The underground treasure

History is resting beneath the main buildings of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda.

Climate-controlled storage rooms are teeming with 46 million pages of documents and 3,700 hours of tape related to the Nixon presidency. They are handled and protected by a nine-member National Archives and Records Administration staff.

The official records, which include many classified documents, began arriving at the location in 2007, the year the privately funded Richard Nixon Foundation opened the library doors to NARA.

“The National Archives in Washington, D.C., and other locations keep the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights and other important documents in history,” said Gregory Cumming, spokesman for the library. “Each of the 13 presidential libraries keep the audio visual and textual materials related to the particular president’s terms.”

Libraries for Herbert Hoover, Franklin D, Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, George Bush, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton are operated by the NARA.

Catherine Gaugh