I finished up the museum with the exhibit galleries.

A detailed model of the Nixon house circa 1920

It had all the furniture I had just seen in the real house!

This was an amazing display of some of the prominent world figures that Nixon dealt with during his career. Each statue weigh about 80 pounds. The face is sculpted onto a styrofoam head and the clothing is made from real clothing dipped in a glue and water mix. Then the whole thing is painted to look like bronze.

Leonid Brezhnev

Winston Churchill...

... chats with Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer.

White gold set with emeralds and diamonds from His Royal Highness Fahd bin Abd Al-Aziz, Prince of Saudi Arabia, 1969

Nixon's great goal for his presidency was to secure a stable, long-lasting peace for the world in which freedom could thrive. Along with ending the Vietnam war, he also formed new relationships with China and the Soviet Union.

"We cannot expect to make everyone our friend, but we can try to make no one our enemy."

A chunk of the Berlin Wall

In 1972, Nixon became the first American president to pay an official state visit to the Soviet Union. This was also the first agreement for both countries to stop the defensive arms race and limit the number of nuclear weapons.

These were the outfits given to the prisoners of war by the North Vietnamese. They was a short-sleeved version to wear around camp and a long-sleeved version to wear for a torture session since the guards found the sight of wounds and bruises distasteful.

Old broadcasts were showing on an old-looking tv.

The Lincoln Sitting Room is the smallest room in the White House.

This moon rock was brought back by Apollo 15 in 1971. This piece of black basalt lunar lava is 3.3 billion years old and obtained from the Mare Imbrium (Sea of Showers). Ancient astronomers thought these large dark regions on the moon might be full of water and hence why they named them 'seas.'

Wedding dresses and other formal outfits

Gifts from the people to the president...

... including a WWII commemorative pistol from Elvis Presley

On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested with electronic surveillance equipment inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office in Washington DC. Two years later, President Nixon became the first American president to resign after exposure about illegal wiretapping, break-ins, payoffs and political scandal. Nixon was not the first president to have authorized secret recordings of White House conversations, but this became an abuse of presidential power and a deliberate obstruction of justice.

This Air Force One (Special Air Mission 26000) flew eight presidents from 1962 - 1998. Nixon logged more flying time than any president before him (550,000 miles) and visited close to 30 countries. He nicknamed it the Spirit of '76.

Click for a larger version of the plane layout

Dinner was spent with more family. In some good news, Dave was able to stay an extra week in his place in Vegas so I can cancel my hotel!