Once again, the Nixon family name is associated with dirty tricks, legal battles and vengeful resentments.
At the centre of the dispute is the humble lemon farm that was Richard Nixon's first home. It sits quietly under the blasting sun of the Los Angeles suburb of Yorba Linda. Nearby, behind the walls of the odd museum complex that bears the name of the disgraced president, a dangerous mix of money, politics and ego have set off a family feud of truly Nixonian proportions.
Mr. Nixon's daughters, Julie and Tricia, reportedly have not spoken to one another in years. They are divided over what to do with a $19-million (U.S.) bequest from a banker who was Mr. Nixon's best friend. Underlying the feud is an ideologically charged battle over what to do with the museum.
Last Friday, a judge ordered the sisters and their husbands to settle their dispute through a mediator. This will do nothing about the lawsuits the sisters filed this year against each other, the destruction of long-standing friendships and the loss of tens of millions of dollars in donations to the museum.
Julie and husband David Eisenhower want the museum to be run by an independent board, whose membership would include both sisters, as a scholarly library and gathering place for the U.S. right. These are the sort of functions held in the Reagan library on the other side of the city.
Tricia and her husband, Edward Cox, a New York lawyer, want the museum to be controlled directly by the Nixon family, presumably to prevent any mention of the former president's darker moments.
The stalemate has gone on since Mr. Nixon's death in 1994; while the library is independently run, as Julie wishes, it serves almost no scholarly function.
It is the only presidential library that contains no books or papers, and its exhibits very noticeably omit mentioning Tricia, with the sole exception of a small exhibit devoted to her highly publicized 1972 wedding. (Mr. Nixon ordered her to make the wedding a news-media event to give him a "warmer" image.)
"It's beyond tragic. I couldn't imagine facing the old man in this situation," Kenneth Khachigian, a long-time friend of Mr. Nixon, said this week. "He would be crestfallen."
The feud has left the facility in limbo, making it the strangest and least scholarly of the 11 presidential libraries maintained at cost to taxpayers of $55-million a year.
The tonnes of Nixon presidency documents are held in Washington, where they were seized and catalogued during the Watergate scandal. The papers haven't been delivered to the library largely because of the sibling feud. So the most documented presidency in history -- Mr. Nixon not only taped all conversations that took place in a half-dozen rooms but insisted that everyone who spoke with him or attended a meeting file a detailed account of everything that was said -- remains undocumented at the president's own library.
As it stands, the library is a bizarre collection of exhibits that seem to steer a wide path around Mr. Nixon's infamy, leaving a mood of forced enthusiasm that wouldn't be out of place in North Korea.
A dark hallway deep inside the library provides the only mention of the Watergate scandal, during which Mr. Nixon resigned after it was revealed that he had ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to avoid investigating dozens of incidents in which he and his staff ordered robberies, wiretaps, tax audits, investigations and other potentially illegal "dirty tricks."
Visitors are told that Mr. Nixon was the victim of a "media-elitist conspiracy," that the damning evidence provided on the tapes is "not what it once appeared to be" and that Mr. Nixon ordered the cover-up "for legitimate national-security reasons."
No mention is made of other unsavoury traits that have recently emerged in the tapes: anti-Semitic outbursts, the belief that blacks are genetically inferior and thoughts about using atomic weapons in Vietnam.
By contrast, former president Bill Clinton recently used eight military cargo planes to ship 80 million pages of documents, 20,000 videotapes and 77,000 artifacts to Little Rock, Ark., where his supporters plan to build an 11-hectare library using $200-million in donations.
Although the library's exhibits are sure to glorify the Clinton years and play down the scandals, the documentation will be available.
The Nixon library, which devotes much of its energies to fundraising, operates on a $13-million endowment. The feud between the sisters has cost the library a $5-million bequest from a pharmaceutical tycoon and a $26-million offer from Washington that would have returned the papers to the library.
Doug Saunders