Carolyn Lyons 

All the presidents’ libraries

As America gears up for its midterm elections, Carolyn Lyons gets an insight into the lives and politics of two of its past leaders at their presidential libraries in California
  
  

Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California
Air Force One on display at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California Photograph: J Emilio Flores/Corbis Photograph: J Emilio Flores/Corbis

Would you fly all the way to Los Angeles in order to go to the library? It may sound crazy but we're not talking about borrowing a book. Ronald Reagan's and Richard Nixon's presidential libraries are both within a short drive of Los Angeles.

There are 12 presidential libraries in total (George W Bush's, which is due to open in 2103, will be the thirteenth). Every former president since Franklin D Roosevelt has built one, and they're scattered across the US. Nothing like your local library with its kiddies' corner, dog-eared magazines and overdue fines, these little-known institutions are - even to Americans - a hybrid of historical archive (they hold that president's papers) and public museums that tell the story of the man and his times.

"To a foreign visitor, they offer a unique way to see America," says Timothy Naftali, director of the Nixon library. "Each one is different. Each reflects choices made by the president himself, from its location to the initial contents of the museum. This is where the president wanted to be remembered and the displays reflect how he wanted to be remembered."

I thought of what Naftali had told me as I drove up a bare hillside in the Simi Valley, an hour north of LA, on a hot morning. Reagan saw himself as a man of the American West and the restorer of American greatness: his slogan was, "It's morning in America again." His library looks suitably imperial: a sprawling, Spanish mission-style complex with red-tile roof and rustic beams occupying a 100-acre hilltop site with views across avocado farms and undeveloped sierra all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

A topiary elephant (symbol of the Republican Party) raises its trunk in gardens that are a replica of the White House south lawn. Reagan's grave site is a huge boulder of polished stone. A hundred yards away a much more humble concrete slab turns out to be a slice of the Berlin Wall. Down some stairs, the so-called Peace Plaza is home to an F14 Tomcat fighter jet - typical of Reagan too.

Much of the museum was being renovated when I visited. It reopens on 5 February, when "visitors will be given the opportunity to role play as they ... take the oath of office on inauguration day, deliver some of president Reagan's famous speeches and step inside a Ronald Reagan Warner Bros movie". But I was able to tour the full-scale replica of the Oval Office and listen to Reagan's mellifluous voice (he began as a radio announcer) narrating his version of the Cold War and claiming that his invasion of Grenada blunted the communist drive to world domination.

Housed in a special $32m pavilion with a 60ft glass hangar wall, the museum's pièce de resistance is a complete Boeing 707 - the old Air Force One. In 2003, "Operation Homeward Bound" disassembled the whole plane and trucked it by night to Simi Valley, where Boeing engineers reassembled it. I had my picture taken giving a first lady wave on the aircraft steps ($11.95 for a copy) before touring the interior - surprisingly cramped now that we're used to jumbo jets. Reagan's jacket still hangs in his private cabin. I noted that the press seats were at the back, near the officer carrying the "football", the nuclear trigger that accompanies a president everywhere.

Under one of the Boeing's great wings is the original Irish pub from Ballyporeen that the Reagans once visited. It, too, was shipped to California and reassembled, and nowadays serves beer only at special events. It's a strange juxtaposition of modern technology, Irish whimsy and Californian temperance.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and 89-year-old Nancy Reagan were at the library the same morning I was. The Gubernator and The Iron Butterfly had come to sign new state laws creating Ronald Reagan Day and launching 2011 Reagan centennial celebrations. Nancy Reagan, tiny in a yellow trouser-suit, shuffled in clinging to Schwarzenegger, who has become stiffer and more robotic with age, like his most famous role. Both of them looked more like pieces of living history than real people, and the "signing" was a fake - the bills had already been signed - staged for the TV cameras. The museum made the perfect setting for such politics as pure theatre.

A few days later, I drove out of LA in the opposite direction. Roaring freeways took me south and east through the industrial suburbs to Yorba Linda. When Richard Nixon was born here, the land was citrus groves. Nixon saw himself as a common man, though he could never decide whether his was a success story of a poor man who made it to the top, or the tragic story of a poor man sneered at and conspired against by rich, fancily educated liberals. His memorial is modest as these architectural ego-trips go (it cost $25m in 1990, compared with Reagan's $60m in 1991). It's oddly touching because it includes Nixon's birthplace - a small, austere clapboard Quaker farmhouse that his father built by hand.

One of the most controversial of all US Presidents, Nixon was the only one to resign, in disgrace, in 1974, following the Watergate scandal. If Reagan has Air Force One, Nixon's library has Army One, the helicopter Tricky Dick rode on that fateful day he left the White House for the last time.

In the museum shop they have Nixon's face as a shower head ($35), and numerous items, from lip balm to playing cards, decorated with the iconic image of Nixon entertaining Elvis at the White House.

As for the museum itself, it's very well done. The cars, the clothes, the atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s are all here, along with the great political controversies like the Alger Hiss case and the Kennedy-Nixon TV debates (the first presidential debates held on television). Part of the first debate plays on a TV placed in a 1960s-style living room. The text of a 1969 speech by Nixon after an oil spill off Santa Barbara could have been made word for word by Obama about BP and the Gulf.

More creepy is the Hall of World Leaders, a surreal group of models of Churchill, De Gaulle, Golda Meir and others. Personally selected by Nixon, the papier-mâché figures were dressed in real clothes then spray-painted to look like bronze. They reveal a Nixon who was always reaching after his idea of "greatness", something that never bothered the supremely self-confident Reagan.

But what about Watergate? The answer is nothing, for now. The Watergate exhibit is "under (re)construction" - though you can listen to the 18-and-a-half minute "gap" on the crucial Watergate tape. Director Naftali took down the original exhibit (a friend who saw it says it dismissed Watergate as a conspiracy by Nixon's enemies) and he's been wrangling with the Nixon old guard over exactly what will replace it.

The running of presidential libraries is split between private foundations, formed by an ex-president's wealthy friends and supporters, and the US government. The foundations pay to build the libraries, and the US government administers them through the National Archives. Naftali says: "The foundations have as their mission presenting the positive legacy of the president. But the government is non-partisan and our mission is learning and discovery."

At best, that leads to creative tension. In Nixon's case, his library opened without a collection, after the US Congress impounded Nixon's papers. The library was run entirely privately until the National Archives finally took it over in 2006, hired Naftali to sort it out, built a new vault and shipped the Nixon records here from Washington (46m pages of documents, 2m feet of film, 300,000 still photographs). The original 3,700 hours of tapes remain in the capital with their own archivists.

Naftali says the new Watergate display will be up "definitely by the end of the year", but I wasn't sorry to miss it. Walking through a Nixon library where some of the most significant history of the 1960s is still being fought over - there are blank panels concerning Vietnam also - and where the final act in his career is represented by an empty room felt somehow appropriate.

Further information

Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, 40 Presidential Drive, Simi Valley, CA. Open daily $12. reaganlibrary.com

Nixon Library, 18001 Yorba Linda Blvd, Yorba Linda, CA.
Open daily – admission $9.95. nixonlibrary.gov/nixonlibraryfoundation.org (Museum cafe is very small so best to eat just up the road at Mimi's Cafe, 18342 Imperial HWY. mimiscafe.com)

• Anyone can research the archives at these libraries for free, but in practise you should make an appointment in advance (archives.gov/presidential_libraries ).

• George W Bush Library, the 13th presidential library, will open in 2013 at South Methodist University close to Dallas, Texas. georgewbushlibrary.gov.

• For a full list of the libraries see archives.gov/presidential-libraries/visit/.

 

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