Hack history
One of the best innovations in the American Presidency in the late 20th century was the Presidential Library, a place to store the President's papers and make them available to scholars. Four-term Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first to have one (Herbert Hoover's actually came later). It was built next to his home in Hyde Park, N.Y., and opened after his death. Until Roosevelt formalized the idea, preservation of Presidential papers was hit-and-miss. Calvin Coolidge notoriously burned most of his, depriving the public (who after all paid to create those documents) of an important historical record of the 1920s.
I've done research at the Roosevelt, Carter, Reagan, Hoover, and Kennedy libraries, and received copies of documents through the mail from the Eisenhower, Truman, and Johnson libraries. The archivists are professonal, friendly, and dedicated to helping researchers no matter their political persuasion. They may or may not harbor an admiration for the President whose library they work in, but if so, they keep it to themselves. It's their job to be neutral, and that's the way it should be. They don't seek to prevent access to documents that might be embarassing to the former President.
President George W. Bush has never been a friend to open access to the records of former Presidents. In November 2001, when the public was still fixated on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he issued an Executive Order barring access to certain documents in the Reagan Library. It is believed these were documents relating to people in his own Administration, but no one is certain. This was an unprecedented restriction of the public's right to know.
Now controversy has erupted over plans to build the Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University, Laura Bush's alma mater. The faculty isn't happy, in large part because the library complex will include a unit dedicated to burnishing the tarnished "legacy" of George W. Bush. Almost unbelievably, it plans to pay conservatives to write hack history glorifying the former President, much as the Bush Administration paid conservative commentators to promote its policies until it got caught.
It isn't unprecedented for Presidents to create institutes to promote their policies after they leave office. Herbert Hoover established the Hoover Institute at Stanford University in California, although his Presidential Papers are at his official library in his hometown of West Branch, Iowa. President Carter has his Carter Center adjacent to his Presidential Library in Atlanta, from which he conducts his admirable efforts toward world peace. Carter writes his own books. Hoover is long dead, and his institute is more of a conservative think tank plus a library with eclectic collections that include the papers of several of the late 20th century members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I suspect anyone at either place would be insulted by the idea that they were there to write hack history about Hoover or Carter.
Bush and I suspect all but his most zealous supporters know legitimate historians are unlikely to treat the 43rd President kindly. I suspect historians will be dissecting his failures for the next half-century, trying to determine how America went so wrong. That he would attempt to buy favorable treatment is not surprising, given all that has happened. Where once hack history would have been laughed at or ignored, with the rise of Fox News and the other rightwing media outlets it is likely to get promoted as real: sort of the Intelligent Design approach to Presidential history.
The danger is that Bush will seek to engineer some sort of permanent restrictions on access to his Presidential Papers, or keep the shredders running 24 hours a day between the November election in 2008 and the inauguration of his successor in January 2009. That would be illegal, probably. But when has that ever stopped him?
Congress in 1974 took former President Richard M. Nixon's official papers, including the notorious tapes, away from him because of fears he would destroy them. They sit today in National Archives II in College Park, Md., far from his Presidential Library in suburban Los Angeles. The current Congress needs to do something to ensure that Bush does not destroy any of the records of his Administration, or put them beyond the scrutiny of non-hack historians. America doesn't need another Calvin Coolidge.