Six years ago–to the abject horror of Orange County's blue hair right wingers, historian/author Tim Naftali became the first legitimate director of Richard Nixon's presidential library in Yorba Linda.
A version of the library had been run by Nixon apologists whose brazenly absurd lies about their hero's misdeeds often prompted howls and tears of laughter inside the Weekly's newsroom.
Naftali's arrival, ordered by the National Archives, ended the library's shameless propaganda that Nixon hadn't committed criminal acts in the Oval Office but was rather the innocent victim of unethical, plotting political enemies determined to thwart a noble man's mission in Vietnam.
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Please recall that this president ordered so many burglaries that under California's Three Strikes Law he would have become a permanent resident of Pelican Bay State Prison.
Now, as my colleague Matt Coker recently reported, Naftali is leaving his position to write more books.
This development is OC's loss.
But
tonight, Naftali–a brilliant, classy man with a keen sense of
humor–will conduct his final presentation at the library on the same
day that he releases once secret Nixon grand jury transcripts.
The 90-minute event is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.