Archive for the &;Richard-Nixon&; Category
Nixon inDisneyland
July 12, 2007
As 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.
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