THE BELL CURVE:Take a summer presidential road trip

When Richard Nixon became the first, and only, — president of the United States to resign from that office, columnist Art Buchwald was deeply saddened — even though he had a prominent spot on Nixon’s hit list.

The main reason for his sadness, Buchwald explained, was he would have to work much harder. For five years, Buchwald had entertained his readers simply by quoting Nixon accurately. Now he would have to dig elsewhere for his quotes.

That’s very much he way I feel about the gutting of the Nixon Museum in Yorba Linda that started last week with the almost gleeful destruction of the Watergate exhibit that offered a fine creative model for fictionizing history that was gratefully adopted by the current Bush administration.

For many years, after we moved to Newport Beach in 1955, I was assigned the task of accompanying friends visiting from other parts of the country who were inevitably burning to see Disneyland.

I was fast approaching the point of terminal saturation when the Nixon Museum opened 17 years ago, and I was off the hook. I had a new Disneyland, and I never failed to enjoy my visits there. Even my Republican friends were delighted, if for somewhat different reasons.

The Nixon Museum was so special to me because I have visited most of the 11 other presidential libraries and museums — all overseen by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration — and found them sticking reasonably close to historical fact. If there was spin, it was modest and not nearly as entertaining as the Nixon Museum.

This was true because the exhibits were approved by National Archives historians, a restriction the Nixon PR people — not hamstrung by historical fact — found unnecessarily limiting (lack of such limits, however, led to the rejection of the museum on the UC Irvine campus).

But now, everything is different. The Nixon Library got religion. A Republican Congress voted it into the federal system. And lo and behold, an honest-to-God historian named Timothy Naftali was dispatched from Washington to direct its conversion to the 21st century.

This is a mixed blessing. No more “smoking gun” hyped-up tape to entertain my visiting Eastern friends. Gone forever. I hope you didn’t miss it. An announcer’s voice over Nixon’s explaining what the president really meant while what he really said was drowned out and fragmented. Or the historical record of Watergate that demonized the press while calling the break-in at Democratic national headquarters a “third-rate burglary” and ignoring the “dirty tricks” campaign. Or my favorite toy at the museum that allowed us to “interview” Nixon by bringing up fragments of self-serving speeches on a movie screen.

The other presidential museums I have visited slipped into this sort of lily-gilding occasionally — for example, the treatment in the Hoover museum in West Branch, Iowa, of the march of many thousands of World War I veterans on Washington to pressure Congress into passing a bonus bill the vets had been promised. The bonus was defeated, and on Hoover’s orders, the vets were attacked and dispersed by heavily armed federal troops, an affair treated in the museum entirely through Chicago Tribune headlines calling the march a communist plot.

But this sort of one-dimensional treatment is the exception rather than the rule.

Some of these museums take an almost gleeful pleasure in giving space to presidential critics. This is especially true with presidents Truman and Roosevelt. Both have corridors of blistering cartoons and personal correspondence that allow frailties to show through.

If you are exploring the United States this summer, you might want to consider a presidential museum side trip.

Here’s how you could do it in a few days. Fly into St. Louis, rent a car, and visit first the new and exciting Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Ill., then into Iowa for Hoover, followed by Truman in Independence, Mo., and Eisenhower in Abilene, Kan. None of these sites are more than a few driving hours apart.

And maybe in a few months, we can add the new and improved Nixon museum in our own backyard.

Sometimes traveling offers us new perspectives on affairs at home. That happened on my trip last week to North Carolina. One of the highlights was a visit to the home where Lincoln biographer and poet Carl Sandburg spent his last dozen years. Virtually every room was graced with books — 17,000 of them, we were told. But each room also had a TV set and great stacks of then-current magazines. One must assume that had Sandburg lived into the computer age, he would have embraced it as well.

I leafed through his considerable writings at the store below the residence and found a book he had written as a newspaper reporter about the 1919 race riots in Chicago. In an introduction, columnist Walter Lippmann wrote: “These articles by Carl Sandburg will move those who allow themselves to be moved. Moved not alone to indignation, though that is needed, but to thought. It is not possible to examine this record without concluding that the race problem as we know it is really a by-product of our planless, disordered, bedraggled, drifting democracy. Until we have learned to house everybody, employ everybody at decent wages in a self-respecting status, guarantee his civil liberties, and bring education and play to him, the bulk of our talk about ‘the race problem’ will remain a sinister mythology.”

The 1919 riots involved African-Americans. Substitute “illegal immigrants,” then ask how much we’ve learned in the near-century since this was written.