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“When I started reading about Richard Nixon and his life, I found him just fascinating as an individual,” Byron tells me. In our conversation, he professes a genuine passion for studying the finer points of Nixon’s biography. Photos of Byron from the Nixon Foundation website show him as a clean-cut 20-something with a crop of curly dark hair, beaming at the camera next to various wrinkled Republican luminaries such as Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger. On the phone, Byron gives off what can only be described as extremely strong College Republican vibes - polite, well-spoken and almost painfully earnest in his regard for American political history. This is, apparently, not a question Byron is eager to answer. With the House hearings looming in the background, the discourse over Nixon’s role in history is increasingly being filtered through the debate over January 6, giving rise to a tidal wave of comparisons between Nixon and Trump.įor the keepers of Nixon’s legacy, these comparisons raise a difficult question: Given Americans’ deeply polarized views of Trump, does the association with the 45th president harm or help Nixon’s memory? The contest over Nixon’s legacy has heated up once again due to the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, which fell on June 17 - coinciding with the House’s inquiry into the January 6 riots and Trump’s unsuccessful attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Today, though, Byron’s job is trickier than ever - thanks in large part to Donald Trump. Sifting through the ash heap of history for contemporary lessons is a challenging task under the best of circumstances, but it is particularly difficult in the case of Nixon, whose heap is larger - and more politically radioactive - than most. Now, this 29-year-old, who was born in 1993, the year before Nixon died, is the unofficial custodian of the 37th president’s legacy, responsible for applying the “vision of President Richard Nixon to defining issues that face our nation and the world today,” as the foundation’s mission specifies.