Continuing Watergate Coverup

Richard Nixon's spirit lives on. Thirty-six years after the only presidential resignation ever, he is still with us as admirers try to hide evidence of his disgrace in the Nixon Library and Museum just as he himself did in the White House.

The Watergate room of the memorial is almost as blank as those missing Oval Office tapes in a to-do described by the New York Times after "the Nixon Foundation--a group of Nixon loyalists who controlled this museum until the National Archives took it over three years ago--described it as unfair and distorted, and requested that the archives not approve the exhibition until its objections are addressed."

In 1990, the Library had opened with ceremonies attended by three Republican presidents--Ford, Reagan and Bush I. What nobody noticed then was that Nixon had rewritten history, edited the crucial tapes and omitted any mention of the dirty tricks, break-ins and other illegal activities that led to his leaving office.

This whitewashed version of Watergate was seen by three million visitors before the Nixon shrine at his birthplace in Yorba Linda, California was transferred to the National Archives in 2007, which then ripped out the exhibits described by a scholar as "another Southern California theme park" with “a level of reality only slightly better than Disneyland."

Now, after the release of a flood of Nixon tapes revealing his raving paranoia, die-hard supporters are still claiming that their man has been maligned and his behavior was only par for the political course.

History disputes that but, in the face of Tea Party madness this year, Nixon could be retroactively rehabilitated in the future as a model of political sanity.