Rendezvous with Oblivion by Thomas Frank

Author:Thomas Frank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

The Animatronic Presidency

It is a good thing that politicians concern themselves with their legacy and the scrutiny of generations to come. In fact, I wish they worried about it more; I wish they constantly asked themselves and their advisers what the nation’s future scholars will make of their decisions. It would be a robust check on an otherwise too-powerful office, where the decision to drop a bomb or render a suspect is attended by few other consequences.

Unfortunately, courting historical analysis is not the same thing as building presidential libraries, the museums that are the main object of our leaders’ “legacy” projects. They aren’t even in the same category, really. When I visited three of the most recent of these library/museums a while back—the William J. Clinton Presidential Center plus two museums commemorating the administrations of men named George Bush—I found them to be, by and large, institutions of bald propaganda, buildings on which hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to cast, literally in stone, a given individual’s personal war with reality.

All of the presidential museums I reference had certain basic things in common. Each contains a replica of the Oval Office as it was decorated when the museum’s subject worked there. Each displays lots of formal White House dinner settings and gifts the president received from foreign leaders. Two of the three feature a presidential limousine or some other mode of official conveyance. And their object is always the same: to make you, the visitor, love and esteem the politician in question.

This is closer to advertising than it is to scholarship. And of course it can be persuasive. All three museums I visited were successful, to a certain degree, at convincing me to admire their subjects. I walked into each as the most skeptical possible visitor, ready to find fault and argue with the text. I didn’t particularly like any of the three presidents in question, although I voted for Bill Clinton and I once gave a lecture at the University of Arkansas’s nearby Clinton School of Public Service. But I left all three of these presidential shrines thinking the same thing of the man in question: Dang, he sure seems like a good guy. Despite all his screwups, he must have meant well.

Sometimes this warm feeling would stick to me all the way back to my hotel room, where I would finally wash it away with a cold six-pack.

* * *

Another thing these presidential libraries have in common is that they soft-pedal those moments of partisan rancor known as elections. Yes, each of them has lots of campaign buttons and the stupid sloganeering memorabilia you can collect at party conventions, but usually this stuff is sequestered in a single room or display case with little more explanation than a few commonplaces quoted from a campaign book. The implication is that no president is proud of what he did to get people to vote for him. The less said about elections, the better. Now, on to the important

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