When Tim Naftali first learned, in 2006, that the Nixon Foundation had put him on a list of acceptable candidates for the library director job, he laughed. He knew why his name had surfaced: the previous year, he had been invited to the library to talk about Blind Spot, his history of counterterrorism in the United States, which included a positive appraisal of Nixon’s record in that area.
But he also ran the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, and was familiar with Nixon’s darker side from the White House tapes.
Naftali did not lack for credentials: educated at Yale and Harvard, the 44-year-old Canadian-born scholar had written books on George H. W. Bush and the Cuban missile crisis, served as a consultant to the 9/11 Commission, and researched links between U.S. intelligence and Nazi war criminals. His temperament was hardly suited to the keepers of the Nixon flame: an independent thinker, Naftali prided himself on seeing past political crosscurrents to follow the documentary evidence. And while he did not set out to do further damage to Nixon’s reputation, as his critics later charged, he was concerned with protecting the National Archives and making sure the government was not seen to be excusing bigotry or criminality in the Nixon White House.
“If the foundation had done their due diligence, they might not have been so enthusiastic about me,” he said. In fact, the more he listened to the Watergate tapes, the more convinced he became that Nixon was the modern era’s “worst president” because he perverted the national security apparatus for his own interests. “How could the U.S. government run a library that celebrates this man?” he later asked.
After discussing the offer with Allen Weinstein, then the head of the National Archives, Naftali began to see the post as a tremendous opportunity. At the time, many historians worried that Congress’s 2004 decision to admit the Nixon library into the official fold could put the integrity of the presidential papers at risk again. It had been difficult enough for Stanley Kutler, a Nixon scholar at the University of Wisconsin, to pry the bulk of the Watergate tapes out of the National Archives in the 1990s—he had to sue for them. Now the historians worried that a new library director based in Yorba Linda would cozy up to the foundation and keep the rest of the archives sealed indefinitely.
Weinstein was determined not to let that happen and convinced Naftali it was almost a duty to take the job, which he started in October 2006, nine months before the official handover.