Team of Five by Kate Andersen Brower

Author:Kate Andersen Brower
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

OBAMA’S CONTROVERSIAL LIBRARY

The reason Barack Obama spends a significant amount of time raising money for his library is simple: presidential libraries cost astronomical sums to build. But donors can begin giving money while a president is in office, and while most libraries disclose some of their donors, there is no requirement for them to reveal that information. The Obama Foundation lists its donors, but the sizes of their donations are given in ranges. Almost seventy donors, some well known, like the Oprah Winfrey Charitable Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, have donated more than $1 million each. Many presidents make decisions that seem tied to raising money for their libraries and the preservation of their all-important legacies. Clinton, who pardoned Marc Rich, whose ex-wife made a hefty contribution to his library, is not an outlier. In 1993, Edwin Cox Jr., who had been convicted of bank fraud, was pardoned by George H. W. Bush, who later received hundreds of thousands of dollars for his library from Cox’s father, a wealthy GOP donor.

Presidential libraries preserve the history of each president, both as museums and as research facilities. The presidential library system began when FDR donated his papers to the federal government and started building a library close to his home in Hyde Park, New York, while he was still in office. The library is located in a picturesque setting high above the Hudson River. It is modest compared with the giant behemoths of Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43. Libraries are built with private funds raised by the president’s foundation. Like the dollar figures on the speaking circuit, the price tag to build a presidential library has surged. Once presidential libraries are complete, the keys are handed over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), staffed by the government. But Barack Obama’s library will not be a library at all, it will not hold any of Obama’s presidential records, and it will not be run by NARA. The enormous four-building “working center for citizenship” will be built on nineteen acres on the South Side of Chicago, and it will be more like an urban center, complete with a gym and a recording studio, than a traditional quiet academic setting. The Obama Foundation will run the museum.

In addition to the recording studio, Obama’s presidential center will include a 235-foot-high museum tower and a sledding hill, and it will cost an estimated $500 million. Its construction is being met with complaints from the Chicago neighborhood in which it is being built as critics voice their concern that the center will displace residents. Another point of contention: the Obama Foundation plans to do something no other library has done and digitize the more than thirty million pages of unclassified paper records from his administration, including more than 275 million emails and more than three million digital photographs, a process that will take years and years. Presidential historians are concerned that this won’t have the stated effect of democratizing the records

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