SPRUCING UP NIXON.(The Talk of the Town)(Richard Nixon Library)

The nine-acre campus of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace, in Yorba Linda, California, features the thirty-seventh President's boyhood home; his burial site; a gift shop that sells, for $9.95, the "Nixon surf logo beanie"; and a sleek museum that highlights the good and the bad, but mostly the good, of Nixon's sui-generis Presidency.

What is missing from the Nixon Library and Birthplace is an actual library. In 1974, Congress impounded forty-four million of Nixon's Presidential papers and almost four thousand hours of his tapes. There was an entirely reasonable belief at the time that Nixon could not be trusted with his own papers. So the California library was opened, in 1990, without the documentary record of Nixon's Presidency. It was administered not by the National Archives, which oversees the nation's eleven other Presidential libraries, but by the Nixon family. Nixon assiduously sought possession of his papers, but the cause was subverted by the library's first director, Hugh Hewitt, who announced that he would screen researchers for partisan compatibility; Bob Woodward, Hewitt said, would not be welcome. Hewitt is long gone (he has since made his name in conservative talk radio), and his successor, the Reverend John Taylor, a one-time Nixon factotum, made peace with the idea of dispassion in scholarship. After years of negotiations and lobbying, the National Archives finally agreed to turn over the documents. So, this fall, the Archives will take formal control of the library, relieving the family of its role (and putting an end to the squabbling for control that caused Nixon's two daughters to stop speaking to each other). The National Archives has just hired a University of Virginia historian named Timothy Naftali to run the library and to oversee the transfer of Nixon's records to Yorba Linda.

Naftali is a less than obvious choice. He is neither a Republican nor a Democrat. Until last year, he was a Canadian. He is an expert not on Nixon's Presidency but on the Cold War and American counterterrorism. Nor is he a museum curator, although the ideological reengineering of the museum may become his first task. "I'm going to give people a museum that will lay out the peaks and valleys," he said recently, over breakfast in Washington.

Taylor concedes that the museum's exhibits now shade toward veneration. "All of the libraries do it," he said. "Because of President Nixon's particular status in history, our ...