Controversy Arises Over President Bush's Proposed Archive Site

DAVID ALSOBROOK, William J. Clinton Presidential Library: Well, Ray, first of all, thank you very much for letting me join your panel tonight from Little Rock. I was thinking about this a few weeks ago. And I really think that FDR, if he could be with us here tonight, I think he would really be both shocked and very pleased to see how far presidential libraries have come since he established the first one in the late 1930s, early 1940s.

But the presidential libraries, as Richard mentioned, have come a long way from that first FDR library, which was essentially an archival facility with a few curio cabinets of artifacts documenting FDR's public career.

We've really come a long way, because now a presidential library reaches out with very sophisticated educational programs for K through 12, in our case, as well as for college students. We also have a number of public programs here that I'm sure FDR would have never deemed of. So we have come light years since that first presidential library was built at Hyde Park in the early 1940s.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, David Alsobrook, President Clinton has been out of office for just over six years now. If I go to Little Rock, can I see everything that's in the archival collection?

DAVID ALSOBROOK: No, Ray, you can only see a small percentage of the 80 million pages of documents that we have. We have about 2 million photographs, as well, and we have about 83,000 museum artifacts.

You'll only be able to see a small portion of the presidential records, because we've only been working on those since 2001. Everything now that you want to use in your research, you'll have to file a Freedom of Information Act request for it.

If someone has already filed that request on that same topic, that material obviously has been opened. But you will only be able to see a very small percentage of the presidential records.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, Michael Beschloss, you actually visit these places to work and tap into those collections. In the 20 years since the Presidential Libraries Act of 1986, have they evolved into useful places for people who want to research and write history?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS, Presidential Historian: Sure. I and Richard would be dead without them, so they're vital to people who are writing history and biography.

But, you know, the interesting thing, Ray, is how this happened really almost by accident, because the two libraries that began with presidents who were still living were the Harry Truman Library and the Dwight Eisenhower Library, and these were essentially just archives. They were really just for scholars with a little museum, and that was because these ex-presidents were old. Truman was 68 when he retired. Eisenhower was 70.

Kennedy, had he lived and served two terms, expected to come out of the presidency at the age of 51. So he wanted to have not only this repository, but also to have a public policy center at Harvard that would sort of embody Kennedy's idea, which was to bring the worlds of action and ideas closer together.

And then, when Johnson retired, 1969, he wanted to outdo Kennedy, so he did the same thing. And one result has been that, as good as the libraries are in terms of research, each one has almost tried to outdo the last one, in terms of taking on other things that were very different from the original.

RAY SUAREZ: So they're still in the process of becoming, you're saying?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: Evolving all the time. And I agree with Richard: There is a dynamism when a library is at a university. There's an element there that you probably don't get when you have -- as good as the Eisenhower library, for instance, is, out in Kansas, one of the many libraries that Richard has been the director of, it does give you a sense of how Eisenhower grew up, but probably does not have the kind of dynamism that another library would have, probably at an urban university.

RICHARD NORTON SMITH: Yes, that's a great question. I'll put -- Richard Nixon and this, as in so much else, is sui generis. You know, up until Richard Nixon, basically the papers belonged to a president.

Chester Arthur put his in a trash can two days before he died and set fire to them. George Washington's were distributed among autograph-seekers 200 years ago.

The fact is, now the presidential library system mandates that all this material be preserved, it all be collected, that it is the property of the people of the United States of America.

The buildings are built with privately raised funds. Every library has a foundation that, first of all, funds the construction of the building, and then funds research, and public programs, and scholarly programs, and the like. They then on opening day are turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency that pays for the staff, pays for the light bill, pays for support.

For whatever it's worth, I think this debate is less about the evolution of the presidential library and the evolution of what it's like to be an ex-president.

Fifty years ago this summer, Herbert Hoover joined Harry Truman, his unlikely friend, in dedicating the Truman Library. And afterwards, an admirer in the crowd went up and said, "Mr. President, what do you do all day?" And he said, "Madam, former presidents spend their days taking pills and dedicating libraries." It wasn't true then, and it's much less true now.

Former presidents, like the rest of us, are living longer. They sometimes leave office involuntarily at a relatively early age. This really began with Jimmy Carter, 20 years ago, who decided that, as an ex-president, there were a lot of causes that were very close to his heart that he wanted to pursue.

And I think, even though President Carter right now is engulfed in a controversy about his views on the Middle East, if you went to Emory University or the city of Atlanta and said, "Has the Carter Center on balance been a boon to the cultural and academic life of these places?" You'd find very little disagreement.