By George Lardner Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 25, 1998; Page A06

Construction of a government-run Richard M. Nixon presidential library in California is becoming increasingly unlikely. Lawyers for the Nixon estate and the Justice Department are preparing for a court battle this summer over how much Nixon's tapes and papers are worth.

Archivist of the United States John W. Carlin has been trying for several years to reach an out-of-court settlement that would in part finance construction of an official Nixon library in Yorba Linda, Calif., on the site of what is now a privately run facility housing Nixon's pre- and post-presidential papers.

Congress seized Nixon's White House records in 1974 to keep the disgraced ex-president from destroying them. After years of litigation, Nixon won a 1992 appeals court decision giving him the right to be compensated for the fair value of the collection, a huge array of 44 million items being kept at the National Archives' high-tech facility in College Park.

Trial has been delayed by backstage efforts to resolve the dispute with an agreement that would pay the Nixon estate more than $26 million. Part of the money, $11 million by the most recent estimate, would be used to build a Nixon library run by the National Archives as part of its presidential library system.

A settlement is still possible, but prospects are dim, according to sources familiar with the negotiations. The Justice Department reportedly is working on a proposal to be submitted to the Nixon estate next month, but department lawyers, evidently anticipating rejection, are at the same time stepping up preparations for trial in mid-July.

The Nixon estate does not seem optimistic either. Asked Friday about new details of a possible settlement, John H. Taylor, co-executor of the Nixon estate and director of the Yorba Linda library, dismissed them as "matters of ancient history."

"At this point," Taylor said, "we are getting ready to try the lawsuit."

For Carlin, an added complication arose last week when the labor union representing the staff of the Nixon Project at College Park said it has decided to oppose a Nixon library in California because it was dissatisfied with Carlin's assurances of job security for archivists stranded here.

Fueling the dissatisfaction, the union's two top officials say, is poor staff morale, compounded by reports that the archives has talked with the Nixon estate about putting as many as five staffers of privately run Yorba Linda library on the government payroll of any presidential library there.

The union officials, Vernon L. Early and Peter J. Jeffrey of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 260, told Carlin in a letter the union "will oppose construction" of a government-run library in Yorba Linda and "will demonstrate" that shifting Nixon's records there would "curtail and delay access" to the roughly 80 percent of Nixon's records that remain unprocessed more than 23 years after Congress ordered them confiscated.

In a conciliatory response, Carlin said that the archives would "attempt to place all" of the staff members here into "appropriate positions" and that he was confident there would be enough vacancies to accommodate them in the Washington, D.C., area. He said any private staff members in California would have to comply with civil service requirements for government jobs there. He also said that review of Nixon's tapes will continue to be conducted at College Park over the next five years "even if there is a settlement."

Carlin emphasized, however, that at the moment there is no agreement, and if none is reached "in the coming months, it is likely that the compensation case will go to trial later this year."

Carlin has advocated settlement partly because the cost could be much higher if a jury were to decide the case. He cited estimates as high as $300 million.

The Justice Department has yet to submit its appraisal, but sources say it is likely to be far lower than the $26 million settlement figure that has been proposed. Government lawyers were advised several years ago, sources said, that "$2 million would be too much."