Interesting quote by the National Archives’ head of the Nixon Library in today’s Washington Post.

From the story “Suburbanites: At President Nixon’s home, there’s a longing for the good old days of conservatism and an ambivalence about this year’s contenders”:

Schilling, 65, counts a daughter of Barry Goldwater among her closest friends. She came to the Nixon museum Friday afternoon after selling her flower shop in the morning. “And don’t even get me started on the state of California and being a small businesswoman,” she said, rolling her eyes.

Rex Johnson, a classmate visiting from Florida, smiled sympathetically. They had wandered past the Lincoln Sitting Room. Still ahead was the president’s old armored limousine, the gun Elvis Presley presented in the Oval Office and, to the right and straight ahead, empty space once occupied by a Watergate exhibit that implied the scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency had been a sly Democratic coup.

Installed by Nixon’s friends, it was dismantled when responsibility for the museum passed to the National Archives, which is preparing a fact-based replacement. (”This isn’t North Korea,” the new director said.)

The facts of the anecdote about shutting down the Watergate exhibit are correct, even if the reporter’s characterization  leans toward editorializing.  That’s fine — it’s tough to present the other side.  What we’re more curious about is the North Korea contrast.

The Library’s director is Timothy Naftali.  Does the name sound vaguely familiar?  It should to readers of the Huffington Post, where he’s been a blogger.

And here’s what Naftali once wrote about North Korea:

Not surprisingly the Bush administration’s Shock and Awe policy toward Pyongyang failed. We Americans are generally not very sensitive to how our power is perceived by outsiders. We scare people by our every existence. We have the most modern military and the largest economy in the world and we have Microsoft, Hollywood and Google. So, whatever we do we will be the target of envy and other countries will seek alliances or additional power on their own to keep us in check. But when we actually decide to scare other countries, as George Bush did with his Axis of Evil speech, then we are guaranteed to propel tin-pot dictators to go to great lengths to try to scare us in return.

Sounds like America does a lot of scaring, according to the government’s Nixon Library director.  Or it could be harmless nostalgia for the good old days or Realpolitik diplomacy.  You know, the kind we had when Henry Kissinger and his boss Richard Nixon were in charge.