For years  the Richard Nixon Library in Southern California has been treated as kind of a low-rent roadside attraction for the few who couldn’t afford the bus fare to get to the Valhalla of Wingnutdom, the Reagan Ranch up in Sanata Barbara. But if you are still interested in our second worst president, there is some good news: some history has seeped into the building:

Richard Nixon failed in covering up the infamous 1972 Watergate burglary that ended up forcing him out of office. But at least one version of the events has, until now, adhered to the former president’s own view. Today, though, the Nixon Library and Museum will no longer describe the president’s ouster as a “coup” by his rivals in its newly revamped Watergate exhibit.

The Nixon Foundation, which the New York Times described last year as a group of “Nixon loyalists,” founded the library and museum in 1990 in Yorba Linda, California, and curated its contents until the National Archives took it over three years ago. Since the changeover, the Watergate exhibit has been a point of contention, with the Archive planning a “searing recollection” of the scandal to replace the longstanding — and long-ridiculed — whitewashed version.

Archivists say the $500,000 new exhibit will be “faithful to fact, balanced and devoid of political judgment,” according to the Associated Press.

“What we tried to do is lay out the record and encourage visitors to come in … and draw their own conclusions,” said Susan Cooper, a spokeswoman for the National Archives.

Some material has never before been on public display, and it includes interviews with, among others, Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy and Nixon special counsel Charles Colson, who went to prison for seven months in 1975 for crimes related to the Watergate.

[...]

When the library opened in private hands in 1990, Nixon biographer Stephen E. Ambrose wrote that commentary heard on one heavily edited Watergate tape “would almost convince a listener that Nixon never ordered a cover-up or a payment of hush money.” The private Richard Nixon Foundation, which ran the site at the time, makes clear on its website the exhibit was “President Nixon’s perspective” of the scandal that brought down his presidency.

For those wondering who was in charge back in the good old revisionist days….

When the $21-million library opened with private funds in July 1990, amid trumpets and a crowd of 50,000 that included Nixon and three other presidents, one biographer called the occasion “a symbolic redemption” for the president who had resigned in disgrace in 1974.

Yet from the start, the library had trouble being taken seriously. Its first director, Hugh Hewitt, announced that researchers deemed unfriendly would be banned from the archives, singling out the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward as a candidate for exclusion. Scholars cried foul; Hewitt revoked the plan.

What’s more, the library possessed only Nixon’s pre- and post-presidential papers. In 1974, Congress mandated that his White House materials be kept in the Washington area, amid fears that Watergate-related documents would be destroyed.

For years, the library enjoyed a reputation less as a sanctuary for scholars than as a roadside attraction, a place Nixon scholar Stanley Kutler derided as “another Southern California theme park,” adding: “Its level of reality is only slightly better than Disneyland.”

When scholar Greenberg visited the Yorba Linda library to research his book “Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image,” he found the staff in the reading room professional and helpful. But when he ventured into the exhibits depicting Nixon’s career, he found “an incredibly distorted, biased, pro-Nixon view of his presidency that distorted facts about Watergate.”

As Digby said, yeah that guy.