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The Obama Presidential Library That Isn’t

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/arts/obama-presidential-center-library-national-archives-and-records-administration.html

By Jennifer Schuessler

Feb. 20, 2019

The Obama Presidential Center promises to be a presidential library like no other.

The four-building, 19-acre “working center for citizenship,” set to be built in a public park on the South Side of Chicago, will include a 235-foot-high “museum tower,” a two-story event space, an athletic center, a recording studio, a winter garden, even a sledding hill.

But the center, which will cost an estimated $500 million, will also
differ from the complexes built by Barack Obama’s predecessors in another way: It won’t actually be a presidential library.

In a break with precedent, there will be no research library on site, and none of Mr. Obama’s official presidential records. Instead, the Obama Foundation will pay to digitize the roughly 30 million pages of unclassified paper records from the administration so they can be made available online.
And the entire complex, including the museum chronicling Mr. Obama’s presidency, will be run by the foundation, a private nonprofit entity, rather than by the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency that administers the libraries and museums for all presidents going back to Herbert Hoover.

The plan was revealed, with little fanfare, in May 2017. Few details of the digitization were made public until Tuesday, when the foundation and the archives unexpectedly released a legal agreement outlining procedures for creating what is being billed as “first digital archives for the first digital president,” which they say will democratize access.

But as awareness of the plan has spread, some historians see a threat to future scholarship on the Obama administration — and to the presidential library system itself.
Without a dedicated repository, they argue, the rich constellations of related material found at the other libraries — papers donated by family members, cabinet members and aides, as well as pre-presidential and personal papers — could end up scattered, or even uncollected. And without help from specialized archivists, the promised digital democratization could just as easily turn into a hard-to-navigate data dump.
More broadly, there’s concern that the creation of a privately run presidential museum undermines the ideal of nonpartisan public history.
Timothy Naftali, the former director of the Richard Nixon library, where he is credited with overhauling museum exhibits to give a more honest accounting of Watergate, called the decision “a huge mistake.”

“It was astounding to me that a good presidency would do this,” Mr. Naftali said.

“It opens the door,” he added, “to a truly terrible Trump library.”

‘An Act of Faith’

The current system had its origins in 1939, when Franklin D. Roosevelt donated his papers to the federal government and began building a library to hold them near his home in Hyde Park, N.Y. (Before the Presidential Records Act of 1978, a president’s papers were considered his private property.)

“It seems to me that the dedication of a library is in itself an act of faith,” Roosevelt said at the opening in 1941, standing on the porch
of the modest Dutch colonial-style structure, which also housed a small display of artifacts.

The library, paid for with private funds, was donated to the National Archives. Since then, the federal system has grown to include all 13 presidents going back to Hoover, whose library was created retroactively.

Today, the museums may draw the crowds, but it’s in the research libraries where historians piece together a more accurate view of a presidency. White House records and other collections at the libraries have, for example, overturned the idea of Dwight D. Eisenhower as a genial, golf-playing figurehead, and revealed the depth of internal debate in Lyndon B. Johnson’s White House over the escalation of the Vietnam War.