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.”