Approval of Design Clears Way to Build Presidential Library

The Yorba Linda Planning Commission gave its final approval Wednesday night for the design of the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library, clearing the way for construction of the $25-million complex to begin early next year.

“I have traveled a long road from my youth in Yorba Linda, and this project has traveled a long road back,” Nixon said in a letter read by Yorba Linda Mayor Roland E. Bigonger after the commission’s action.

“Now that we have seen the kind of project it will be, we cannot imagine it any other way, or in any other place,” Nixon wrote in the letter to Bigonger.

“This is a very important thing as far as Yorba Linda is concerned and as concerns the history of the United States,” Planning Commissioner Ronald Watroba said as he cast his vote approving the project.

“This is something all the residents of Yorba Linda will take pride in,” Commissioner Ron DiLuigi added.

The two-level library, to be located on a 6-acre site at the corner of Eureka Avenue and Yorba Linda Boulevard, will sit next to the small, wood-frame house where Nixon was born 75 years ago. The complex will comprise about 45,000 square feet of public space, including a 300-seat theater, a 15,100-square-foot museum and air-controlled rooms for document storage.

On Wednesday, architects from the firm that designed the library, Langdon Wilson Mumper of Newport Beach, displayed a scale model of the facility and described some of the planned exhibits.

Included in the museum will be displays detailing the Alger Hiss spy case; Nixon’s debate with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in a Moscow kitchen; the presidential campaigns of 1960, 1968 and 1972; the diplomatic breakthrough with the People’s Republic of China in the early 1970s; the war in Southeast Asia, and the integration of public schools in the South.

The museum also will include a replica of the White House’s Lincoln Room, where Nixon was said to have made many of his most important foreign policy decisions.

The grounds of the complex will include the First Lady’s Garden, which will feature the blackish-red Pat Nixon rose, as well as an herb and iris garden.

“We are consulting very closely with the Nixon family, especially Pat, on this theme garden,” said Richard W. Poulos, partner-in-charge at Langdon Wilson Mumper.

Ironically, because the U.S. Congress ordered that Nixon’s presidential papers be retained in the National Archives in Washington, the Nixon library will contain no official documents from his six years as president. Instead, the library will feature Nixon’s vice presidential papers, his personal papers since leaving office, manuscripts for his six books and personal White House diaries.