The Bell Curve:

The feds are messing around with the Nixon museum in Yorba Linda, my favorite stop while entertaining visitors from the east.

In no time at all, historical accuracy will have washed away its jocular creativity, and the museum will join 10 other U.S. presidential museums dedicated to getting things right. And I’ll be taking people to Disneyland once again.

A little background is in order. Every president since Herbert Hoover has a presidential library. And every such library since Franklin Roosevelt’s has been federally funded and staffed.

With one exception.

Richard Nixon’s.

These libraries were created by the Presidential Records Act in 1939 with the dual purpose of giving the public a clear historical fix on where to place this president in the demands of his years in office and to provide a repository for his papers where they are available for public scrutiny. To this end, personal and political bias are anathema, to be flushed out by engaging teams of historians to review the museum’s plans for breadth, accuracy and reasonable objectivity.

If those dreamy goals are unattainable, there was at least a clear effort to achieve them, warts and all, under the aegis of federal oversight in the seven presidential museums I’ve visited.

But such restrictions were not for Nixon. He was never very good at the warts thing. As a result, he had a tough time finding a place to put down his museum. The faculty at UC Irvine — and, it was rumored, Duke University, also — was receptive to the idea of having the Nixon museum on campus, but only if the plans and content could be reviewed by professional historians. So 10 years ago, Nixon followers packed their bruised egos, returned to Yorba Linda, and built the first private presidential museum in the back yard of his boyhood home.

Now, the Nixon museum is being converted from a private to a public institution so that Nixon’s White House papers can finally find a home. In that process — under the direction of the National Archives — the whole place is being gentrified for historical accuracy and balance, and I’ve lost a prime tourist attraction, the finest example I’ve ever known of spinning history into an art form worthy of study.

Examples abound. The entire Watergate exhibit would lead a visitor from Outer Space to believe that Nixon was the victim of a vengeful process.

That section ended in a recording of the “smoking gun” conversation in which Nixon’s words were interrupted every other sentence by another voice explaining what Nixon “really” meant.

Then there was the talking Nixon, where visitors could punch out questions on a remote control and a Nixon recording vaguely applicable would pop up.

When I asked him why his first run for Congress against Jerry Voorhis was based almost entirely on personal attacks, the talking Nixon answered: “No, it was very gentlemanly. I called him sincere and able in my summation, and afterward some of my hard-line supporters said ‘You shouldn’t have said those kind things about him.’”

There was more, much more, of the same. It’s ironic that the biggest issue so far to come up in the makeover of the museum is the presence of statues of 10 former heads of state grouped about Nixon that include Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai.

They call attention to a legitimate Nixon triumph, his opening of China. But strong anti-communist pressure led by former Chinese nationals has made the nature of their inclusion a major issue among many other decisions now facing the new arbiters of the museum.

Visits to other presidential libraries add perspective to these decisions.

They also offer history lessons and presidential insights caught in the fine line between self-serving exhibits and rounded portraits of our presidents not usually found in books.

When I visited the Hoover museum in West Branch, Iowa, for example, the account of the president ordering troops under Douglas MacArthur to attack the bonus marchers on Washington after World War I was told entirely in Chicago Tribune headlines that strongly supported Hoover. Nowhere were the motives of the marchers explained.

By contrast, the museums of both presidents Harry Truman and Franklin Roosevelt have long corridors of rabidly critical political cartoons.

There is also Truman’s tiff with a music critic who reviewed his daughter’s performance harshly, Roosevelt’s correspondence with a close female friend, and the heat taken by Jimmy Carter when he withdrew the United States from the Olympic games in Russia.

In general, the Democratic presidential warts have been allowed more exposure in their museums than the Republicans. I’ll be watching on behalf of my visiting eastern friends to see if that trend continues in Yorba Linda.

I recommend what is taking place there as continuing local entertainment.

And if you’re ever in Kansas City, three presidential museums are just an hour’s drive away.

Meanwhile, I’ll be out of touch until the Angels polish off the Boston Red Sox.

I expect to be looking to the Yankees by next Thursday, so just leave a message.

I may not get back to you for a while.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.