Obama’s narcissism gets its monument

There will be no cables, no memoranda or manuscripts, no official records of the presidency it’s designed to celebrate. The Barack Obama Presidential Center will not be a historical archive, scholarly resource, or even museum, so much as a vast, 33-acre monument to Obama, spread over multiple structures and a manicured landscape.

Most startling of all, the unclassified papers of the Obama administration, the ostensible purpose of any presidential library, will repose not in Chicago but in a distant federal warehouse, digitized for online access but otherwise inconvenient and inaccessible.

Presidential libraries are many things.

They’re repositories of the official papers and, in many cases, the personal archives and artifacts of our nation’s chief executives, as well as those of their families, friends, and colleagues in public service. And as the name would suggest, they are also home to vast collections of books, articles, dissertations, monographs, and journals about their subject or the presidency in general. They’re a scholar’s dream for historians, researchers, and students alike. If you’re seeking to understand, say, Harry S. Truman’s diplomacy or Ronald Reagan’s life before politics, a journey to Independence, Mo., or Simi Valley, Calif., is probably obligatory.

In recent decades, they’ve expanded their purview. Since the advent of Jimmy Carter’s eponymous center in Atlanta, they double as the site of think tanks, foundations, or institutes intended to continue the public work of retired or deceased presidents. Some are located at birthplaces or boyhood homes, which are of interest in themselves, or on college campuses, where their presence may evoke mixed sentiments. They are conference centers, ceremonial and mortuary sites, and, above all, tourist destinations featuring well-stocked museums, rotating exhibitions, troops of visiting schoolchildren, and capacious gift shops.

At the John F. Kennedy library alongside Boston Harbor, you can see a replica of his Oval Office, complete with rocking chair, and at the Reagan library in sunny Southern California, there’s a two-story fragment of the Berlin Wall on an outside terrace.

By contrast, at the forthcoming Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, for which ground will be broken later this year, things will be quite different. To begin with, it is the Obama “center” and not the Obama “library” because it is not, in fact, a library at all: There will be no books, no presidential papers or documents, nor printed matter of any kind related to the Obama presidency, except for, presumably, what’s on sale at the gift shop.

There will be no cables, no memoranda or manuscripts, no official records of the presidency it’s designed to celebrate. The Barack Obama Presidential Center will not be a historical archive, scholarly resource, or even museum, so much as a vast, 33-acre monument to Obama, spread over multiple structures and a manicured landscape.

Most startling of all, the unclassified papers of the Obama administration, the ostensible purpose of any presidential library, will repose not in Chicago but in a distant federal warehouse, digitized for online access but otherwise inconvenient and inaccessible. This particular feature has not gone down so well among historians, who are feeling the sting of unrequited affection. Of course, the admiration of the chattering classes for Obama was never quite so high as the 44th president’s regard for himself, but the grandiosity and essential philistinism of the center, not to mention its offhand insult to the life of the mind, does remind us yet again that our erstwhile president’s status as intellectual in chief was wishful thinking at best.

“Everybody is still calling it a presidential library,” complained the former director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt library to the New York Times, “but it’s not.” Nor, for that matter, will it be a federal installation like its precursors. The center will not be owned and administered by the National Archives or National Park Service but instead by the Obama Foundation, a lavishly funded, closely held entity devoted not to history or scholarly inquiry but rather the veneration of Barack Obama.

In that sense, the center succeeds in its purpose. Visitors will marvel at its cathedral-style design and layout and two-story “event space” with its nearby winter garden. The hub of the campus will be a misshapen, 235-foot-high cube-tower containing not only a “working center for citizenship,” as yet undefined, but also spacious meeting facilities, grandiose halls, and certain luxury features, including a state-of-the-art recording studio and a fully equipped athletic center, that might not have occurred to previous presidents. And, of course, no books.

Pilgrims are welcome, inquirers not so much.

To be sure, presidential libraries reflect their particular presidents. The Roosevelt library, designed by FDR himself, is surprisingly modest in size and has a kind of homely elegance. The Lyndon B. Johnson library is a brutalist monolith looming over the Austin, Texas, landscape. The Dwight D. Eisenhower library is a resolutely plain neoclassical structure, and the chapel where Ike is buried is called not a chapel, but rather the Place of Meditation.

The growth of the modern presidency is reflected as well. The libraries of Kennedy and Gerald R. Ford, neither of whom served a full term in the White House, are substantially larger than the library of Roosevelt, who was elected to four terms.

[Also read: Obama delivers speech to Boeing after $10M donation made to his presidential center]

Prior to FDR, presidential papers sometimes departed from Washington with each president, there to be scattered in various directions or, on occasion, lost. Some, but not all, presidents bequeathed their papers to the Library of Congress — where, since 1978, official documents are supposed to reside — while Theodore Roosevelt’s huge, private archive was donated to Harvard, his alma mater.

It was his cousin Franklin’s idea, in the late 1930s, to assemble all the FDR papers and archives and memorabilia, public and private, into one privately financed repository on the grounds of his family’s homestead in Hyde Park, N.Y., and leave it all to be jointly administered by the National Archives and the park service. It was a good idea at the time, and as anyone who has ever visited the FDR home and library in the Hudson Valley can attest, it remains a good idea. Scholars of the New Deal or the Second World War are indebted to its vast resources and are rewarded equally with admirers of Roosevelt, American history buffs, and random visitors.

Indeed, it is shocking to modern sensibilities to reflect that the personal effects and residences of such historic eminences as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or James Madison should ever have been scattered, sold for debt, or fallen into disrepair and neglect, only to be rescued by private philanthropy. In the absence of a common religion and mortuary relics and divine pilgrimage sites, we Americans take comfort in visiting the shrines and examining the remnants of our secular saints. We don’t have Chartres Cathedral, but we do have Grant’s tomb.

But of course, not all presidents are equal in the eyes of history, and no president, not even Washington or Abraham Lincoln, has yet served who is universally admired or respected, much less revered. Thus, the passage of time and the accumulation of libraries across the landscape, as well as the partisan divide, have led to second thoughts, even before the announcement of Obama’s center to himself.

The printed record of modern administrations is voluminous, almost beyond imagining, and so requires a repository roughly equivalent in size to Scrooge McDuck’s money bin or one of the lesser pyramids. Added to this is the inevitable element of politics, especially where Republicans are concerned. Duke University School of Law refused to countenance a library of its most famous graduate, Richard Nixon, on campus. Even George W. Bush’s eventual location at his wife’s alma mater, Southern Methodist University, was not without controversy.

Moreover, presidents are now, of necessity, obliged to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in private funds to build and endow their library/museums, which, in due course, become federal property. This, in turn, leads to conflict between the archival instinct to treat the libraries as scholarly resources, where the evidence is assembled en masse in the service of history’s judgment, and the natural desire of politicians to build monuments to themselves.

The question, as always, is to what extent public funds should be expended to subsidize points of view and to what extent the government may separate history from advocacy or hero worship.

Sufficient separation is probably impossible. You’re not likely to hear discouraging words about Bill Clinton at the Clinton library, which is federal property, any more than visitors expect harsh criticism of George Washington at Mount Vernon, which is privately owned. It is entirely possible that, a century from now, the Clinton library may offer a more nuanced view of the 42nd president than at the present moment when Clinton is very much with us.

At the Barack Obama Presidential Center, the possibility of any such future reconsideration will be nil. Ever fond of flouting the norm, Obama’s center will have no transition from private to public, meaning the Obama-authorized version of his presidency will be permanent. The reflection Obama sees in the pool of Narcissus will, like Mount Rushmore, be one etched in proverbial stone, visible for miles.

Moreover, unlike many of his immediate predecessors, Obama had the comparative luxury of picking and choosing among innumerable cities and universities that eagerly sought his archival presence. In the end, Chicago was the fortunate, and likely inevitable, choice. Considerably more accessible than his birthplace of Honolulu, and offering more available acreage than, say, the campuses of Harvard or Columbia, Chicago is where Obama may be said to have put down roots, married and raised a family, and embarked on the remarkably smooth path that led to the White House.

It is worth noting, however, that not even Obama has been immune to the obstacles that often complicate such projects, including currently pending lawsuits. The Barack Obama Presidential Center, with its monstrous obelisk, adjoining parking garages, and various gimmicks — there’s even a planned sledding hill — will dominate considerable acreage of Chicago’s Jackson Park, located adjacent to a low-rise residential neighborhood in the city’s South Side. Local activists, including faculty at the nearby University of Chicago where Obama once taught, have complained that the center is destined to overwhelm its South Side environment and, as a product of high ambition and multimillion-dollar fundraising, is “an object-lesson in mistakes of the past.”

Which may well be true. The Obama center is certainly a throwback in comparison to more recent specimens. The Nixon library in California, for example, is a much smaller, considerably more accessible structure built in harmony with Nixon’s nearby boyhood home. Even the two Bush libraries in Texas and the Clinton library in Arkansas were designed not to dominate but to blend with their respective environments.

Regardless, many long-standing arguments about the value and purpose of presidential libraries have been turned upside down or rendered absurd in the face of such stark narcissism. Since the Barack Obama Presidential Center is primarily designed as an Obama theme park with exercise facilities and convenient parking but no paper trail to follow and, it bears repeating, no books, it’s essentially the opposite of what a presidential center ought to be. And it is so intentionally.

Which, in turn, means no historian or scholar, no student or serious journalist, would have reason to visit, except, of course, to pray at the altar of Barack Obama and, perhaps, perspire at the athletic center.

Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at the Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.