It's Friday June 30, the day of the week I pass along quotations relating to American political life -- lines intended to be uplifting or educational. Today's words of wisdom come from Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Eighty-three years ago today, Roosevelt took respite from the pressing duties of the presidency to dedicate a library in the New York town of Hyde Park. FDR was still dealing with an economy far worse than anything we've seen in this century -- even during our recent coronavirus pandemic -- and knew that the United States was being dragged inexorably into world war for the second time in less than 25 years. But the dedication ceremony was a nice diversion, for this wasn't just another provincial book repository: Roosevelt was commemorating the opening of his own library. And it was the first official presidential library, which is to say, the first operated by the National Archives.
After the searing end to Richard Nixon's presidency, Congress passed numerous statutes intended to curb the excesses -- past and future -- of the executive branch. An old axiom holds that bad facts make bad law, which came to be the consensus of many of the post-Watergate reforms. Nixon himself was the set of bad facts. But some of the corrections were problematic. The campaign finance requirements were thrown out by the courts or simply superseded by the two major political parties' inventive fundraising schemes. And the special prosecutor law, after years of being repeatedly abused, lapsed and was not renewed during Bill Clinton's presidency.
One of the laws that proved enduring, however, was the Presidential Records Act of 1978. Until then, presidential papers were considered the property of the nation's chief executive. The new law held that with the exception of purely personal materials, they belonged to the people of the United States, and that the National Archives would be their custodian.
Defenders of Donald Trump have pointed out that the intent of the law was never to imprison a president who erred on the side of keeping more documents than he should. But this is only half right. The law was prompted specifically by worries that Richard Nixon would destroy incriminating papers. So it was aimed at a president (or White House aides) who would seek to distort the historical record. It's not an academic concern, as we learned in 2003 when former Clinton administration National Security Adviser Sandy Berger stole classified documents relating to terrorism from the National Archives and destroyed them for reasons never fully understood. Presumably, there was embarrassing material Berger wanted forever hidden from public view.
At the same time, there is an obvious conflict of interest at the heart of the U.S. presidential libraries system. Because the presidents -- and, in most cases, their families and heirs -- are heavily involved in the design, fundraising, and operation of these institutions, the stories they tell tend toward a hagiographic version of history.
Yet, the libraries still manage to serve an important function and in our hyper-partisan times, it's needed just as much as it was when Franklin Roosevelt conceived of a government-run facility where Americans -- regardless of political affiliation -- could encounter the artifacts of a president, and scholars could delve into the inner workings of a presidency.
The Hyde Park groundbreaking occurred, fittingly, on July 4, 1940. The night before, on June 30, 1941, as he invited friends and visitors to tour the new facility, FDR made the point that the dedication was occurring as "government of the people" was under attack all over the world.
"It seems to me that the dedication of a library is in itself an act of faith," Roosevelt said that day. He continued:
"To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a nation must believe in three things:
"It must believe in the past.
"It must believe in the future.
"It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future."
And that is our quote of the week.
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon
