CURVE:Take a summer presidential road trip

When Richard Nixon became the first, and only, — president of the United States to resign from that office, columnist Art Buchwald was deeply saddened — even though he had a prominent spot on Nixon's hit list.

The main reason for his sadness, Buchwald explained, was he would have to work much harder. For five years, Buchwald had entertained his readers simply by quoting Nixon accurately. Now he would have to dig elsewhere for his quotes.

That's very much he way I feel about the gutting of the Nixon Museum in Yorba Linda that started last week with the almost gleeful destruction of the Watergate exhibit that offered a fine creative model for fictionizing history that was gratefully adopted by the current Bush administration.

For many years, after we moved to Newport Beach in 1955, I was assigned the task of accompanying friends visiting from other parts of the country who were inevitably burning to see Disneyland.

I was fast approaching the point of terminal saturation when the Nixon Museum opened 17 years ago, and I was off the hook. I had a new Disneyland, and I never failed to enjoy my visits there. Even my Republican friends were delighted, if for somewhat different reasons.

The Nixon Museum was so special to me because I have visited most of the 11 other presidential libraries and museums — all overseen by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration — and found them sticking reasonably close to historical fact. If there was spin, it was modest and not nearly as entertaining as the Nixon Museum.

This was true because the exhibits were approved by National Archives historians, a restriction the Nixon PR people — not hamstrung by historical fact — found unnecessarily limiting (lack of such limits, however, led to the rejection of the museum on the UC Irvine campus).

But now, everything is different. The Nixon Library got religion. A Republican Congress voted it into the federal system. And lo and behold, an honest-to-God historian named Timothy Naftali was dispatched from Washington to direct its conversion to the 21st century.