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Kathy’s and my vocational seasons collided, or perhaps elided, on Thursday when we received a visit from our friend and former colleague, Cold War historian and Columbia University professor Tim Naftali. You may know him as a CNN presidential scholar. We know him best as the brilliant, battle-tested first federal director of the Nixon library in Yorba Linda.

We had a lot of catching up to do in our three-hour conversation over pizza in my office. Kathy and I are former chiefs of staff to former President Nixon and executive directors of the private Nixon foundation, which operated the library by itself starting in 1990. With congressional approval, the National Archives and Records Administration added it to its archipelago of presidential libraries in 2007.

I had gotten to know Tim as an expert not just in the Cold War but in the specialized field of White House tapes. When I recommended him as our first federal director to then-archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein, Allen told me the same idea had occurred to him. As part of the handover, we had promised to install an objective exhibit about Watergate. I asked Tim to do the honors. Thanks a lot, John! A withering assault by Nixon’s former White House loyalists, some of them Watergate figures themselves, did not prevent Tim from completing the task. You will see his painstaking work when you visit the library today. Under current law and agreements, the foundation is not permitted to change it.

As for when you visit the library next year or the year after, that may be a different question. No one can say for sure. But the hyper-politicizing of the federal government affects even independent agencies like NARA. The Nixon foundation’s current president and CEO, Jimmy Byron, my former religion student at St. John’s Episcopal School in Rancho Santa Margarita, is now in charge of all NARA operations, including the presidential library system. Byron was in the news last week for firing the director of the Eisenhower library, a 30-year civil service veteran, after he refused to let Trump give King Charles a library artifact as a state gift. Doing so would have been against the law. But that argument goes only so far these days.

While on board at St. Paul’s Commons, Echo Park, Tim chatted with Canon Serena Evans Beeks, former executive director of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles’s Commission on Schools, about her grandfather’s work with Eisenhower after World War I, including a cross-country pilgrimage that inspired the future president to establish the interstate highway system. Tim also looked in on the monthly meeting of the Program Group on Global Partnerships and The Episcopal Church’s Chinese convocation, whose three-day meeting got underway Thursday.

My incredibly rich day included my monthly meeting with Serena’s Episcopal schools successor, the Rev. Dr. Ryan Douglas Newman; a visit from Obispo Maximo Joel Polares of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente, his colleague and mine, the Rt. Rev. Gerry Engnan, and other IFI friends; a chat with members of the diocesan Altar Guild, who have a little something coming up early next month they like to call diocesan convention in Riverside; and a return visit to the Chinese Convocation over dinner, to offer remarks lifting up their work in Bible study training for lay and ordained leaders.