Donated Materials of Ollie Atkins

The Nixon Presidential Library and Museum owes debt of gratitude to Dale and Leonard Adler for the gift of the over 7,000 original negatives and associated contact sheets, prints and publications from all phases of the career of Ms. Adler’s father, Oliver F. Atkins. Mr. Atkins (known universally as “Ollie”) served as President Nixon’s official White House photographer from 1969 to 1974. Ollie also had a long and distinguished photographic career starting with The Birmingham Post and The Washington Daily News in the late 1930s and early 1940s.  Ollie served as a photographer for the Red Cross during World War II and the recovery in Europe and North Africa. In the late 1940s Ollie went to work for The Saturday Evening Post as their roving photographer in Washington, DC, where he documented events around Capitol Hill and the White House for almost twenty years. Ollie’s work caught the eye of candidate Richard Nixon in 1968. He served as the campaign’s official photographer and got the assignment as President Nixon’s official photographer upon Nixon’s ascent to the White House. Shortly after Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 Ollie accepted a vice-presidency with Curtis Publishing Company, the publisher of The Saturday Evening Post, a post he held until he died in 1977.