Nixon Library Update

NIXON LIBRARY UPDATE....When I blogged the other day about Matt Yglesias's talk at the Nixon Library on Wednesday, several commenters wanted to know what that was all about. The Nixon Library? Matt? Well, just for the record, it turns out that last year the library was transferred into the federal system and a new director, Tim Naftali of the University of Virginia, was named director. The old private foundation still controls a couple of buildings, but basically it's now a nonpartisan institution under federal control. Naftali told me that they're busily updating the displays and that Nixon's presidential papers, kept in Washington until now, will be shipped to California as soon as a new archive building is constructed. It is, one might say, the New Nixon Library.

So that's that. As for the talk itself, it went fine aside from a couple of odd harangues from the St. John's Wort dude. But even that, it turned out, just provided a bit of comic relief, so it wasn't all bad. Nickel summary: a militaristic foreign policy is bad and everyone should buy Matt's book. Or, at a minimum anyway, everyone should buy Matt's book.