Benjamin Hufbauer, a professor at the University of Louisville, is the author of the book Presidential Temples.

It’s that time again. Two years after George W. Bush dedicated his $500-million Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, President Obama reportedly plans to announce, with considerable fanfare, the site of his own (likely even more expensive) library. Perhaps we should be asking ourselves: Why do all American presidents now get to create these colossal temples of spin dedicated to themselves that, although mostly built with privately-raised money, are largely run by the federal government? Presidential libraries are in some ways like Stephen Colbert’s old show—often surreal in their megalomaniacal self-promotion—but unlike the Colbert Report there’s no irony at these shrines. At the April 24, 2013 dedication of his library, George W. Bush declared that “this beautiful building has my name above the door, but it belongs to you.” Yet should we be grateful?

The Bush library’s opening was, of course, attended by every living ex-president and former first lady (Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barbara and George Bush, Sr.), as well as President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. When President Clinton spoke, he pricked Bush’s bubble by saying that the Bush Library was just “the latest, grandest example of the eternal struggle of former presidents to rewrite history.”


Parallels from the ancient world came to mind, like the pyramids and temples of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt that told glorified versions of their reigns, as well as the Roman Empire’s Imperial Cult, which made most emperors gods for political worship. Roman emperors could have an exaggerated list of “things achieved” engraved in stone, written with the help of their advisors. These ancient examples are prequels to the self-promoting museums in presidential libraries, which are largely curated by the former presidents themselves. The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin has, as Ada Louis Huxtable wrote, "a Pharaonic air of permanence" that "puts Mr. Johnson in the same class as some Popes and Kings who were equally receptive clients for architects with equally large ideas."

For many, presidential libraries are just a fact of American political life, but what are their deeper meanings? For instance, can the architecture of a presidential library reveal the personality of a president? And how have presidential libraries been connected to the use and abuse of history? Digging deeper, the larger issue for almost all presidential libraries is what historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called “ the imperial presidency.”

Presidential libraries don’t just commemorate individual presidents, they also promote an expansive view of presidential power—while usually ignoring excesses, mistakes, and abuses. It’s not a coincidence that the federal presidential library was invented by Franklin Roosevelt, identified by Schlesinger as the first modern “imperial president.”

FDR helped design the first federal presidential library in a Dutch Colonial style on his estate at Hyde Park, New York, which opened in 1941. In creating his library, Roosevelt looked to Fremont, Ohio, for what was actually the first presidential library before Roosevelt got the federal government involved. The Rutherford B. Hayes Library was founded to honor that late-19th century president, but was run without federal funding.

The Roosevelt Library was modest in size compared with succeeding presidential libraries (although it’s since been expanded), but, by creating an institution with an archive for all of the records relating to his life, as well as a popular history museum that has told FDR’s story to millions, Roosevelt changed presidential commemoration. Previous presidents would only have monuments built in their honor decades after they died. The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in 1922, more than 50 years after Lincoln’s death. And many presidents before Roosevelt didn’t get a grand national monument.

Roosevelt was able to engineer this shift in presidential commemoration for several reasons, including how he had reimagined and enlarged presidential power in the 1930s, and, just as importantly, because of the loss of many presidential records since the time of Washington. The private ownership of presidential papers was a tradition started when George Washington, on his retirement, shipped all of his official as well as personal documents to Mount Vernon. After Washington’s death, his papers were left to his nephew, who confessed that they were “extensively mutilated by rats.”

The remains of Washington’s papers, like the remains of many presidential papers, were eventually purchased by the Library of Congress, but only after some were lost forever. Even the presidential records that found their way to the Library of Congress sometimes had unusual restrictions placed on them by relatives. For instance, many of Abraham Lincoln’s papers were unavailable to historians until 1947. If we have to wait until 80 years after a president’s death to get at the records, or whatever is left of them, how are we to learn from our own history?

FDR knew this, and also knew that every new government program needs beneficiaries who will lend political support. To create his presidential library, Roosevelt wooed professional historians by saying that his library would be part of the recently created National Archives, and would make available to historians all of his records as soon as possible.

But a secret memo that FDR wrote in 1943 makes clear that he wanted all of the most sensitive records sealed away. After Roosevelt’s death, however, a judge ruled that FDR’s public statements took precedence. Now any of us can go into the Roosevelt Library’s archive and, with the help of professional archivists, look at presidential records, as well as personal letters, that FDR thought nobody outside of his family and political advisors should see. The understanding of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt has been immeasurably enriched as a result. The recent Roosevelt documentary by Ken Burns was made possible in large part by open access to records at the Roosevelt Library.

The second part of the presidential library was a museum for tourists, and FDR looked forward to the museum serving “an appalling number of sightseers.” Initially the museum was filled with relics, from his childhood clothes to mementoes of his presidency, including a paper maché portrait of Roosevelt as an Egyptian sphinx.

At the time, some objected to FDR’s seemingly narcissistic creation of a monument to himself. One newspaper accused Roosevelt of wanting a “Yankee Pyramid,” while a member of Congress said that “only an egocentric maniac would have the nerve to ask” for a presidential library. An editorial comic from the Chicago Tribune even pictured FDR as Santa Claus putting a giant present into his own stocking, saying, “Won’t he be surprised—Bless His Heart.”

The Roosevelt Library cost about $7 million in today’s money, which was raised from FDR’s supporters. Since Roosevelt, almost all presidents build their own monuments with private money (although at times presidential libraries have been expanded with federal money), and then the government takes over ownership, and pays to staff and fund the libraries. It costs about $70 million a year to run the now 13 presidential libraries.

Roosevelt was buried next to his library in 1945, and when Eleanor Roosevelt died 17 years later she was buried next to him. Several other presidents and first ladies are also buried at presidential libraries. In 2004, when Ronald Reagan died, there was live TV coverage of his casket being driven up the mountain-side in Simi Valley, California, to the Reagan Presidential Library, for a cinematic burial at sunset.

These ceremonies help make presidential libraries part of what has been called the “ civil religion” of the United States. The term civil religion, first used by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, has been used by historians to describe our political veneration for secular “saints,” like George Washington, sacred sites, like the Lincoln Memorial, and for sacred objects, like the Declaration of Independence, and rituals, like the singing of the National Anthem. Presidential libraries are part of this civil religion, sites where tourist pilgrimages can be made to see relics and reconstructions that elevate presidents who, although lesser than Lincoln and Washington, are still supposed to be worthy of some degree of patriotic veneration.

After Roosevelt, the presidential library seemed natural and necessary to FDR’s successors. Harry S. Truman built in Independence, Missouri, a library that exceeded FDR’s, with the facade echoing Queen Hatshepsut’s temple in Egypt. As tourists enter the Truman Library, which opened in 1957, they see American artist Thomas Hart Benton’s large mural Independence and the Opening of the West, which frames the entry to the Library's most popular attraction, a 94 percent-scale replica of the Oval Office.

The mural and Oval Office replica together create a linked message about the settlement of the West in the 19th century, as well as about presidential leadership in the nuclear age. During the era shown in the mural—from the 1840s to the 1860s—Independence was a supply station for American settlers. The painting shows how Truman’s future hometown helped the United States to achieve its “manifest destiny.” In the mural’s center, armed white men prepare to defend the women and children of their camp from two approaching Native Americans.

Western movies and TV programs, which were popular in the 1950s, influenced Benton’s Independence and the Opening of the West. Westerns during the early Cold War recast international tensions into a heroic past. As historian Stanley Corkin has written, “the Western was well-suited to convey…[the] rationales for postwar U.S. foreign policy, including [those]….that guided the Truman administration.” In other words, just as settlers secured the frontier, the mural seemed to imply, President Truman and NATO helped secure the world against the Soviet Union.

President Truman’s contributions to the early Civil Rights movement are also seen in the mural. The two prominent African-American blacksmiths refer to a 19th century African-American named Hiram Young, a free black man who was the most sought after wagon-maker in Independence. President Truman, with his Executive Orders to desegregate the Armed Forces and to guarantee fair civil-service employment, made more significant progress up to that time on civil rights than any president since Lincoln.

Benton’s painting presents a microcosm of 19th century American society, and prepares tourists for the Oval Office replica just beyond. As they enter, visitors stand inside the curved walls of the Oval Office where they see Truman’s desk next to the American flag and the President’s flag. The globe that General Eisenhower gave to Truman at the end of World War II is at the other end of the room, showing the importance of America’s global role.

And then, Truman's recorded voice is played through hidden speakers in the Oval Office replica:

I am glad you have come to this historical institution. You are very welcome. This is Harry S. Truman speaking. This room is an exact reproduction of the Presidential Office in the West Wing of the White House, as it was in the early 1950s. The furniture, the rug, and the drapes are duplicates of those in use at the White House when I was president of the United States.

One afternoon when I was visiting the replica, a United States Marine and his family entered. As Truman's voice described the reproduction of his Oval Office, a boy about eight years old told his father, "That's Harry Truman!" But his father replied, "That’s not the president, son. That's an actor." In the midst of the largest collection of Truman materials and displays in the world, the sense that Truman's real recorded voice would instead be an actor's impersonation offered an insight. In presidential libraries, where simulations as well as real history are mixed, historical “truth” is disrupted as much as it is reinforced.

It is perhaps noteworthy that the Truman Library’s Oval Office replica opened just two years after the first Disneyland in California. As my mentor, architectural historian Reyner Banham, once wrote, "Disneyland was a set for a film that was never ever going to be made, except in the mind of the visitor”—and this is essentially the appeal of an Oval Office replica. It is an empty set for tourists to visualize cinematic narratives of presidential power.

The replica at the Truman Library was so effective at drawing tourists that in the following decades additional Oval Office replicas were built at the Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush libraries. Each library highlights the story of its president with copies of this room that are sprouting up across America like mushrooms.

President Kennedy introduced the next significant innovation for presidential libraries, by planning to affiliate his with his alma mater, Harvard University. After Kennedy’s death some at Harvard decided they didn’t like the idea of common tourists on their campus, since 99 percent of visitors to presidential libraries are tourists, and only one percent are researchers. New York Times architecture critic Ada Louis Huxtable humorously lampooned Harvard’s fear of "Goths overwhelming the intelligentsia." Harvard did establish the Kennedy School of Government, but the Kennedy Library itself was located at the University of Massachusetts, on a spectacular site overlooking Boston harbor.

The Kennedy Library was also the first to have a "starchitect," when Jacqueline Kennedy chose I.M. Pei — who later designed the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, as well as the expansion of the Louvre—to design her husband’s memorial. Originally, the Kennedy Library was going to be a large pyramid with the top cut off, representing JFK’s tragically truncated achievement, but eventually that plan was scrapped, and Pei reimagined it as the glass pyramid at the Louvre. Pei’s final design for the Kennedy Library is a futuristic glass, steel, and concrete edifice.

President Lyndon Johnson, with Lady Bird’s help, also hired a star architect for his monument to himself. Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill got LBJ’s orders to design “the best presidential library in the world.” This stark building, which is brutal and subtle at the same time, represents for some who knew him Johnson’s personality. In this photograph, LBJ and Lady Bird are seen standing before the 85-foot high building.

Lady Bird had told LBJ that the Oval Office replica was the top draw for tourists at the Truman Library, but Bunshaft resisted. And so, LBJ called him from the real Oval Office to demand a replica. The conversation, which took place on October 10, 1968, was secretly recorded by Johnson, who said:: “That’s one of the basic things! [The Oval Office] is gonna be remembered….a lot more than some book up there [on] a shelf….!” One employee told me that LBJ used his replica as his office sometimes, saying, “Johnson could emerge from the door behind his desk into the replica and surprise visitors, almost like the Wizard of Oz coming out from behind the curtains.”

Inside the Johnson Library the grandest space is called The Great Hall of Achievement. There is a spectacular display of some of the thousands of archival boxes filled with the 45-million or so pages of documents from Johnson’s career. In 1975, when Pulitzer-prize winning historian Robert A. Caro first walked into the building to start work on his acclaimed multi-volume biography of Johnson, he felt daunted. The Johnson Library is to a large degree a shrine to Johnson’s ego, and to the imperial presidency, but Caro’s massive and often disturbing biography has shown that the access to the historical record that this architecture symbolizes is real.

The most remarkable part of the building to me, which is not open to the public, is the private apartment for the Johnsons on the top floor. The Johnson suite is an elegant modernist space, with exquisite pieces of art on display. But it’s the chrome and marble bathroom that is the most unusual feature. Inside the large travertine shower are four industrial-strength showerheads, which are like those that Johnson had installed in his real White House bathroom. This shower perplexed his successor President Richard Nixon on his first day in the White House, because “the thing was like a fire hose; it almost knocked him down.” As Johnson showered in his library and then dried himself off, mirrors all over the walls and ceilings of the bathroom reflected back his image, multiplied.

Up until 1974, all presidential records were still private property. Although presidents starting with Roosevelt had voluntarily donated their papers to their libraries, they could still edit or destroy parts of their records. They didn’t do that in any significant way, but after President Nixon resigned from office because of the abuses of power collectively known as Watergate, Nixon intended to destroy many of his self-incriminating papers and recordings. Under this threat, Congress seized Nixon’s records, and then passed a law that made all future presidential records the property of the nation.

Some might wonder whether presidential libraries make much of a difference to a president’s reputation. The short answer is that they do. President Jimmy Carter’s reputation, for example, was tarnished when he left office in 1981. But as The New York Times put it in a nearly prescient headline in 1986: "Reshaped Carter Image Tied to Library Opening"—and today, Carter is one of the more respected former presidents.

It was Carter who first morphed the presidential library into a presidential center. The Carter Center, which is next to but administratively separate from the Carter Library and Museum in Atlanta, has been so effective at living up to its motto of "Waging Peace. Fighting Disease. Building Hope" that President Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize. And when President Ronald Reagan showered praise on Carter during the Carter Library’s dedication it also helped, just as President Obama’s words for George W. Bush at the Bush Library’s dedication—where Obama spoke of Mr. Bush’s “incredible strength and resolve,” and “his compassion and generosity”—seemingly gave a boost to Bush’s poll numbers. Presidential libraries help former presidents rise above partisanship, enhancing their reputations.

But most visitors to presidential libraries are not there to do research, but instead to make a visit to the museums. The exhibits in presidential libraries, not surprisingly, amount to giant campaign commercials in museum form when they first open. This is true for presidents from both parties. When the Johnson Library first opened in 1971, for instance, there was little in the museum about the ongoing Vietnam War, and instead there was praise for LBJ and his Great Society programs. As Newsweek wrote, “Inside the Library the visage of LBJ is as ubiquitous as Chairman Mao’s in Peking.” The Nixon Library not surprisingly originally whitewashed Watergate (although the Watergate exhibit was completely redone in recent years, and now has an accurate account overseen by historian Timothy Naftali), the Reagan Library originally ignored Iran-Contra (also fixed in recent years).

Clinton still puts his own spin on his scandals, while the new George W. Bush Library has bronzes of the family dogs, but the accounts found of our recent wars, hurricane Katrina, and the Great Recession don’t match those found in current history books used by high school students for the AP US History test. As the decades pass, and a president and his supporters pass away, usually the museums become somewhat more balanced and accurate. But it’s often about 40 to 50 years after a president leaves office before that happens, and there are no guarantees even then.

Presidential library museums can spin so much in part because they open decades before the records that would prove or disprove them are processed. The number of records generated by the Executive Branch has exploded in the last several decades, but there has been insufficient funding for the archivists who must process these records for release. It will apparently take up to 100 years to fully process and release the records of recent presidents.

As presidential libraries have evolved and grown they have become a better deal for presidents, but it’s not as clear that they are as good a deal for the public. Looking to the future, we can say, like the motto under the sculpture in front of the National Archives that “what is past is prologue.” In other words, presidential libraries are likely to become even more expensive, larger, and glitzier centers of spin in the future. Presidential libraries are likely to continue to remind us of the poem “Ozymandias” by Percy Shelley: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”