What Are Presidential Libraries Actually For?
New presidential centers are rethinking what it means to preserve history
Men dominate the story behind John F. Kennedy’s rise to power, but researcher Barbara Perry found another important voice buried in the archives at the JFK Presidential Library and Museum: his mother’s.
Letters and press clippings showed how, with speeches and appearances at gatherings for tea or coffee, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy played a crucial role in seeding her son’s presidential campaign in the late 1950s. She talked about his candidacy and his upbringing, and made him more familiar to groups of voters, especially Catholic women.
Those documents, Perry said, showed how some of Kennedy’s political DNA came from a woman “whose voice had often been ignored at best or ridiculed at worst.”
Perry’s discovery offers just one example of material that may change the way visitors to these presidential centers think about our past leaders. But the nature of these sources of information is on the edge of some radical change.
A new presidential center honoring Barack Obama just opened without a research library. The soon-to-be-opened center on Theodore Roosevelt will do the same. And archives for Joe Biden and Donald Trump are currently stored in Maryland, with no plans yet to include them in future presidential centers.
Technology is making it easier to find these archives online, so many documents will still be accessible. But the government created a system of presidential libraries more than 80 years ago to house the papers of former leaders in one convenient place. Their shift away from operating as research sites raises an important question: Why keep building these centers — the latest of which cost hundreds of millions of dollars — if they don’t include a library?
Preserving the record
Through most of US history, presidents were allowed to do what they wished with their documents and other materials once they left office.
Researchers say George Washington organized his with an eye toward posterity. Dolley Madison sold a lot of her husband’s material. Theodore Roosevelt donated much of his archives to Harvard, but his collection wound up being spread out over 18 different institutions.
“They could burn them, they could put them in the Library of Congress, they could take them back to their birthplace,” said Perry, a professor in presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. “There just wasn’t the concept of a federally run… repository for presidential records and documents and archives.”
That changed starting with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The nation’s 32nd president donated his papers and part of his family’s Hyde Park, NY, estate to the federal government for a library and museum. The president’s supporters then raised money for construction, and Roosevelt asked the National Archives to administer the library.
The president dedicated his library on June 30, 1941. He told Americans that making records like his available required the nation to believe in the capacity of its own people to learn from the past so that “they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.”
Following Roosevelt’s example
FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, then decided to donate his papers, and Congress passed the Presidential Libraries Act in 1955 to encourage other presidents to do the same and ensure the documents were made available to Americans. That started a system of presidential centers around the country that were privately built and federally run.
But libraries housing boxes and boxes of records are just one part of these centers. They also include museums highlighting the former leader’s accomplishments.
“A presidential library is kind of two dueling entities, the museum and the archive,” said Justin Vaughn, a political science professor at Coastal Carolina University. “They often are conflated, but they’re really kind of serving two different purposes and funded by two totally different entities.”
The National Archives runs the library part, which is generally located in a separate building on a presidential center campus, sometimes with different entrances and security. Researchers ask to see certain records and make appointments for a visit. They then use a library reading room to examine them.
“Getting access is not like just walking into your neighborhood public library,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor. “You can’t take any of the material with you. It all has to be looked at in the reading room.”
That can involve hours of sifting through boxes of dry memos or correspondence. But the work can offer some unique insights that shape research papers and books on presidential history.
Vaughn found a collection of phone recordings in the archives for Lyndon B. Johnson that show how the former president would flatter, cajole, and bully to get what he needed.
“They aren’t all flattering,” the researcher said about the recordings. “Being on the receiving end of a sales pitch from Lyndon Johnson was like experiencing every single emotion at once.”
While the archives are often most useful to researchers, the museum side targets the general public, often with the goal of polishing a president’s legacy — or repairing it.
Herbert Hoover, for instance, has been criticized historically for his response to the Great Depression, which started during his presidency. But his museum’s Great Depression exhibit notes that Congress refused to enact a Hoover plan to stem financial panic in the early 1930s and then passed a nearly identical strategy once his successor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, took office.
How the system works
Presidents generally start thinking about their museums and libraries as their time in office winds down. They often pick a location or state that helped shape them.
The $850 million Obama Presidential Center, for example, opened on June 18 on the South Side of Chicago, where Obama was a community organizer in the late 1980s and where former first lady Michelle Obama grew up.
Library construction is funded through donations, and the president’s papers are turned over to the National Archives to manage. A federal law mandates that presidential foundations also provide an endowment to help with that expense.
The National Archives currently manages the records of 16 presidents, or every leader dating back to Hoover. That includes the records of 12 former leaders that are stored on the grounds of their presidential center or museum. It also includes the records of Gerald Ford, which are housed at the University of Michigan, and those of the three most recent presidents — Obama, Biden, and Trump — which are stored at the National Archives location in Maryland.
There are also more than two dozen additional presidential museums or centers scattered around the country, some with libraries or collections that are not managed by the government.
Presidents mostly gave up their records voluntarily until the Watergate scandal, when President Nixon tried to conceal incriminating tapes of Oval Office conversations and phone calls. In response, Congress passed the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act in 1974 to seize Nixon’s records and preserve them within federal custody, ending the precedent that presidential records were private property. Four years later, Congress passed another law, the Presidential Records Act, which required future presidents to turn over their records to the federal government once they left office.
The next generation
The Obama Presidential Center features a 225-foot-tall tower, a museum, walking trails, an NBA-regulation-size basketball court, community meeting areas, and a branch of the Chicago Public Library.
But records from the 44th president’s time in office will be kept at a National Archives location in Maryland and made available digitally.
An Obama Foundation spokesperson said 95% of the former president’s records were already in digital form. And the foundation is funding efforts to create digital copies of any physical papers so they also can be accessed online.
The $450 million Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library opens on July 4, the country’s 250th birthday, in Medora, ND, also emphasizing digital access to records instead of an on-site research library.
Spokesperson Matt Briney said the library has been working with Microsoft to create a chatbot for the museum’s website that will help researchers find digital copies of the president’s records.
The center partnered with Dickinson State University to digitize more than 120,000 items from 18 institutions.
“A high school student in rural Texas now has access to material a Harvard Ph.D. couldn’t have assembled 20 years ago,” Briney said in an email.
What do visitors to these presidential centers lose when the archives are no longer stored on site? Not much, according to researchers. They say the shift to digital archives makes research more convenient for them, although visiting presidential centers can give them a greater sense of the more intangible qualities and interests of their subjects. For example, the Theodore Roosevelt museum sits in the North Dakota badlands, where Roosevelt lived for two years after his wife and mother died in 1884 and visited frequently afterward. The physical experience of being there isn’t something one could replicate in a digital archive.
What the future holds
There are few signs that future presidential centers for Joe Biden and Donald Trump will have on-site research libraries. Biden has chosen Delaware as the site for his, but that project is still in early planning and fundraising stages.
Trump’s supporters are eyeing a Miami location for his center. But the Justice Department issued a memo in early April arguing that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional and the president doesn’t have to continue complying with it, casting doubt on whether Trump would offer up any archives for public viewing.
The DOJ opinion faced a federal court challenge within days of being published. The American Historical Association and American Oversight, a nonprofit that promotes government transparency, have sued the Trump administration, seeking to make sure that it abides by established federal law and doesn’t destroy records.
“This case is about the preservation of records that document our nation’s history, and whether the American people are able to access and learn from that history,” the plaintiffs state in the opening line of their complaint.
If you remove research libraries from the design of future presidential centers, are visitors left with anything more than an expensive vanity project? Yes, according to researchers and other experts.
These centers can offer chances to learn about US history or leadership for people who can’t visit Washington, DC. That can include learning more about the role first ladies play or hearing from the president himself. Ronald Reagan’s museum offers talks from a hologram of the former president.
The centers also give visitors — particularly those who didn’t live through the presidency in question — a more complete picture of the president. Perry noted that JFK’s museum teaches about the Cold War and how Kennedy founded the Peace Corps. To younger generations, that makes him more than just the president who was assassinated in Dallas, she noted.
Many centers do charity work or offer places for community meetings, a big emphasis with Obama’s center, noted John Bridgeland, the founder and CEO of More Perfect, an alliance of existing presidential centers.
Bridgeland said he sees these centers as more than research sites — rather, they’re “civic institutions that knit communities together.”
“They’re designed to light a civic spark, to remind each of us, particularly the young people, that they can make a difference in their communities and countries,” Bridgeland said.