Education: Those Bedeviled Blue Devils

Duke University decides to okay a library for Nixon’s papers

The 19th century English historian Sir John Seeley once noted that “history is past politics, and politics present history.” For a while last week in Durham, N.C., Richard Nixon’s past politics threatened to deprive Duke’s historians of a disquieting repository from the past.

In 1937 Nixon, a determined and solitary young man nicknamed Gloomy Gus by his classmates, graduated third in his class from Duke Law School. He was never Duke’s most popular alumnus on campus; in 1954, when he was Vice President of the U.S., the faculty voted against awarding him an honorary degree. Since 1974, the year he resigned as President, the school has kept his official portrait in a vault. But this summer Duke President Terry Sanford, a former Democratic Governor of North Carolina, began trying to acquire Nixon’s presidential papers.

At a meeting in New York City in late July, Sanford broached the subject to Nixon. Duke would provide the land; friends of the ex-President would raise the money; and the mountain of documents, as mandated by federal law, would be tended by punctilious national archivists. Back in Durham, Sanford quietly lobbied for the proposal among top university administrators. Six days after the New York meeting, Nixon’s attorney Stan Mortenson turned up at Duke, conveying a sense of “urgency” and asking whether there was any opposition.

There was, but it had not yet surfaced. Students and faculty were on vacation. On Aug. 18, when Sanford sent a letter explaining the proposal to 65,000 Duke alumni, a terrible uproar arose. Professors, pro and con, outdid themselves with historical allusions. The Nixon Library was likened to a Trojan horse (“I fear Government officials bearing gifts”) and an archival “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (“We will not possess it. It will possess us”). Wits wondered if Duke could call it the Watergate Memorial Library. On Aug. 19 Trustee Emeritus Charles Murphy, a Washington lawyer who helped raise money for the Harry Truman Library, resigned to protest a plan that, he said, would inevitably result in a memorial to Nixon. Declared History Professor Richard Watson: “The question is, to whom are we erecting a monument? The answer is, to a President forced to resign to avoid being impeached. Mr. Nixon would have a continuing relationship with his library.”

Author and Literary Critic Edwin H. Cady spoke for the library. The opponents, he suggested, were viewing the issue in too narrow a time frame. Said Sanford, echoing Cady: “The opposition of the moment will be overcome by the long-range benefit to scholarship, and that’s what a university is all about.”

After a debate last Thursday, the academic council voted 35 to 34 against the proposal. Some hoped for a compromise in which the Nixon papers would become part of Duke’s library, without a special edifice bearing the Nixon name. Explained Historian Watson: “We’d all love to have Benedict Arnold’s papers, but we don’t want a Benedict Arnold building on campus.”

At week’s end the executive committee of the board of trustees voted 9 to 2 to proceed with negotiations. Nothing was said about dusting off the portrait of Gloomy Gus.