In a recent interview for Meet the Press, Chuck Todd asked Donald Trump about the location of his future presidential library, a repository that would preserve the history of his administration and promote his accomplishments. Trump replied, “I have a lot of locations actually. The nice part, I don’t have to worry about buying a location… I’ve been treated so great in Florida.” Trump’s answer flummoxed Todd, who later told his viewers, “I have to say, I didn’t see the idea of his library on one of his properties coming with that answer.”1
Naturally, there was no follow-up on Trump’s answer. The American public will most likely not learn more about the president’s plans for his library until at least either 2021 or 2025. Will his library join the federal presidential library system, a public-private partnership that includes every president from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush? Or will he follow Obama’s recent decision to opt out of the federal system and have his own foundation completely control the project? Will there be any public accountability over Trump’s future presidential library?
The answers to these questions will have a profound impact not only for scholars interested in access to presidential records, but also for historians who are considering a career in public history. And while the presidential library system may seem so unique as to be irrelevant to anyone working elsewhere in public history, these libraries are worth studying to understand the intersection of private foundations, the federal government, and scholarship.
As an employee at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, I saw how a presidential library could afford exciting possibilities for the work of public history, while at the same time placing serious limitations on the workers themselves.
The beginning of the federal presidential library system can be traced back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision to build his own library with private funds in Hyde Park, New York. He then donated his records to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). This established a precedent that was formalized with the Presidential Libraries Act of 1955. It became standard practice to build the libraries with private funds and then develop a partnership with NARA for their continued operation.
Since Congress seized Nixon’s presidential papers in 1974, it was no surprise he established his library as a private institution outside the NARA system. It also took Nixon longer to open a library than it does for most former presidents, mainly because he couldn’t settle on a location; San Clemente was too expensive, while Duke and UC–Irvine sparked too many protests. Finally the Nixon Library opened in his hometown of Yorba Linda, California, in 1990.
The Library’s first director was Hugh Hewitt, who had been Nixon’s ghostwriter and served in the Reagan administration. (He is now a prominent conservative commentator.) Hewitt created a media stir a week before the Library opened, when he announced his office would screen all researchers before they were allowed to use the Library’s materials. He also remarked that Bob Woodward would be denied access to the archives. After a wave of backlash, Hewitt retracted his statement, and he resigned later that year.
A presidential library is a museum in addition to being an archive, and its exhibits can tend towards the hagiographic. The Nixon Library’s exhibits, however, were all vetted by Nixon himself and were exceptionally partisan. The original exhibit on Watergate blamed the president’s enemies for his downfall and glossed over the key sections of the infamous tapes that led to his resignation. The text read, in part, “Commentators sought to portray Watergate strictly as a morality play, as a struggle between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, good and evil. Given the benefit of time, it is now clear that Watergate was an epic and bloody political battle fought for the highest stakes, with no holds barred.” Museum visitors were told Nixon did not obstruct justice, and Watergate was nothing but partisan politics.
Though the Library contained many artifacts from Nixon’s life, including his pre- and post-presidential papers, there were initially no original records from his presidency. Only in 2007, after years of negotiations between the Richard Nixon Foundation and the National Archives, was the Nixon Library brought into NARA’s system and the presidential records moved to Yorba Linda. The Yorba Linda campus was then split into two offices, a new one run by the National Archives and the other by the private Nixon Foundation.
The Foundation, run by a board of directors mostly made up of Nixon family members, former aides, and financial contributors, maintains control over certain parts of the facility. The National Archives office oversees the archives and museum galleries. As is often the case at presidential libraries, this sometimes leads to private interests butting heads with NARA’s standards. For example, because NARA does not control the Library’s replica of the East Room and its outdoor garden space, the Foundation frequently rents those spaces out for weddings, proms, and other events. This often results in NARA employees and the Library’s security guards receiving reports of various forms of inappropriate behavior near Nixon’s burial site and presidential helicopter.2
Timothy Naftali, a Cold War historian and former director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia, was appointed by the head of NARA to be the Library’s first federal director. From the outset, he sought to revamp the Library’s image. His first major decision was to take down the Library’s original Watergate exhibit, explaining to the Los Angeles Times, “I can’t run a shrine.” Over the next four years, Naftali accelerated the release of previously withheld materials, and pushed for non-partisan public programming.3
I first visited the Nixon Library as a part of a field trip where our class met Naftali. During an introduction to the Library, he mentioned that there was an opportunity for internships in their office. Given the precarious state of the humanities, I kept the idea of an internship in the back of my mind. In 2010 I contacted the Nixon Library and was brought in as an intern. For the next several months, I transcribed oral histories and participated in the Library’s rebranded nonpartisan school tour program (led by historian Mindy Farmer).
I was then hired as Naftali’s assistant in early 2011, just as he had wrapped up a particularly tense period of back-and-forth over the new Watergate exhibit. The Foundation had changed leadership in 2009 and become more aggressive in its dealings with Naftali. They pressured him to remove a section of the exhibit that discussed Nixon’s pre-Watergate abuses of power, including a description of his plan to punish Jewish employees at the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. NARA’s support was inconsistent, and Naftali’s boss (Sharon K. Fawcett, then the Assistant Archivist for NARA’s Office of Presidential Libraries) encouraged him to find a compromise with the Nixon loyalists. But then the New York Times and other outlets covered the drama surrounding the stalled exhibit, and NARA allowed Naftali to complete the exhibit without removing the pre-Watergate section. I helped proofread some of the final drafts of the exhibit during my first few weeks as a federal employee.4
The exhibit opened in March 2011 and was praised by scholars who had previously criticized the Library for whitewashing Nixon’s presidency. Stanley Kutler, a historian whose successful lawsuit led to the release of the Nixon tapes in 1996, claimed it was “a new day” at the Nixon Library.5 Over the next several months, our office released Nixon’s grand jury testimony and organized the Library’s first-ever academic conference. The library even hosted an event with Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward that was attended by around 1,000 people.6
Naftali left in November 2011 after finishing what he set out to accomplish during his tenure. He was later hired by New York University, first as the Director of the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, and is now an Associate Professor of History and Public Service at NYU.
It would be more than three years before Naftali’s replacement was hired. In the intervening period, our office was left without a vision for the Library, aside from the Office of Presidential Libraries encouraging us to adopt a more diplomatic relationship with the Nixon Foundation. Our public programming dramatically slowed down, and our staff struggled to deal with the federal government’s hiring freeze. The Foundation continued to invite conservative celebrities like Ann Coulter and Dinesh D’Souza into their space.7
Still, I was seriously considering a permanent career within the National Archives. The academic job market wasn’t looking great, and I was encouraged to hear NARA was selecting the historian Mark Atwood Lawrence to be our new director. While I knew there would be plenty of frustration and compromise ahead, I was willing to accept that in order to work with someone who would push for better history for the tens of thousands of people who visited the museum every year.
Then we learned Lawrence was no longer in the running. Nixon Foundation chairman Ronald H. Walker, a former Nixon advance man, had refused to even meet with Lawrence; and though the Foundation had no official veto power, NARA chose not to move forward with their selection. Lawrence dropped out of the process in the summer of 2013.
Walker later cited his concerns regarding Lawrence’s past writings on Nixon’s Vietnam War policies. “We had done some of our own research and found out that he had written a number of negative stories about Vietnam and with President Nixon,” Walker told the Orange County Register. “So it was kind of a red flag with both of [Nixon’s] daughters and some of the other board members.” NARA and the Foundation finally settled on a compromise candidate, Michael Ellzey, a former director of Golden Gate Park and Orange County’s Great Park. Ellzey, who had no prior experience in archives, museums, or history, became the Nixon Library’s new director in January 2015.8
Around the same time, I was told by my supervisor that the president of the Foundation (Richard “Sandy” Quinn, a former Nixon staffer during the 1960s) was critical of my doctoral advisor, Jon Wiener, whom Quinn considered an “anti-Nixon” historian. I was also informed they were upset that I had recently rushed through a temporary Nixon centennial exhibit during one of my school tours—which meant, among other things, that I had been spied on! I was further told they were less than thrilled with my dissertation research, a study of Republicans who resisted Nixon’s orders. (The project was born out of my time working on the revamped Watergate exhibit, and was an early version of what eventually became my first book, They Said No to Nixon: Republicans Who Stood Up to the President’s Abuses of Power.) Finally, there were another two or three instances in which I was spied on during a tour, and there were probably others I was not aware of.
It was time to look for other job options. Besides, the Museum was in the early stages of a major renovation, and it had become clear that the Foundation would be in control of producing the content for the new exhibits. Fortunately, Timothy Naftali recruited me to work at the Tamiment Library at NYU, and I left the Nixon Library in March 2014.
Marketed as the “New Nixon Library,” the new museum galleries opened in the fall of 2016. The 2011 Watergate exhibit remains, albeit in a different location within the museum, in the middle of the museum instead of towards the end, and now followed by a section on Nixon’s humble beginnings. Earlier this year, the Nixon Foundation appointed Hugh Hewitt as their new CEO.9
Presidential foundations have continued to exert their power over the federal system. The Boston Globe reported that there was an “exodus” of staff at the JFK Library in August 2015 due to decisions made by the Kennedy Foundation’s new chief executive, Heather Campion. The very next month, director Thomas J. Putman resigned following reports of increased tensions between his office and Campion, who in turn resigned from her post in December 2015.10 Last year, the LBJ Library announced that historian Kyle Longley would become their new director, only for him to be ousted this spring. “We cannot discuss personnel matters,” said James Pritchett, the Library’s director of public and media communication.11
There is little public information with regards to both cases, but they each suggest that the National Archives has been unwilling to carve out an independent space for their employees. It is worth noting that the current President and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, Mark Updegrove, is a former Director of the LBJ Library. Elsewhere, from 2003 to 2009, R. Duke Blackwood was director of the Reagan Library and the Reagan Foundation simultaneously.
By rejecting taxpayer dollars, the Obama model is arguably the more ethical option of running a presidential library. But it also gives up on the idea of the public having a say over these sites, and the Obama presidential center has so far been defined by a lack of transparency.12 Greater public accountability would help the large number of passionate civil servants who already work in the system, and it could also carve a space for historians who want to reform these public-history sites. These museums are simply too large for historians to ignore, especially given how many students walk through them. Presidential libraries are too important to be left to loyal partisans.
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- Meet the Press, June 23, 2019 (transcript).
- A quick search of YouTube will yield several videos of weddings and proms held at the Library.
- Naftali quoted in Christopher Goffard, “Nixon’s library to go by the book,” Los Angeles Times, July 8, 2008.
- Andrew Gumbel, “Nixon’s Presidential Library: The Last Battle of Watergate,” Pacific Standard, Dec. 8, 2011; Timothy Noah, “Malek Talks!,” Slate, April 1, 2011; Adam Nagourney, “Watergate Becomes Sore Point at Nixon Library,” New York Times, Aug. 6, 2010.
- Adam Nagourney, “Nixon Library Opens a Door Some Would Prefer Left Closed,” New York Times, March 31, 2011; Kutler quoted in Gumbel, “Nixon’s Presidential Library.”
- The program for “Understanding Richard Nixon and His Era: A Symposium,” July 22, 2011, can be found on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine here. Four of the panels (on Nixon’s biography, politics, domestic policy, and role in the Vietnam War) were recorded for C-SPAN. The event with Bradlee and Woodward (“Remembering Watergate: A Conversation,” April 18, 2011) can be found on YouTube in two halves, here and here.
- Coulter’s speech at the Nixon Library, Nov. 4, 2013, YouTube; D’Souza’s speech at the Nixon Library, Nov. 1, 2012, YouTube.
- Daniel Langhorne, “Nixon library left leaderless as foundation, federal officials seek common ground,” Orange County Register, May 12, 2014; Walker quoted in Anders Howmann and Lauren Jow, “After three-year search, Nixon library finally has new director: ex-Great Park CEO Michael Ellzey,” Orange County Register, Dec. 17, 2014.
- Lou Ponsi, “Hugh Hewitt starts Nixon Foundation CEO job, plans satellite Washington, D.C. office,” Orange County Register, July 5, 2019.
- See these three article by Jim O’Sullivan in the Boston Globe: “JFK Library sees exodus as new CEO, strategy draw complaints,” Aug. 5, 2015; “Leaders critical of regime in charge of JFK Library,” Sep. 15, 2015; “JFK Library Foundation chief ends her rocky run,” Dec. 14, 2015.
- Michael Barnes, “Kyle Longley is out as director of the LBJ Library,” Austin American-Statesman, March 17, 2019.
- Anthony Clark, “Barack Obama’s Presidential Library Is Making a Mockery of Transparency,” Daily Beast, March 2, 2019; Jennifer Schuessler, “The Obama Presidential Library That Isn’t,” New York Times, Feb. 20, 2019.
