The London Sunday Times suggests today that the cost of Bush’s library may exceed its usefulness, writing that the library is “in danger of becoming a white elephant.”
The Times notes that while the National Archive uses taxpayer dollars to pay presidential library staffers to maintain presidential papers, an executive order Bush signed in 2001 will allow him to withhold any documents he chooses from the library’s collection.
The order threatens the traditional usefulness of presidential libraries that generally “show the president ‘warts and all.’”