful of Ventura County dirt to begin construction of his library, Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower will break ground for their father’s library in Yorba Linda.

But no shovels will poke dirt here. The former President’s daughters will signal a bulldozer with a loud air horn. Then a giant scoop of earth will be ripped from the ground just feet from the front door of the white wood-frame house where Nixon was born 75 years ago.

Although area politicians, the Nixon faithful and other luminaries will be on hand for the celebrations, the only President to resign from office will not attend.

“He wants to give the opportunity to his daughters,” said Michael Nason, an Orange County GOP political consultant who is coordinating the Marine Corps band, Boy Scouts and festivities planned for the day. “It’s a very important occasion in the family’s life.”

But Nixon has had to watch his $25-million library suffer a bumpy road to realization.

Yorba Linda, site of the original family homestead, was his location of third choice, after San Clemente and Duke University in North Carolina.

And there will be no original presidential papers in this presidential library. Congress passed a law following the Watergate scandal that turned over all 44 million pages of documents and 4,000 hours of tape recordings from Nixon’s abbreviated term in office to the National Archives and Records Administration.

The country’s 37th chief executive, named by Watergate prosecutors in criminal charges as an unindicted co-conspirator, resigned the presidency in August, 1974.

It would require another act of Congress for the federal government to hand over Nixon’s presidential papers to his library, said National Archives spokeswoman Jill Brett. Items already made public at the archives, however, could be copied for display, she said.

So the 84,000-square-foot Nixon complex in Yorba Linda will house instead materials from his days as a congressman, vice president and private citizen, said Maurice H. Stans, former finance chairman for the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP) and now chief fund-raiser for the library foundation.

But the library will also focus on Nixon’s accomplishments as a President, Stans said. These include Nixon’s secret negotiations that opened relations with Communist China, his Middle East work, arms control summits and “things in his domestic programs that are not too well known to the public,” Stans said.

Even Watergate will have its place, although foundation officials were murky about the details of its portrayal.

The complex is scheduled for completion in February, 1990, and Nixon has promised to attend the opening, foundation officials said.

Money to build and operate the library has come entirely from private donors, said Stans, who was also secretary of commerce under Nixon. The foundation is about $1 million shy of its $25-million goal, he added, but hopes to narrow that gap with a $1,000-per-person reception and dinner after the ceremonies Friday.

Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s former secretary of state and national security adviser, will speak at the Anaheim Hilton dinner. About 700 guests are expected, foundation officials said.

The library ground breaking comes at a time when the man once reviled by some as “Tricky Dick” is basking in a more favorable reappraisal by some scholars and politicians of his stormy presidency and contentious public career.

“I think it’s much more than a reexamination,” Stans said. “It’s a rehabilitation. A recognition of him as an elder statesman to whom others go for advice. A man honored around the world for his preeminence in foreign affairs.”

And Nixon is, after all, the man Americans twice chose to lead their country and the man who earlier had almost been elected to the presidency.

He also is the man who grew up in a small town of avocado and citrus trees, on his father’s 9-acre homestead at what is now Yorba Linda Boulevard and Eureka Avenue.

There where the crowds will gather Friday to honor his life as an adult, he and his older brother some 70 years ago pushed their father’s 1910 Model T Ford down the driveway and into a gulch.

“He got into trouble,” ceremony director Nason said. “We’re going to try and have a similar car there.” Then, he laughed and said: “Maybe Nixon will show up and do something with it.”