Memo
To: Former President William Jefferson Clinton
From: Citizen Sarah Jane Vowell
Re: Presidential libraries fact-finding tour
Mr. President, I’m tired. Who wouldn’t be after a decade of sticking up for you? I am looking forward to your presidential library in Little Rock because I am worn-out from defending you. I would like to donate what’s left of my faith to some building in Arkansas, where it can be archived in an acid-free box, so I can make a little extra room in my heart and fill it up with trying not to hate your successor. But before relinquishing my duties as your crabby little cheerleader, I scoped out four presidential libraries to help you figure out how to do the job right. Not that you asked me. I just don’t want you to mess this up.
We’ll begin our tour at the John F. Kennedy Library overlooking Boston Harbor. Partly because your youth and flash have been described as “Kennedyesque,” and partly because you yourself have often invoked the comparison, most notably by trotting out that film of you as a teenager shaking JFK’s hand, an image of eerie destiny.
I talked to the Kennedy library’s curator, Frank Rigg. We agreed that the plainest pleasure of visiting presidential libraries is getting close to the actual stuff of history. For example, the presidential cheat sheet for the pronunciation of a certain German phrase. Rigg tells me, “We have on display in one of the cases in that room the little card on which he’s written ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ spelled out phonetically. If you watch the film [of his Berlin speech], you can see that just before he gets to the line he looks down at the paper and then looks up and says, ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ I love those little correspondences between an artifact and a piece of film. The most beautiful one comes towards the end of the museum, where we have the video of his tour of Ireland in 1963. As he was leaving, he quoted a piece of poetry that Mrs. De Valera, the wife of the president of Ireland, had recited to him the night before at dinner. He’d written it down on the back of his itinerary.”
On the video, Kennedy says that Mrs. De Valera “quoted this poem and I wrote down the words because I thought they were beautiful.” Rigg points out how “you see him in the film pick up a piece of paper that he has under a silver jug. It’s windy. That’s why he has it under there. He picks it up and then he recites the beautiful lines.” Kennedy quoted, “‘Thus return from travels long. Years of exile. Years of pain. To see old Shannon’s face again.’ Well, I’m going to try to come back and see old Shannon’s face again.” Rigg continues, “At the end, he folds it up and you can see the crease. And again it’s one of those things where you feel as if you’re there in that moment in time.”
In this I. M. Pei—designed white box, JFK’s life and death unfold primarily on television monitors and video screens. I walk in suspicious. I have never particularly worshiped Jack Kennedy. I mean, he didn’t really do anything. Except talk. He spoke of civil rights, but it was Lyndon Johnson who got actual laws passed. And then there’s the minor matter of the Cuban Missile Crisis, perhaps the scariest single week in the history of the world. And yet, at JFK’s library, I found myself hoodwinked by pretty words. I stood there, transfixed by the film of his Inaugural Address:
Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation”—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself…. With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.
“As you may have noticed,” Rigg says, “there are no narrators to our films and our videos. The principal voice is that of John F. Kennedy himself. And we did that very consciously.”
There are also a lot of pretty pictures—home movies of JFK handing a dandelion to John-John, one weirdly evocative filmstrip of the president in which all he does is carry a briefcase and walk to a car. I watch it wondering, Why is this so riveting? He’s taking work home. But I can’t resist him. The man is Medusa: Don’t look in his eyes.
President Clinton, you should milk this in your library. Where the legislative record is perhaps ambiguous, or downright shabby, go for the flashy sound bites. You are such a sweet talker, the Charlie Parker of the press conference Q & A, riffing rhythmically about everything from interest rates to Greece versus Turkey with regards to Cyprus. There are probably too many momentous quotes to sift through, but placing all the State of the Union Addresses on video loops is a good place to start. My personal favorite was the one in 1997 in which you proclaimed, “America is far more than a place. It is an idea—the most powerful idea in the history of nations. And all of us in this Chamber, we are now the bearers of that idea, leading a great people into a New World.” There was one paragraph in your speech at the Oklahoma City bombing memorial service that actually made me want to be a better person. You said, “When there is talk of hatred, let us stand up and talk against it. When there is talk of violence, let us stand up and talk against it. In the face of death let us honor life,” And I always thought one of your loveliest moments as president was one of your smallest. Might your librarians dig up a tape of that special you did for the music channel VH1 in your second term called Bill Clinton: Rock ’n’ Roll President? There was one scene in which you were flipping through your old records, reminiscing about what music has meant to you. Your face lit up when you spotted a Ray Charles album in the stack. It was a fleeting, seemingly trivial clip, and yet the way you beamed at the cover and said Ray Charles’s name revealed your ability to revere.
I wanted to go to the Dwight David Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas, to see how they handle something the Clinton Presidential Center will have to tackle. Which is, if one of the achievements of a presidency is economic prosperity, how can that be displayed without trotting out a bunch of toasters and hula hoops? Without making people seem dumb and materialistic? How do you convey the decency of making people’s lives better? Unfortunately for our project, the way the Eisenhower library deals with this challenge is—they basically ignore it. In fact, you’d barely know the man was president. The exhibit devoted to his White House years mostly consists of heaps of weird but swanky gifts he got, like a mosaic desk from the shah of Iran. The museum is great at Eisenhower’s military career. I walk around with its director, Dan Holt, who points out “the original note that Roosevelt and Churchill signed appointing Eisenhower the Supreme Commander.” We pass a documentary in which a corny narrator calls Ike “a military meteor on the rise” and I think, Who cares if he accomplished anything after V-J Day?
There is a lesson to be learned here after all. Mr. President, play to your strengths. Eisenhower’s greatest achievement was liberating Europe. Your greatest achievement? Balancing the budget. Not as dramatic, I know. They’re probably not going to make a Tom Hanks movie about fiscal policy, no matter how inspired that fiscal policy might be. But still, as your White House Web page cheerfully pointed out, your money wrangling did result in the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, the lowest unemployment rate in thirty years, and the most new jobs ever created in a single administration.
In the Eisenhower library, the climax of the visit is D day, in which you turn a sharp corner and, suddenly, you’re standing like a soldier on a ship’s ramp, facing a Normandy beach. My tour guide, Dan Holt, walks me across “a small mock-up of an LCI (landing craft infantry) and into the photograph that’s been called the Jaws of Death, which is the landings at Omaha Beach.”
As we trudge across the ramp, we glimpse our buddies ahead of us, slogging through the bloody wet, and the beach so far away In short, this is very effective theater. Which leads me to my next recommendation, Mr. Clinton. What about a similar stage set, only in your library, instead of being a soldier leaving the boat for Omaha Beach, the visitor could walk in the shoes of Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, as he steps out of a Lincoln Town Car and into the Dirksen Senate Office Building to endorse the Clinton deficit reduction strategy before the Senate Banking Committee!
A word on the people who run these libraries, Mr. President. Fortunately for you, they are very attached to their subjects, very loyal. Their president becomes a kind of mental roommate. And each of the library directors I interviewed spoke of his president with affection, like a mom almost.
Dan Holt praises Ike’s correspondence skill: “He was a wonderful letter writer.”
And talks up his private-sector prowess: “He was an outstanding businessman.”
His book learning: “His grammar was very good.”
His looks: “He was a very handsome man.”
All the loyalty you would want while you’re in office you finally get after you quit. None of the library directors have written kiss-and-tell memoirs and gone on to work for ABC.
I ask Holt if he has any advice for the administrators of the new presidential library in Little Rock. “Bigger rest rooms,” he says, “and more drinking fountains. But I think you have to have fun. I’m a true believer in that. There have to be bells and whistles.”
In the bells and whistles department, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, features a little piece of Disney World in the form of an LBJ animatron. It is a Lyndon Johnson robot, a robot who wears cowboy garb and tells folksy stories. Have you heard the one about the man who goes to a doctor because he’s hard of hearing? The doctor advises the man to quit drinking and sends him home. A few days later, the man returns to the doctor’s office. He hasn’t stopped his drinking. According to the LBJ robot, the doctor scolds the man, asking, “‘Didn’t I tell you when you were here that you should cut out your drinking if you wanted to improve your hearing?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, why didn’t you do it?’ He said, ‘Doctor, when I got home and I considered it, I just decided that I liked what I drank so much better than what I heard.’”
The library’s director, Harry Middleton, who is showing me around, turns a corner and says, “As we move into this area, we show some of the correspondence that President Johnson got, some of it quite critical, some of it quite supportive.”
One letter hanging on the wall is addressed to Lyndon Johnson from one Frances Mercer of Beverly Hills, California. She wrote, “Mr. President—you have engaged this country in an act of war, without the consent of Congress. I consider having worked for your campaign one of the most tragic mistakes of my life.”
President Clinton, I am going to hazard a guess that you yourself have received one or two angry letters. The question arises: What are you going to do about all the people who hate your guts, not to put too fine a point on it. What are you going to do about all the aspects of your presidency you’d rather forget about?
I tell Harry Middleton that I heard a rumor that in the initial exhibition at the LBJ library, there was little or no representation of Vietnam and that the president himself came to the library and insisted that that part of the exhibition should be beefed up.
Middleton nods. “To a certain extent that’s true. There was a representation of Vietnam. But nothing that showed the controversy of Vietnam. And when President Johnson walked through the library just a few weeks before it was to open, one of the things that he commented on was that the library did not indicate how contentious that time was. He said to me, ‘That was a very controversial period. We’ve got to make sure that people know that we understand that.’ He said to me, ‘I don’t want another damn credibility gap.’”
“Do you think the people who are in charge of a president’s legacy are more apt to protect him than the president himself would be of his own legacy?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Unless you get a clear direction from the president that he wants it all laid out. In the case of Johnson, I’ve been director here from the beginning. On one occasion when he was concerned that we might be too protective he said to me, ‘Good men have been trying to protect my reputation for forty years, and not a damn one has succeeded. What makes you think you can?’ So we have not tried to do that.”
Mr. Clinton, here’s a list of things you should not whitewash. Before we even discuss the scandals, let’s talk about the ordinary failures: What about one of your key campaign promises, to reform health care? A fiasco. Ditto Waco. Or the 1994 congressional elections, in which the voting public punched Republican names on their ballots with one hand, while using the other hand to give you the finger. I’m not even mentioning all the half-ass policies like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, or Bosnia or Somalia.
Finally, you did have sexual relations with that woman. You have to confront this. I do not know how. What I do know is that if your library’s only exhibits from 1998 are celebrations of the budget surplus and a copy of the Wye River Memorandum between Netanyahu and Arafat, those of us who lived through that excruciating impeachment trial are going to feel cheated. I suppose everyone has a favorite artifact from that era (insert stained dress joke here), but I always thought that gift of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that you gave to your mistress helped me understand you better. Perhaps your exhibition designers can do something with a line or two from “Song of Myself.” No, not “Smile, for your lover comes.” The best description of you I’ve ever read was published in 1855:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Mr. President, take heart. Someday, there might be people in this country who think that cheating on your wife and lying about it is not as embarrassing as being one of the presidents who got 58,000 American soldiers killed, not to mention more than 3 million Vietnamese.
Harry Middleton insists, “I think that a library should not proselytize. It should not sugarcoat and should not distort the facts or the truth in order to hide a controversy surrounding the president. Otherwise, it’s just not fair to the public.”
Meanwhile, in Yorba Linda, California: “First of all, I don’t think a presidential library should necessarily bend over backwards to be objective and fair and inclusive of every important telling fact on all sides of the argument.”
This is John Taylor, director of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace. It’s about a fifteen-minute drive from Disneyland. Just as Harry Middleton of the LBJ library is doing his job according to LBJ’s wishes, John Taylor is doing his job the way Nixon would want. He tells me, “People expect presidential libraries to reflect the point of view of the president, the president’s family, and the president’s institutional advocates.”
I am ambling through the museum, past pictures of Nixon, all smiles in China, and one of the other visitors asks a guard, “Where’s Watergate?” The guard tells him, “Keep going straight. It’s a dark room.” And it is, a very dimly lit tunnel chronicling the break-in at the Watergate Hotel through President Nixon’s resignation and farewell.
It does take you back. Have I mentioned that Nixon’s face on television is my very first memory? Born in the first year of his administration, by the end of it, during the ever-present Watergate hearings on television, I thought Watergate was just a regular TV show, like Bonanza or Scooby-Doo. My mother claims it was unnerving to have a four-year-old always tugging at her hem saying, “Mom, Watergate’s on!”
There are stations in the Watergate gallery where one may listen to the famous tapes, and there are intricate text panels with labels like “What Did the President Do and When Did He Do It.” John Taylor says that one of the purposes of this exhibit is that people come here expecting the museum to avoid such a sore subject, and that dealing with it in such an info-packed manner gives them credibility.
According to Taylor, “The most important reason to tell the story is that it happened. It was an amazing outbreak of political passion. The anger that Congress expressed during the Senate investigation in 1973 and the impeachment investigation in 1974. It was passion that had been building probably since the events around the time of Kent State. I think one sees the same effect with President Clinton, who was also a figure about whom there were simmering passions among many conservatives. There was a strong feeling among many conservatives, as we all know, that he “was not legitimate.” Or that he had been engaged in activities that had never been fully revealed to the American people. And many of those passions came forth during the impeachment investigations and proceedings in 1998 and 1999.”
Offering advice to you and your library director, President Clinton, Taylor says, “I think that it would be appropriate for the Clinton presidential library that there was a political dimension to the Clinton impeachment. And there were people who did not think President and Mrs. Clinton should be in the White House who used the impeachment effort as a way to accomplish that end. Pointing that out is fair comment. We point it out in our museum, and I would think and assume that they would attempt to do so in Little Rock as well.”
In fact, Taylor says that one curious effect of the recent impeachment is the way it retroactively colors the Nixon legacy. Even if Nixon looks no better, his enemies don’t seem quite as pure. Now, Taylor says, people are more likely to notice the vindictiveness and the sheer partisan glee that are bound to shadow any presidential impeachment.
There’s a lot you can crib from the Nixon library, Mr. President. Just substitute the name Clinton for the name Nixon in the following text from the Watergate exhibit: “Nixon himself said he made inexcusable misjudgments during Watergate. But what is equally clear is that his opponents ruthlessly exploited those misjudgments as a way to further their own, purely political goals.”
One caution, Mr. President: the Nixon library can sometimes seem a little defensive. In the LBJ library, a visitor’s view of history is complicated by the presentation of both sides of the Vietnam dilemma. It’s an emotional place, but it still operates within the language of good old-fashioned civics—a president and constituents loudly agreeing to disagree. The Nixon library asks, You want facts? We’ll give you some facts! And, oh, by the way, grow up, because you’re not going to like any of them.
Recalling the Nixon library’s exhibit marking an anniversary of the deaths of four students at Kent State, Taylor asserts, “Thanks to the Neil Young song, thanks to the way that event is generally packaged in the media and in history, one rarely hears about it from the perspective of Richard Nixon. But when you hear President Nixon talking in our presidential forum about what a dark day that was for him, it challenges the prevailing thought that he was callous and unfeeling towards the families of those who had died. In fact, he says in this museum and says in his memoirs that it was the darkest day of his presidency. And he includes Watergate when he makes that calculation. At the same time, however, you also learn, when going through the museum, that President Nixon had to weigh the lives of those four innocent young people against the lives of innumerable South Vietnamese and American soldiers whose lives were saved as a result of the incursion of Cambodia, which was the proximate cause of the demonstration at Kent State, which got out of hand and led to the deaths.”
President Clinton, perhaps you’re wondering if the Nixon library changed my mind about anything. You’re wondering if citizens who shook their fists at your face on TV might someday drop in on a building with your name on it and maybe give you a break.
All I can tell you is that I still think Watergate’s a horror and Vietnam was wrong. But I do find it useful to remember that those decisions, even the most deadly ones, were made not by a supernatural monster but by a real man whom we elected, a man who at least believed he was right. And that is not nothing.
In fact, the Nixon and Johnson libraries were my favorite ones to visit because they deal with quarrelsome subjects. Once, years ago, I was at the LBJ. I was walking away from a copy of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 toward a photo of a serviceman who had been killed in Vietnam. In the ten seconds it took to walk from that law to that face, a song from a nearby pop music exhibit started playing: “Louie Louie.” And I felt like all of America was in that ten seconds: the grandeur of civil rights, the consequences of war, and the fun, fun, fun of a truly strange song.
Mr. President, Americans like contradictions. We elected you, didn’t we? So in your library, own up to your failures, but don’t stop trying to win us over. In other words, just think of it as running for president forever.