National Post (National Edition)
Presidents don’t need shrines
Partisan supporters of past presidents do their best to keep objective history out of the official libraries
In 2007, I had the privilege of becoming the first director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. My job was to move Nixon’s presidential materials from the Washington, D.C. area, where they had been kept as federal property because of the Watergate investigation, to California, where Nixon’s friends and supporters had built a private library in 1990. My job involved transforming the once private library, which had a reputation for being a national centre of Watergate denial, into a public, nonpartisan facility.
Sometime in 2010, I was surprised (and frankly, a little proud) when my boss at the National Archives told me that my name had been invoked in negotiations over the George W. Bush Presidential Library, which opened last week. Apparently, the George W. Bush Foundation was worried “some future Naftali” would “want to put up a torture exhibit.” It’s true that I had managed to anger Nixon loyalists. As part of the Nixon Library’s rebranding mission, I had brought in serious critics of the former president to the library and vowed to have an honest exhibit on Watergate. And the Nixonians made their feelings known. In 2009, the private Nixon Foundation sent a letter to every living former president denouncing me personally — “Who is this Naftali,” a puzzled President Bill Clinton is said to have asked, “and why should I care?” — for messing up the library system by trying to achieve nonpartisanship in Yorba Linda. Bush’s supporters wanted control of the temporary exhibit gallery to keep out anything that might cast Bush 43 in a negative light.
The creation of every new presidential library involves negotiations over an agreement — a treaty — between the federal government and the former president and his representatives. Called a Joint Use Agreement, the contract divides up responsibility for the space at the library between the private presidential foundation, which is usually dedicated to promoting the positive legacy of a president, and the American people. The spaces controlled by the National Archives on behalf of the American people are legally mandated to be nonpartisan.
In dealing with the Bush Foundation, the National Archives apparently held the line, as it did with the private Nixon Foundation. If the final agreement is anything like the treaty governing the Nixon Library, the National Archives has veto power over all exhibits and programs at this new presidential library.
One of the misconceptions about presidential libraries is that they are supposed to be shrines. Congress is not interested in creating shrines to the branch of government at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. It is one of the strange outcomes of the separation of powers doctrine that one branch has to pay to archive and display the documents and trinkets of a competing branch. In recent years, Congress has shown its displeasure by trying to narrow the streams of public money that go to presidential libraries. The younger President Bush had to raise a lot more money than his father, not just because construction costs had increased in 15 years, but because Congress expects the
Fundraisers for George W. Bush’s just-opened museum are afraid someone will propose a torture exhibit. Why shouldn’t they?
friends of presidents to create an endowment to help shoulder the burden of maintaining the buildings forever.
There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily. But in its zeal to reduce the public burden for these libraries, Congress has made them even more vulnerable to presidential friends and family. Unwilling to use public funds for these programs or exhibitions, Congress expects the library’s private presidential partner to foot that bill. The effect is that the National Archives finds raising money for museums, exhibits, and book talks from groups that are not interested in promoting objectivity.
The National Archives is nonpartisan; it is supposed to act in the spirit of open government and transparency and be a leader in the custodianship of history. But since Americans regularly “throw the bums out,” regardless of ideology, there are almost as many Democratic presidential libraries as Republican ones. So, why not let them be? Democrats can visit the Clinton Library and Republicans the Reagan Library.
I have to admit that this was my view until I ran one. These presidential libraries, however, have an educational mission that is much more important to the country than the reputation of a former president. Depending on the location, these libraries receive between 60,000 and 400,000 visitors a year. And students and teachers use these libraries’ online resources in the classroom. You cannot look at the faces of the kids and their teachers that come to your museum without regret if what they see is not as accurate and informative as it could be.
At the Nixon Library, 12,000 school kids on formal school tours visited each year. Before the National Archives took over in 2007, nearly 200,000 students had been taught that the Democrats used Watergate to overturn the electoral result of 1972 and that Richard Nixon did nothing that presidents before him had not done; the only difference was that he got caught.
Will the George W. Bush Library echo the insecurity of the president’s supporters worried about letting the National Archives put up a future torture exhibit? The test will not just be the permanent galleries unveiled last week, but the tenor of the programs sponsored by the library.
Will the library invite serious writers who opposed the Iraq War? Will the school tours be run with an educational or a rehabilitative mission for the reputation of the 43rd president? And what about the temporary exhibits sponsored by the library, will they be nonpartisan or just echo chambers for Bush-era White House spin?
The new Bush Library will be as nonpartisan as the American people want it to be. All of the libraries read the emails, letters, and social media about how they are doing their job and how they could do it better. If teachers find the educational materials on offer one-sided, they should let the library know. The Bush Library, like all other presidential libraries, will have an education specialist, paid by public funds, whose job will be to foster an inviting, “no-spin” zone. If the public wants serious discussion about No Child Left Behind, the consequences of the Iraq War, or why the government crossed the line and used torture after 9/11, there is no good reason why these discussions cannot occur in the same building as where the documents that explain those policies exist.