By Christopher GoffardLos Angeles Times
YORBA LINDA, Calif. — In the official narrative of the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace, Carl Bernstein has long been one of the villains, a reporter whose name — along with that of former Washington Post colleague Bob Woodward — elicited special loathing.
That sentiment was on display at the Watergate exhibit that stood for years in the Yorba Linda library where a Nixon-approved text falsely accused the reporters of offering bribes to further their coverage of the scandal that drove the 37th president from office.
The exhibit was torn down in March, marking a symbolic turning point for an institution ridiculed by scholars since its 1990 opening. Another milestone came Monday: Bernstein visited for the first time. He pronounced it “a very moving experience.”
Touring the grounds before his scheduled speech, the reporter-turned-bestselling-author quietly entered the white clapboard farmhouse where Nixon was born. He peered at the piano where, as a boy, Nixon learned to play. He bent before a glass case to examine the marriage certificate of Nixon’s parents. He walked around the helicopter where Nixon took his final flight off the White House lawn.
“It’s impossible … not to feel some kind of strange kinship and not to feel part of this place,” Bernstein later told the crowd that filled a 300-seat auditorium.
Bernstein came at the invitation of Tim Naftali, the library’s first federal director, who in July presided over the library’s shift from a privately run facility — controlled by Nixon loyalists — to a National Archives institution. Among Naftali’s first acts was the dismantling of the Watergate exhibit that characterized the scandal as a “coup” hatched by the president’s enemies. He expects the new Watergate exhibit, which will feature first-person oral accounts by participants in the drama — including Bernstein — to open in January.
While the National Archives runs the library now, the Nixon Foundation runs the museum’s gift shop and funds exhibits, many of them celebratory. After touring the museum, Bernstein said he found the two functions were “a wonderful melding ” that helped cast Nixon on a human scale and conveyed “a magnificent feeling about a whole life lived.”
“Bob (Woodward) and I are bound in our lives to this man, and each of us has spent a lot of our lives thinking about him,” he said in an interview. “He’s a genuinely tragic figure, and you feel some of that tragedy here. He spent his life seeking the presidency and was forced to resign not because of his policy failures but because of his flaws.”
Bernstein, who was promoting his new Hillary Rodham Clinton biography, “A Woman In Charge,” said that if he had predicted in the late 1990s that he would be speaking at the Nixon Library about Clinton as a plausible next president, “I think I would have been accused of smoking something — inhaling.”
Not all those in attendance at his speech were aware of Bernstein’s iconic status. Sayra Morales, 26, a journalism student at Fullerton College, said she attended for extra credit. She said she is unfamiliar with the details of Nixon’s presidency, of Watergate, of Bernstein’s role in history. She knows him as the author of the Clinton biography.
“I’m not big on politics,” she said.
Absent for Bernstein’s appearance was John Taylor, the director of the Nixon Foundation who helped write the text of the original Watergate exhibit. Taylor was reportedly on vacation in Hawaii, though Naftali said he was aware of Bernstein’s visit and had “embraced” it.
Naftali said he was delighted with the crowd, which had turned out despite Bernstein’s notable lack of conservative credentials.
“I was told when I got here it couldn’t be done,” the new director said.