Bitter Nixon family feud over legacy

When Richard Nixon was forced to resign from the US presidency in 1974 over the Watergate affair, it was his family who closed ranks around him and helped him survive his disgrace.

But now, eight years after his death, his two daughters are locked in a bitter and vengeful struggle over his legacy that is set to be played out in the US courts.

'There is complete estrangement between the sisters,' one director of the Nixon Library and Birthplace Foundation in Yorba Linda, California, told the Los Angeles Times.

Until he died in 1994, the library was run by Nixon himself. After his death, the sisters disagreed on whether it should be run by members of the family, as Tricia Nixon Cox believed, or by an independent board of directors, as Julie Nixon Eisenhower held.

Eisenhower's vision prevailed, and for the past eight years the library and its substantial assets have been operated by a 24-member board that includes the sisters and such former Nixon White House figures as Henry Kissinger, Nixon loyalist and Reagan speech-writer Ken Kachigian, and former US ambassador to Britain Walter Annenberg.

However, a legacy of about $12 million from Nixon friend and Florida property millionaire Charles 'Bebe' Rebozo has given the library the opportunity to challenge the arrangement. Under the terms of the bequest, Rebozo left the money to the Nixon Library on the condition that all spending should be approved by Nixon's daughters and another long-time Nixon friend, Robert Abplanalp.

But the sisters have been unable to agree on how the money should be controlled, and it is sitting in a Florida bank until either they reach an agreement or one of them is ousted.

In a court action begun earlier this year, the Nixon Foundation is seeking to remove Cox from the triumvirate and place the money under the direct control of the museum.

'It's a disagreement over how the substantial effort to nurture President Nixon's legacy should be handled,' says John H. Taylor, executive director of the Nixon library.

'Mrs Cox has taken the view that the resources of the Nixon foundation should be managed directly and totally by the Nixon family with a focus on the personal activities and interests of it.'

However, a source close to Tricia Nixon Cox disputes that assertion. 'That's pure slander. Unadulterated garbage. For five years Patricia has been excluded from the running of the library.'

Taylor claims the board of the library, along with Eisenhower, want it to be run more independently of the family 'for the purposes of furthering scholarship and understanding' of Nixon's presidency.

Cox's camp accuse the directors of the library of trying to oust her to win 'complete control for their own purposes'.

And they accuse the library's directors themselves of failing to give grants to research and serious study of the President's life and instead putting money into furnishing the museum itself.

The increasingly bitter dispute threatens to draw many of the museum's board members into the controversy. Tricia Nixon Cox's side claim that the board of directors like Kissinger and Annenberg are too far distant, unwell or passive to exert any control of the way the library is being run.

Although the sisters are no longer speaking, observers say the rift is being encouraged by the museum.

'The museum wants to project this as a Julie vs. Tricia issue. But it's really a museum vs. Tricia issue. The sisters have been very close in the past and I think they will be again in the future.'