Nixon in Disneyland
July 12, 2007As a media trainer, a key tenet we teach is to never repeat a negative, even when denying it. President Nixon at the time of Watergate said “I am not a crook.” Convincing, no?
Now Nixon’s presidential library, located in Orange County, the land of Disney fantasy, has decided to join the reality-based community. The cover-up that was Watergate will no longer be continued in the museum, although you’ll still be able to hold your wedding or barmitzvah in the Library’s reproduction of the White House East Room. Money quote:
“Visitors learned that Watergate, which provoked a constitutional crisis and became an enduring byword for abuses of executive power, was really a “coup” engineered by Nixon enemies. The exhibit accused Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — without evidence — of “offering bribes” to further their famous coverage.
“Most conspicuous was a heavily edited, innocent-seeming version of the “smoking gun” tape of June 23, 1972, the resignation-clinching piece of evidence in which Nixon and his top aide are heard conspiring to thwart the FBI probe of Watergate.
“This was history as Nixon wanted it remembered, a monument to his decades-long campaign to refurbish his name. Nixon himself approved the exhibit before the library’s 1990 opening.
“Everybody who visited it, who knew the first thing about history, thought it was a joke,” one Nixon scholar, David Greenberg, said of the Watergate gallery. “You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
Now that ‘exhibit’ is gone, tossed literally in the dustbin (dumpster) of history. Somewhere a blue-haired Orange County matron is shedding a tear, but fear not: Digital photos were taken of each exhibit, so Nixon’s version of history will survive for digital display.
