Nixon Library Honors Presidents’ Day with Free Admission

Admission will be free at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Museum in Yorba Linda Monday for Presidents’ Day. The library will be open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with the first 100 guests receiving a free slice of cherry pie.

Actors portraying the presidents depicted on Mount Rushmore—Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and George Washington—will be available for pictures throughout the day.

Educational and “kid-friendly presidential programming” will be presented in the White House East Room at 1 p.m., the library’s Anne Brown said.

Former presidential speechwriter James Humes will discuss Nixon’s 1972 trip to China at 2:30 p.m.

An exhibit celebrating the centennial of Nixon’s birth opened Friday. “Patriot. President. Peacemaker” depicts Nixon’s life from its humble beginnings to becoming the 37th president, encompassing five main themes of his life:

• “RN: How American deals with his early life, upbringing, education and service in the U.S. Navy during World War II. The bench he sat on while a member of the Whittier College football team, letters he sent his wife Pat during the war, and the desk he built with his father for use in his Whittier law office are displayed.

• “RN: In the Arena” begins with Nixon’s first run for Congress in 1946 and continues through the 1960 presidential campaign. It includes the Checkers Speech, the first television broadcast to appeal directly to American voters, and a re-creation of the 1950s-era American kitchen exhibit in Moscow where Nixon debated Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev on the merits of freedom versus communism.

• “RN: Creating a More Just Society” includes previously unseen interviews with Nixon as he explains the decision behind his domestic policies ranging from the New Federalism programs designed to “return power to the people,” along with groundbreaking environmental legislation, desegregation of Southern schools and returning to native Americans much of their former lands.

• “RN: Peacemaker” recounts Nixon’s ending U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, opening relations with China and detente with the Soviet Union, averting a U.S.-Soviet clash in the Middle East while providing vital aid to

Israel during the Yom Kippur War, and diplomatic efforts with the Arab world.

• “RN: Elder Statesman” covers the time following Nixon’s 1974 resignation as president, when he made 13 international trips to more than 20 nations from 1976 to 1994 and was consulted by all his successors. The exhibit includes newly declassed national security documents revealing how Nixon advised then-President Bill Clinton on the shaping of the post-Cold War world.

More information on the Nixon Library is available by calling (714) 993- 5075 or online at library.nixonfoundation.org or nixonlibrary.gov.

Although commonly known as Presidents’ Day, the Monday holiday is still legally Washington’s Birthday.

The holiday was shifted from Feb. 22 to the third Monday in February 1971 under the terms of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968. Because the holiday falls between Feb. 15 and 21 it can never fall on the actual anniversary of Washington’s birth in 1732.

The term Presidents’ Day began being popularized in the 1980s, when retailers combined sales formerly held in conjunction with Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays.

-City News Service