The Richard Nixon Library, which opened last week in Yorba Linda, Calif., consists of three low-slung pavilions across a reflecting pool from Nixon’s boyhood home, a small, white frame farmhouse. At first glance, it seems too simple and tasteful. What happened to the imperial president, the Richard Nixon who wanted to dress the White House guards like extras in an opera bouffe?

Then again, Nixon was always reinventing himself. The political figure who has been revived more times than “Oklahoma!” looked tanned, rested and ready last week. His wife, Pat, in seclusion for the past decade, appeared wobbly but chipper. The former First Couple was hailed by President Bush and ex-presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, a brass band, and about 40,000 onlookers. (Jimmy Carter declined to come; Nixon had refused to attend the opening of his library.)

The new library contains an exhibit on Watergate, where tourists can listen to snippets of the infamous White House tapes. But Nixon has hardly abandoned his lifelong effort to fashion his own image. The 5,500-square-foot building, just seven miles from Disneyland, is “more of a museum than a library,” said Stephen Ambrose, a Nixon biographer. While the library has life-size statues of famous world leaders from Charles de Gaulle to Golda Meir, it has none of Nixon’s White House papers. Fearing Nixon would destroy his records, Congress seized them in 1974. Some 44 million pages now sit in a warehouse in an industrial park in Alexandria, Va. Though most of the records are open to the public, Nixon has sued to keep thousands of sensitive documents under wraps, and the matter is being hashed out in the courts.

Built with private donations, Nixon’s roughly $25 million museum will cost taxpayers nothing to maintain. Other presidential libraries are operated by the National Archives and subsidized at a cost of about $20 million a year. Over the years, presidential libraries have become ever-larger monuments to departed leaders. The library of Gerald Ford, who spent 30 months in the White House, is almost twice as big as the library of Franklin Roosevelt, who served 13 years. If Nixon’s library is smaller than that of the man who pardoned him after Watergate, it may reflect a newfound mellowness. “Won some, lost some,” Nixon reflected last week. “All interesting.”