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Nifty Naftali

The impossible takes a little longer at the Nixon Library.

New Director Timothy Naftali is still winded and a little dusty from single handedly removing the old, bad, inaccurate Watergate exhibit at the Nixon Library, Museum, Birthplace and Grave.

But he found the strength to congratulate himself for booking Watergate Hero-Reporter Carl Bernstein, book touring with his Hillary Clinton biography:

“I was told when I got here it couldn’t be done“

The Los Angeles Times and Orange County Register followed Bernstein around the grounds to the Nixon birthplace home , but if he paused at the the nearby grave it went unreported.

*Let’s review…

“Libraries are not monuments to the glory of the Presidents for which they are named.”

Whatever they are smoking at Redstate blog it’s clouding their vision.

Leaving aside the endless galleries of glory, if the Presidential Libraries are not monuments, whatever are these doing there?

Nixon:

Reagan:

Bush [to come]:

LIKE IKE?

Ever been to Kansas? Doesn’t matter – you too, or rather you three times may vote in the state’s “8 Wonders of Kansas” balloting.

The Eisenhower Library in Abilene is in the running, and campaigning hard, but in order to vote for or against it you have to vote a full slate of eight out of twenty-four prospects. To somehow make up for this Soviet Central committee style “election” you can vote three times between now and years end.

The choices are, um, very Kansaseque. Your natural feature , buildings,

more land, and even more land .

And all that string!

The great John Steuart Curry murals in the state Capitol are on the ballot, but the organizers’ description is rather begrudging.

“The John Steuart Curry murals are a finalist for the 8 Wonders of Kansas because Curry was one of the greatest American regionalist painters and, despite great controversy, he considered the murals in the State Capitol his greatest work!…Curry’s critics disliked his color scheme and the over-all menacing effect of the mural….Still, the murals are known as some of the greatest public art in the country…”

Yup, it’s the color scheme.

The New York Times‘ lifting the money veil from it’s op-ed page has already paid off for HISTORY!

Tuesday’s letters include an update on President Dwight Eisenhower, who quietly, in private, to friends, allowed as how he may have had some reservations about Barry Goldwater opposing the Civil Rights Act.

Whew!

That’ll sink the story of him sympathising with Southern racists at a post Brown vs. Board of Education dinner with Earl Warren:

“All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.”

A future President was tested in conflict seventy-five years ago, but his role goes unmentioned. July 28, 1932 saw the US Army mobilized to drive the “Bonus Army” of World War I veterans out of Washington. At least three veterans died. Douglas MacArthur commanded the soldiers, but who was his deputy?

Dwight Eisenhower goes unmentioned by the Associated Press and the Washington Post.

It’s as Ike and his acolytes would want it. Historian Wyatt Kingseed describes the Supreme Allied Commander’s creation of a minimal role for himself:

“By the time he published At Ease 30 years later, Ike portrayed himself as a frustrated hero of sorts, claiming that he tried to dissuade MacArthur from personally leading the charge. He advised him that Communists held no sway over the marchers, and he reiterated the old claim that his boss ignored White House orders to halt operations. Interestingly, Ike waited until after MacArthur’s death in 1964 to present this version. If it distorted history, MacArthur was not around to contest it.”

The Eisenhower Memorial Commission goes along with the story in one document on it’s site:

“Ike was appalled, for he had counseled MacArthur to avoid unnecessary provocations in confronting his fellow World War I veterans. While publicly defending his chief, Ike was privately bitter about the Army’s attack upon its veterans.”

But there is no mention in the Commission’s vast “legacy ” document that usual suspects Michael Beschloss and Richard Norton Smith lend their names to.