Whether Richard Milhous Nixon was in fact a crook may still be up for debate, but one thing is not: he wasn't an art lover.

Papers and recordings released from the National Archives yesterday reveal much about the 37th president and his aides, including his broad disdain for the media, which he calls "the hostile working press" in a 30-page memo to his chief of staff, H. R. "Bob" Haldeman.

In another memo to Haldeman, he writes that "..those who are on the modern art and music kick are 95 percent against us anyway. I refer to the recent addicts of Leonard Bernstein and the whole New York crowd. When I compare the monstrosity of Lincoln Center with the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, I realize how decadent the modern art and architecture have become."

Nixon continues that the "Kennedy-Shriver crowd...had every right to encourage this kind of stuff when they were in. But I have no intention whatever of continuing to encourage it now."

"P.S.," wrote Nixon. "I also want a check made with regard to the incredibly atrocious modern art that has been scattered around the embassies of the world."

Read more at ABC news.