Nixon’s library lifts the veil on the scandal of his tenure; Clinton’s library not so much

When a curious reader goes to the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum website and searches the name “Monica Lewinsky” — the White House intern who almost brought down the Clinton presidency — the search yields zero results. Searching the term “impeachment” brings the following: “In 1998, his relationship with a young White House intern resulted in the President’s impeachment by the House of Representatives. A trial in the Senate found the President not guilty of the charges brought against him. President Clinton apologized for his conduct and vowed to keep working as hard as he could for the American people. As a result, Bill Clinton left office with historically high approval ratings… .”

The bricks-and-mortar Clinton Library, which opened in Little Rock, Ark., in late 2004, does offer an exhibit in an alcove titled “The Fight for Power” that focuses on “the politics of persecution.” The Lewinsky scandal, which broke on Jan. 21, 1998, tarnishing the last three years of Clinton’s second term and resulting in impeachment by the House and acquittal in the Senate, is treated as an ultimately futile and evil effort by Republicans — independent counsel Ken Starr and then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich are portrayed as particularly villainous — to bring down Bill Clinton. The point is that Republicans were attempting to achieve by scandal mongering what they could not achieve at the ballot box.

And then there’s the new Watergate gallery at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., featured today in a New York Times story. “From the first words a visitor sees entering the gallery,” writes Times reporter Adam Nagourney, “a quotation from Nixon, ‘This is a conspiracy’ — the exhibit offers a searing and often unforgiving account of one of the most painful chapters of the nation’s history. The timeline methodically chronicles the stream of misdeeds leading up to the Watergate break-in, followed by the attempts to cover it up, which led to Nixon’s resignation.”

The reason for the difference in portrayal of Nixon’s dark years and Clinton’s? Nixon, the 37th president of the U.S., is dead; Clinton, the 42nd, is very much alive, arguably the most active and engaged former president in American history. In addition, Nixon’s library is no longer solely controlled by the late president’s foundation, which, Nagourney explains, ceded control of Nixon’s papers four years ago to the National Archives: “It is a far cry from the library’s original Watergate exhibition, ‘The Last Campaign,’ created by the Nixon Foundation with the former president’s direct involvement. That installment portrayed Watergate as an orchestrated effort by Democrats to overturn the 1972 election.” 

Sound familiar?

Nagourney never mentions the sanitized Clinton Library’s treatment of impeachment, although he does quote an assistant archivist for presidential libraries as noting that attempts are being made at the library of Ronald Reagan to address Iran-Contra and at the library of Franklin Roosevelt to address the inadequacy of his response to the Holocaust.

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