Could Obama Change Presidential Libraries Forever?
Will Obama's private center—what NARA calls the "new model"—alter the system?
Last week, Barack Obama unveiled the plans for his presidential center, to be built in the historic Jackson Park on the South Side of Chicago. Architects, city planners, educators, community organizers, activists, pundits, boosters and critics all have weighed in on the look and on the plans. But if you blinked, you might have missed something important: Obama will not follow the example of his 13 immediate predecessors. He will forgo the creation of a traditional presidential library and museum.
The National Archives and Records Administration—which operates presidential library-museums for every president from Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush—won’t be operating either for Obama. His private Obama Foundation, not the government, will own and operate the museum. And there really won’t be a presidential library. The Obama Foundation will pay for NARA to digitize unclassified records and release them to the public as they become available, but the center’s “Library,” which may or may not house a local branch of the Chicago Public Library, will not contain or control presidential papers and artifacts, digital or otherwise. Instead, according to a NARA press release that called the museum “a new model for the preservation and accessibility of presidential records,” those records will be stored in “existing NARA facilities”—meaning one or more of the agency’s research or records centers across the country.
The notion that a federal presidential library would contain no papers, and not actually be federally operated, is astonishing. But to those like myself who have advocated for years—without much success—that it’s time to reform the broken presidential library system, it’s also an important positive development, and one that could be revolutionary.
Presidential libraries are perfect examples of just how far presidents will go to control their own legacies. Since the first one was created in 1941, what were intended to be serious research centers have grown into flashy, partisan temples touting huckster history. Built with undisclosed, unlimited donations, often to sitting presidents, libraries have traditionally been donated to the government after their construction. But even though they are taxpayer-funded and controlled by a federal agency, the private foundations established by former presidents to build the libraries retain outsize influence. The libraries’ whitewashed exhibits are created by presidential boosters; they host political events; their boards are stacked with loyalists; and many of their important historical records may never see the light of day.
You could say that the rise of the presidential library has followed the fall of the presidency. We once held the office of president in high regard. As we have lowered our opinion of it, presidential libraries have grown larger and more powerful—and less truthful.
The Obama Presidential Center could break this pattern, and solve at least some of the major flaws of the system, by creating a new model for a privately run presidential museum that can be laudatory in its exhibits and partisan in its programming, but not while under the troubling imprimatur of the federal government—and without the taxpayers footing the bill. At the same time, the new arrangement will leave presidential records and the terms of their release to the public in the hands of the government, where they belong. Freeing NARA to process and produce those records without the interference of the Obama Foundation will be our best hope for learning what really happened during the Obama presidency—and, if others follow his example, future presidencies as well.
The presidential library system has fallen far since President Franklin D. Roosevelt set up the first one in the summer of 1941. As the threat of war loomed over the United States, Roosevelt decided to house his official records and private collections in a fireproof building on his estate in Hyde Park, New York, well away from Washington, D.C. (Before Roosevelt, most presidential papers were housed at the Library of Congress or in private or university archives.) He saw in those papers and artifacts the documentary evidence of his legacy, and he wanted to preserve and make them available for research. As he said at the dedication ceremony, “we believe that people ought to work out for themselves, and through their own study, the determination of their best interest rather than accept such so-called information as may be handed out to them by certain types of self-constituted leaders who decide what is best for them.”
Almost as an afterthought, Roosevelt made room to display memorabilia and gifts he had received during his presidency, so that, in addition to scholars, the general public might stop by and take a look at some of his curiosities. Researchers continue to mine this extraordinarily important archive. (Just last month, the FDR Library announced the opening of the Henry Morgenthau Jr. Holocaust Collections, a project to “discover unique but dispersed Holocaust subject material across the Roosevelt Library’s archival holdings.”)
It wasn’t long before libraries intended to be sober research facilities with tasteful exhibit halls turned into massive tourist traps of dubious historical value. Libraries became larger with each president, but the big leap came with Lyndon Johnson and the eight-story brutalist behemoth he raised on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. If a single anecdote can encapsulate LBJ’s plans for his library and the post-presidency, it’s that he built, as his office on the top floor, a replica of the Oval Office (even LBJ’s architect, Gordon Bunshaft, questioned the propriety of that decision). The national drive to memorialize the slain President John F. Kennedy resulted in the even more dramatic and monumental I.M. Pei-designed library in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood, where, on Sunday, Obama will accept the Kennedy Library Foundation’s Profile in Courage award.
Perhaps none exemplifies the antithesis of the Rooseveltian presidential library model more than the Spanish Colonial-inspired conservative big-box store that is the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum, in Simi Valley, California. Sixty-five years after FDR opened his modest fieldstone structure, the Reagan Library dedicated a new wing: the Air Force One Pavilion, a 90,000-square-foot addition to the existing 150,000-square-foot center, housing the aircraft that carried seven presidents, plus a Marine One helicopter, a presidential motorcade, exhibits on presidential travel and the Cold War, a banquet space for 1,600, a gift shop and an actual Irish pub the Reagans had once visited briefly (purchased by the Reagan Foundation, crated and carted back to California, and recreated as a place to sell snacks—complete with the bottle, glasses and part of the bar the Reagans once touched, under reliquary-like glass). The pavilion has since added the Discovery Center, with kid-size replicas of White House rooms providing a “dynamic, hands-on educational experience.” Several years ago, the Reagan Library hosted its most popular temporary exhibit. It was not on the Wit and Wisdom of the Great Communicator, nor How Reagan Won the Cold War. It was called, “Treasures of The Walt Disney Archives.”
And what about the Reagan archives—you know, the whole point of building a presidential library? The government estimated in 2007 that they won’t be fully open for 100 years. The same goes for the records of the two Presidents Bush and President Bill Clinton, who can each boast of enormous, gleaming, monumental library-museums that opened within five years of their leaving office and whose glowing exhibits welcome far more public visitors in a week than their research rooms receive in a year.
Presidential records matter because they inform us about what presidents do and how they do it. American citizens give our chief executives a great deal of power to keep much of this information secret, at least temporarily. In exchange, at some reasonable time after they leave office, we get to pierce that secrecy and find out what really happened. Except, the development of the powerful presidential library altered that deal, allowing “history” to be written (rewritten, actually) by presidents themselves. Critics have long charged presidential libraries with politicization, from questionable decisions to withhold certain papers (or sometimes, temporarily “lose” them, as happened with Chief Justice John Roberts’ files at the Reagan Library during his confirmation process) to highly skewed “history” exhibits (such as the Nixon Library’s Watergate display; when the government took control of the facility in 2006, the first thing it did was to dismantle the “fundamentally inaccurate” mess) to years-long Freedom of Information Act request backlogs.
Many of these problems are due to the way presidential libraries are set up, under “public-private partnerships.” Presidents create private foundations that raise money from a variety of sources, build and equip the libraries according to NARA’s standards (most recent presidents have chosen to partner with universities, which provide the land), and donate them to the government, either through deed or lease. Taxpayers then fund their ongoing operation. Starting with George H.W. Bush’s library, new legislation required the foundations to provide an endowment to help defray a portion of the operation and maintenance costs, but for the most part the federal government pays to run them, and federal employees operate them. Foundation employees work in the libraries, too, however, carrying out different—and sometimes incompatible—agendas.
Congress appropriates funds for NARA to carry out its core function—to process and release presidential records and administer the laws governing them in a nonpartisan manner—but very little for the “public” side of the libraries (exhibits, public events and educational programming). Therefore, NARA has increasingly become reliant, for ongoing financial support and political cover, on the private foundations presidents create to build the libraries. Which means that NARA cozies up to these organizations, working side by side to help fulfill the foundations’ legacy-polishing ambitions. NARA grants former presidents and their representatives veto power over the selection of the library’s director, which is a federal position. The agency also allows the foundations to use federal email accounts, office space and other resources, and welcomes, with open arms and (almost) no questions asked, the adulatory and alternative-fact-laden exhibits they write and create. Furthermore, by cooperating fully with the foundations’ desire to open the museum exhibits in their libraries as quickly as possible—and not providing staffing and resources to quickly (or even relatively slowly) process and open records—NARA has helped ensure that the public learns only what former chief executives and their families and supporters want them to learn, decades before we have access to the records that show what really happened.
In return, the private foundations pay for ongoing temporary exhibits, periodic renovations to the permanent exhibit and special projects—such as smaller-scale digitization of records. And the foundations throw their considerable former-president-powered weight around, both in favor of NARA when the agency needs their help and against it when they disapprove of NARA’s decisions. When the Nixon Library Foundation became unhappy with the nonpartisan and truthful manner in which the library’s first federal director, Tim Naftali, was planning to portray Watergate in a new exhibit, it pressured NARA to fire him—which agency officials tried, unsuccessfully, to do. In 2010, when I scheduled a series of field hearings at the presidential libraries for a subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, to examine the relationship between NARA and the foundations and seek possible solutions to these problems, those private organizations pressured the archivist of the United States to get the subcommittee chairman to cancel the hearings; he did. A few months later, after control of the House changed parties, the foundations, presidential library directors and NARA officials got together for a daylong “celebration” of these public-private partnerships as “important cultural treasures and repositories of our country’s history.” The festivities included a joint hearing between the Committees on Transportation and Infrastructure and Oversight and Government Reform (Chairman John Mica, during his opening statement, proclaimed, “I might say at the outset, this isn’t one of these hearings where we have a mission of some violation or some problems with the libraries”), as well as a major symposium to champion the libraries’ “mission and future.” At neither event were any major problems or concerns seriously discussed, much less any reforms contemplated.
How the private funding works is also an ethical minefield. The federal government spends about $100 million a year operating, maintaining and improving presidential libraries. But the costs to build and equip them—which have doubled for each successive president in the past 30 years and now run in excess of $500 million—must come from non-federal sources. That’s not a sum one can raise through $25 internet donations; presidential libraries are funded by mega-donors.
At least, we think they are. The laws governing the libraries are mostly silent when it comes to disclosing donations. Presidential foundations—and even presidents, while in office—may raise as much money, from whatever sources (including foreign governments), as they wish. And, with the exception of donations over $200 from registered lobbyists, no donation must be disclosed. In other words, someone wishing to gain influence with President Donald Trump could give him a $50 million check today, and as long as they wrote "For the Trump Library "on the memo line, we’d never know about it.
Unlike many of his predecessors, Obama eschewed directly soliciting library donations while in office, and voluntarily disclosed donations he received (and, perhaps consequently, is reportedly well behind previous presidents in amassing a fortune to build his center). But the operative word is “voluntarily”—neither he, nor his successors, are under any legal obligations when it comes to disclosing such donations.
So: Hundreds of millions of dollars of hidden political donations have the capacity to influence not only NARA’s operation and administration of the law, but presidential decision-making. The government hosts biased, factually incorrect, legacy-polishing exhibits and partisan political events, and the taxpayers support them. And records languish, unprocessed and unavailable, as NARA allocates scarce resources to exhibits, education and public programs rather than to the core function of the libraries: records. All this from a system that’s supposed to be about transparency, and revealing American history to its citizens.
In the absence of any impetus to change the laws that have helped create this mess, maybe getting the government out of the presidential commemoration business is a good idea. Congress has debated many times how to improve the preservation of and access to presidential records. But it’s never even seriously considered whether the government should be in the business of hosting presidential museums, primary campaign debates, politicians’ launching pad speeches and questionable educational programs—much less square dance lessons, wine tastings and “Remember the ‘60s” parties (all of which events, and much more like them, have been held at the libraries over the years).
The Obama Presidential Center will rip off the band-aid, removing government from what it has no business paying for. The center will have, like many other presidential libraries, space for exhibits, public and educational programming, an auditorium, garden and restaurant. It likely will host, just like past libraries, grandiloquent, celebratory exhibits; political (and politicized) events; and authors and speakers almost exclusively from one side of the aisle. But at least the government won’t be involved—and you won’t be paying for it.
Meanwhile, the government will be able to focus on what it’s really meant to do: preserving presidential records and making them available in a timely fashion. Sure, not everyone will be satisfied with the new arrangement: Apparently, no access will be granted to the original textual records—an idea that is sure to rankle serious researchers. But in the end, it’s possible that more records will be released as a result of this new system. One real test will be whether NARA can process and digitize 60 million pages and more than 250 terabytes of electronic records faster and more reliably under this new model. Given the tight budgetary constraints and significant records-processing challenges already overwhelming the agency, this will be a challenge for NARA—especially within five years, when the FOIA begins to apply to the Obama records. But if the agency can find its footing under this new arrangement, there is a very good chance that we will know more about the Obama presidency within the next decade than we already know about the presidencies of his four immediate predecessors.
It’s hard to know why Obama and his foundation chose to set up the new presidential center this way. One clue may lie in a little-noticed change to presidential library legislation enacted during President George W. Bush’s term: the endowment formula. If the Obama Center chose to include a “presidential archival facility,” the private Obama Foundation would be required to provide NARA with an endowment equal to 60 percent of the total cost to build and equip that facility for ongoing operation and maintenance expenses. (It had been 20 percent for previous presidents.) For a library that has been estimated to cost more than a billion dollars, such a move could save hundreds of millions.
But whether it was in service of saving cash or not, I believe it’s a major step in the right direction. There’s still more we need to discover about the precise nature of NARA’s relationship with the Obama Foundation, and where and how the records will be stored, processed and released. And the drive for reform continues: We still need full disclosure of donations. In the end, though, we’re closer to having a presidential library system that isn’t a complete embarrassment, and meets FDR’s vision for preserving presidential records so that American citizens can learn from the past to gain knowledge for the future.
Hopefully, the Obama Presidential Center truly will become a new model, and it will motivate Congress to codify this arrangement into law. In any case, if one of the most popular presidents of modern times moves forward and gives up the traditional presidential library, it will make it considerably difficult for his successors to take us backward.