Presidential Libraries: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Presidential Libraries: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Our [Music] main story tonight concerns presidential libraries. Voted number one nice little activity by retired dad’s quarterly. Presidential libraries are incredible repositories of documents, artifacts, and occasionally displays like this one at the Reagan Library. Really laying out that man’s priorities. You might know that President Reagan once said, “There is nothing as good for the inside of a man as the outside of a horse.” Well, the exhibit about Rancho Deliello, the ranch in the sky, describes his feelings about his beloved ranch. Reagan once said, “You look at the beauty of it, and God really did shed his grace on America.” And there’s a gallery about his sidekick, as he called her, Mrs. Reagan. Yeah. Apparently, it goes horse then wife the way God intended. And look, my my position on horses is clear, I think. But Reagan’s quote, “There is nothing as good for the inside of a man as the outside of a horse,” might be the dirtiest thing I have ever heard. He should have been put on a watch list. He should have been banned from petting zoos and merrygo rounds. I sincerely hope they don’t have horses in hell because they are not safe. But a weird horse exhibit is actually part for the course. Presidential libraries often have eye-catching artifacts displayed throughout. From Gerald Ford’s letter, pardoning Nixon, to the microphone FDR used for his fireside chats, and some even host exhibits that have nothing to do with American history, or indeed the president themselves, like this one. Come experience extreme bugs at the Clinton Presidential Center, where spiders and ladybugs are as big as cars. Be transported into a new world that puts you up close and personal with big, larger than life bugs, all in their natural habitat. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold up. In their natural habitat. Look, I’m no insect expert, despite looking like I spent my high school years collecting bugs instead of friends. But I’m pretty sure giant spiders natural habitat is not a museum dedicated to Bill Clinton. It is, as we all know, any New York restaurant with a C from the Department of Health. Still, as you’ve undoubtedly noticed, the subject of presidential libraries has been in the news a lot lately, primarily because of a flurry of donations to Trump’s. Tonight, a $16 million settlement. Paramount, the parent company of CBS, announcing it will pay President Trump’s legal fees and give money to his future presidential library. President Trump has signed an agreement with Meta to settle a lawsuit that he filed against the company and its CEO. According to a spokesperson, the settlement terms are $25 million with 22 million of it going toward Trump’s future presidential library. in the settlement. ABC agreeing to donate $15 million to Trump’s presidential library. Right. Trump’s presidential library foundation seems to be the preferred vehicle for what I’m apparently legally not allowed to call shakedowns or extortion attempts. So, I won’t. It’s actually one of many things I’m not allowed to say. Like that the Chipotle guac secret ingredient is froges. That’s why it costs so much. Or that I personally believe dozens of men have died on the set of Mission Impossible movies. There is just no way Tom Cruz is the first person attempting those stunts. And you know the Scientology is covering it up. If they can hide Shelley Muscavage for 18 years, they can definitely bury a few handfuls of stunt men. No problem. Anyway, all of those things are things that I am not allowed to say. So, let’s all agree that I didn’t. But the thing is, as is so often the case, Trump is merely laying bare a system that’s actually been problematic all along. Because while presidential libraries enjoy the reputation of being esteemed guardians of history, the truth is they’ve always been both a little more and a little less than that. So given that tonight, let’s talk about presidential libraries, what they actually are, who’s in charge of them, and why Trump may be about to supercharge the problems that they can cause. And let’s start with the fact that the very term library is a bit of a misnomer. In fact, here is Harry Truman a few years after his opened, setting the record straight. This uh library is not a library. It’s an archives building with the idea of keeping the records of the government in uh an orderly manner. The objective is to obtain microfilm uh reports on all the presidential papers. It’ll take a little while to get that done, but when we do get it done, this place will be the center of the study of the presidency of the United States. Yeah, that is basically it. And by the way, do you remember when presidents were boring? It almost feels strange to watch a clip of one without the fear he’s going to throw in a slur or argue that Joy Behar should be imprisoned. Back then, presidents kept their racism and sexism away from the cameras and just put them in their policies. It was a simpler time. But like Truman just said, presidential libraries aren’t libraries in the traditional sense in that you can come and check books out. They’re actually two things fused together. archives containing the official records from a presidency for researchers and scholars and a museum showcasing that presidency for various visiting dads and board school kids who already went to the planetarium last year. The first presidential library was established by FDR, who wanted a place to house the presidential papers and gifts accumulated during his administration. Before then, when a president’s term ended, he’d leave the White House with all his records, many of which ended up destroyed. George Washington’s were apparently extensively mutilated by rats. Most of William Henry Harrison succumbed to flames when his log cabin burned down. And Chester Arthur’s son had most of his father’s papers burned in three garbage cans. And if you automatically knew Chester Arthur was the 21st president and not the name of a snack food character, congratulations. You are our exact audience. The point is after FDR, presidents began gifting their records to the federal government to be housed in libraries. And that is a good thing. Among other reasons, it is why we have this incredible audio of LBJ calling the head of the company that made his trousers with a custom request. The crotch down where your nuts hang a little too tight. So when you make them up, give me a inch that I can let out there. Uh because they cut me. It is like riding a a wire fence. Let’s see if you can’t leave me about an inch from the where the zipper ends uh down under my back to my bung hole. That is just excellent. We’ve played that clip before on this show and we will play it again. Not only does he burp in the middle of the call like a man whose nuts haven’t breathed in years, but every time I hear it, I’m forced to wonder just how big were LBJ’s balls. I mean, just in terms of fruit, are we talking plums or pomelos? Kiwis or mangoes, clementines or big honking naval oranges? If I could go back in time and ask LBJ one question, it would be, did you put out the hit on JFK? But if I could ask two, I’d say, if we’re measuring circumference, do we need inches or do we need feet? Now, initially, the handover of records was voluntary. But after Nixon tried to ensure access to audio tapes from his presidency would be limited to himself and laid plans that they’d be destroyed at some point, Congress made it mandatory, codifying into law the presidential records belong to the public and is to be turned over at the end of their term to be controlled by the National Archives and Records Administration or NAR. And it is then the library archavist’s jobs to catalog everything, which is no small feat because records doesn’t just mean papers and emails. It can mean all kinds of As this Clinton Library employee explains, you can find fine art in a box. You can open up a box and find head of state gifts that are a thousand years old. You can find just about anything when you open up a box. It’s sort of like everyday is Christmas. Many of the gifts were sent to President Clinton by the public, including a statue of American basketball star Michael Jordan. This is something that someone thought the president would like to have and sent it off to the White House. Yeah, someone thought President Clinton would like to have that statue of Michael Jordan, a sculptural rendering of his air soaring over, I want to say, the charred remains of his enemies. And you know what? Congrats to that person. and their gift ended up in a place of honor, specifically in an industrial-sized file cabinet being lightly groped by a woman with the most archival librarian energy I’ve ever seen in my life. Present company accepted. But again, the archives are just one part of a presidential library. Most of its physical structure is a museum dedicated to that president’s life and history. If you have been to one, that is probably what you walked through. But it’s worth understanding how both halves, the archives and the museum interact and how they came to be set up in the first place. And the first thing to understand is that these buildings aren’t publicly funded. In fact, here’s Jimmy Carter at the dedication ceremony for George HW Bush’s library describing how it works. As many of you may not know, all the funds that are invested in presidential libraries, none of it comes from the federal government. We have to raise the money and then turn over the library to the federal government. He’s right. If a president wants a library, and they all do, they have to raise the money themselves. It’s one of the many quirks of being a president, alongside the fact that if the first lady dies in office, you have to remarry the White House Easter Bunny. That is true. It is in the Constitution. So, to pay for their libraries, presidents have traditionally created private foundations that raise money from a variety of sources. build and equip the libraries and then eventually donate them to the government either through deed or lease. Now, once that happens, by and large, the federal government pays to run them and federal employees operate them. And that is not cheap, by the way. The government spends around hund00 million a year operating, maintaining, and improving these libraries, whether that’s repair work to a building’s facade, or in the case of the LBJ Museum in Texas, something a little more intimate. Though it is in an area now closed to visitors, the animatronic LBJ still works. Everyone loves the animatronic LBJ. Everyone can relate to it. People enjoy humor. In the next few days though, the half fascinating, half creepy LBJ will be taken apart and moved. Step one, it’s just a matter of u taking his clothes off. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you doing? Don’t do that in front of us. No one needs to see an animatronic LBJ stripped down to his softballsized nuts and bung hole. Rest in peace LBJ. You’d have crushed on only Only Fans. But this weird public private partnership where the library gets built by a president and his foundation, then operated by the government means that the line between shrine and official archive can get unhelpfully blurry. Especially because those foundations are often run by the president’s family and friends who often then help to personally curate the exhibits. And what that means is on the museum side of things, especially when a library first opens, exhibits can be extremely one-sided. Take the Reagan Library, which been called a graceand for conservatives. It features everything from an actual plane that served as Air Force One to a section of the Berlin Wall to an Irish pub the Reagans once visited which was purchased by the Reagan Foundation and recreated as a place to sell snacks complete with the bottle glasses and part of the bar the Reagans once touched under reory like glass. And look, I’m not surprised that the actor president turned his library into what if Planet Hollywood but with more Gorbachoff. But Ronny R and his sidekick wife touched this piece of wood while having a beer and ignoring AIDS feels a bit much to me. But the thing is when it comes to one of the biggest scandals of Reagan’s presidency, Iran Contra, when the museum first opened and for years afterward, it didn’t mention it at all. And that is not a one-off. On the on the day that Clinton’s library opened, it became clear there were some pretty significant editorial choices made. For all of President Clinton’s fans who brave the weather today, he certainly has his critics. And they complain the new library gives little attention to the impeachment scandal that dominated Clinton’s second term. Inside the museum, just one al cove deals with impeachment and characterizes it as a struggle for power. Most of the building is filled with pictures and memorabilia from more accomplished and happier times. Yeah, that makes sense, doesn’t it? If you asked any rando on the street to name something that defined Clinton’s presidency, they’d say, “Oo, probably baseball.” That guy loved baseballs to a genuine fault. If I remember, his love of baseball almost derailed his presidency. Now, that pattern continued with George W. Bush’s Museum where a historian pointed out that a display about the Iraq war boldly claims no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction are found. Although Iraq’s WMD related program activities are still a threat, which is a big old swing to take. At that point, you’d almost be better off just having the whole Iraq war section be a giant sign reading oops. At least that would be historically honest. But perhaps the most extreme case of whitewashing was at Nixon’s library, which initially opened without a partnership with the National Archives. When the library first opened, it taught visitors that Watergate was a coup orchestrated by the media and democratic elites. That the enemy’s list was the product of a rogue presidential staffer and that Nixon didn’t do anything his predecessors hadn’t done except get caught. And just set aside how ahistorical that is, why would you want that to be your legacy? Yeah. Yeah, I was a criminal, but so was everyone else. It’s just that I was also embarrassingly bad at it. Now, I should say the Nixon Library did eventually get folded into the National Archives, and their Watergate exhibit is now more accurate. Though, it’s also worth pointing out the Nixon Foundation apparently tried to pressure the National Archives to fire the library director before he could finish updating that exhibit. And the fact presidents can exert a heavy influence over exhibits is so well known that the former director of the Herbert Hoover Library had a pretty grim piece of advice. If you are planning to visit any presidential library, people generally go though initially to the to the library as soon as it’s opened and then don’t return again. I tell people wait 25 years if you’ve got 25 years. Yeah, that is both a little depressing and also might be the worst advertising campaign I have ever heard. This will get good in 25 years. It’s not what you say to promote a business. If anything, it’s what you say to reassure brand new parents. Look, just give it 25 years, then it does get kind of fun. But he is right. Presidential libraries do tend to evolve over time. FDRs has worked to update their message on the Holocaust, describing his slowness to admit Jewish refugees until late in the war and reckoning with his internment of Japanese Americans. And Truman’s underwent a huge update and now encourages visitors to engage in a debate over the question, if you were President Truman in 1945, would you have dropped the bomb? which is a fun little discussion for a family to have together and likely to result in a pretty awkward drive home after dad admits he’d have dropped more and bigger bombs. So, that is the museum half of the libraries. But remember, there’s also the archive side. And while it is supposed to be separate, ex-presidents can exert a surprising amount of control there, too, because their foundations get to consult on the library’s first director and can effectively veto anyone that they don’t like. And that person also gets to oversee the archive side, which is a big deal because by law, all of the documents from a presidency are supposed to be requestable by the public 5 years after their term ends. But as a practical matter, that’s basically impossible for them to do. Funding for the National Archives has remained stagnant for the last 30 years, which, as this archist explains, has led to an enormous backlog. When that five-year window hits, almost immediately we have a backlog of thousands of foyer requests that we can’t possibly respond to within the 10 days under the Freedom of Information Act. Yeah, he’s right. And he’s actually massively understating things there because when it comes to Reagan, Bush, and Clinton’s records, the government estimated in 2007 that they wouldn’t be fully open and accessible for a hundred years. And at that point, no one is going to have time to analyze Reagan’s papers. will all be too busy dealing with the fallout of World War I, presumably launched by President Beast. Although, don’t worry, don’t worry. The video of him launching the nukes did do numbers, so it’s not all bad news. And those massive backlogs mean that the library director has a huge amount of power when it comes to the order in which documents get reviewed to be released, as they can choose to frontload the subjects that make a president look good and delay the ones that are less flattering. And before any get released, the former president gets notified and has the chance to object. Which is a lot of power because if you told me everything on your laptop is going to be released over the next hundred years and you get to decide the order, I’m going to release the scripts from this show first and my erotic Wallace and Grommit fanfiction long after I am dead. So look, it is pretty clear when it comes to their libraries, presidents get to heavily thumb the scale of history, both in terms of the exhibits you can see and the documents that you can’t. But there is one more big issue here because remember, as Carter mentioned, presidents are generally the ones raising money for these buildings. And it is not a small amount either. Over time, libraries have gotten significantly more expensive. FDRs cost about 5 million in today’s dollars. Clinton’s cost 165 million. George W. Bush’s cost $327 million and the upcoming Obama Presidential Center in Chicago is estimated at around $830 million. And I do hope at least part of that money has gone to acquiring the rights to the single best 10 seconds of TV I have ever seen. Barack Obama, it will almost be an honor to kill you. Yep. Yep. That is a psychic gorilla who goes back in time to try and kill a young Barack Obama. It is a scene from Legends of Tomorrow. And I would argue that Obama’s presidential library would be incomplete without it. And the thing about fundraising for these libraries is there are basically no rules around it. Well, to be fair, there is one rule. Registered lobbyists have to disclose donations over $200. But that is the end of the rules. And that throws the door wide open for corruption. Because while still in office, presidents can solicit unlimited Library Foundation donations from absolutely anybody on earth, including foreign nationals, individuals seeking presidential pardons, and corporations with federal contracts. And this clearly incentivizes a president to fund raise while in office since that is when they have the most political cache. And since most presidential foundations enjoy taxexempt status, it’s also a pretty compelling offer for donors. All of which opens up a host of problems up to and including accusations of bribery. This has been an issue for decades now. Bill Clinton caught a lot of heat at the end of his presidency after he did this. Among his last acts, he pardoned billionaire fugitive Mark Rich. A man who never stood trial is now cleared for crimes that could have meant 300 years in prison. That’s Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, hugging and kissing the Clintons. She’s a New York socialite who’s donated more than a million dollars to Democrats. Thank you, Denise. Thank you for everything you’ve done to make it possible for Hillary and me to serve. Okay, thanks to Denise aside, can we just talk for a second about this photo? This man looks like the Godfather concept art. I’ve never been more certain in my life that someone was undeserving of a presidential pardon than in the three human seconds that photo was on screen. And the details in that case are pretty damning. Mark Rich had fled to Switzerland 17 years before after he was indicted on more than 50 counts of wire fraud, racketeering, trading with Iran during an embargo, and evading more than $48 million in income taxes. And let me reiterate, he fled. This man was a fugitive. He wasn’t in the US fighting to clear his name. He noped the out of the country. But Clinton pardoned him, which as many pointed out at the time came hot on the heels of a $450,000 donation from Denise to guess what? The Clinton Library Foundation. And look, I am not saying that the runaway billionaire funnels bribe money through his ex-wife to the Clintons in exchange for immunity. I am not saying that. What I am saying is if someone were to do that, what do you think that individual would look like and would they look something like this? I am just asking questions here. Now, I should say not every president has done this. To his credit, Obama issued directly soliciting library donations while in office and voluntarily disclosed donations that he received. But he didn’t have to do that. And that is kind of the problem here because all of this brings us back to Donald Trump who is now set to amplify every single problem that I’ve described so far because presidential libraries seem almost designed to exploit his every personal failing from his tendency to obiscate his wrongdoing to his desire to build expensive monuments to himself to a set of ethical guidelines based more in norms than law. Because the fact is, as things stand right now, someone could walk up to Trump today with a $50 million check, hand it to him while saying, “We love the work that you are doing and hope that you’ll consider helping us out with that little problem that we were discussing earlier.” And as long as that check said, “Pay to the order of the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation,” it would be completely legal. Though, don’t worry, what soulless, ethically bankrupt ass kissing corporation would even think of doing something like that? Please stay the away from us. You are not my real business, daddy, and you never will be. And the legal settlements that we know about are bad enough, but that’s just the beginning of the money involved here. Funds left over from the $239 million raised by the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, including millions from tech companies and CEOs, are also expected to be redirected to Trump’s library. And that’s not even getting into the $400 million plane given to Trump by Qatar, which is also slated to be transferred to the Trump Library shortly before he leaves office. And that gift is being flown directly through the library loophole. The Constitution prohibits anyone holding federal office from accepting a personal gift from a foreign head of state. But sources say Attorney General Pam Bondi has concluded that this gift is quote legally permissible because the plane is not being given to an individual, but rather to the US Air Force and then to Donald Trump’s foundation. Oh, come on. We all know what is going to happen here. He’s going to use that plane while in office and then instead of leaving it for the next president to use, he’s going to keep it for his library and suddenly discover he has a lot of library related business to do all over the world. It’s just completely inevitable. Kind of like how after Trump leaves office, Pete Hexth will get his own Fox News show. Caroline Levit will go on Dancing with the Stars and get voted off after two weeks. And Steven Miller will return to the cocoon that he emerged from. We all know these things are going to happen. And while technically Trump doing that could be perceived as legally dicey, the main enforcement body for all of this would be the IRS, which the Trump administration has been gutting to a shell of its former self. So I would say the odds of him getting away with it look pretty high. And it does seem notable that Trump was given a $400 million plane by Qatar. And then just this week, out of absolutely nowhere, he issued an EO declaring that any attack on Qatar would be treated as a threat to US security. And look, I am not saying the US military should be for sale, but it sure feels like Qatar just bought it awfully cheap. In fact, I would say the same thing to Trump that I once said about Kim Kardashian turning up for a shaman toilet paper event. They simply didn’t pay you enough to do as much as you are doing for them right now. The point here is our whole private public setup for presidential libraries has resulted in a bunch of shrine-like buildings that presidents can raise money for from basically any source with the vast majority of donations undisclosed. And as usual, Trump simply by being himself has very effectively shined a bright light on all these cracks. So what should we do? Well, for starters, we should make donations to presidential libraries far more transparent and solicit to them while in office should be outlawed altogether. Multiple bills have tried to do some version of that over the years, but they’ve all gone absolutely nowhere. And frankly, I don’t think that this guy is going to be signing one anytime soon. As for the National Archives, they should be getting funded to an operational level so they can reduce that 100red-year backlog and actually do the important job that they’re supposed to because who knows how many more recordings at LBJ bung hole level we could be missing out on. But honestly, maybe the main thing here is to let go of the idea that these giant shrines are remotely necessary or that they’re accurate representations of history and try to decouple their celebrity function from their archival one. And that link’s actually been wobbling for a while now. A few years ago, the federal government actually handed all control of the George W. Bush Museum over to its private foundation. So the government still runs the archives, the important part. When it comes to the museum, there are no federal workers lending legitimacy to its whitewashed version of history. Meanwhile, Obama declined to build an archive at his future presidential center at all. Instead, opting to digitize all his unclassified paper records. That means that his grand monument to himself will be entirely privately run. And while I know this sounds weird, maybe that’s a good thing. But the key thing is next time you visit a presidential library and especially one of the newer ones, you should go in there knowing that they are not necessarily telling the story of that president from a historical lens, but from a personal one. And going forward, whenever you hear reports that an organization, news network, or foreign country is giving money to a presidential library. And I think that you’re going to be hearing about that a lot over the next three years. Know that it is at best a personal gift and at worst an active bribe. And while clearly none of this is ideal, I guess as long as this is how the system is operating, then if you can’t beat them, you should probably join them. So given that, please follow me because after researching the story, we suddenly found ourselves motivated to donate something of real value to any presidential library or foundation interested in taking it. Specifically, what we’d like to offer is this. It is from our own guesstimates a life-size rendering of LBJ’s balls. And any presidential library is now welcome to take these balls as a symbol of the massive ego it takes to build one of these libraries in the first place. The only catch is in the grand tradition of these buildings engaging in quid pro crows. We would expect something in return. Now, obviously, these testicles make the most sense in LBJ’s library, and in return, we’d be interested in taking your animatronic statue of him. But we’re also open to negotiation with other foundations, too. Just make us an offer. Whether it’s a horse statue from the Reagan Library, or if the Trump Foundation is so inclined, a full blanket pardon for me personally. That is apparently something I’m allowed to suggest. The point is, we are open to any and all trade. So, please do get in touch. That is our show. Thank you so much for watching us. We’ll see you next week. Good night. Call us. Call us about the balls. [Applause] over there.

John Oliver discusses what presidential libraries are exactly, how presidents use them to fundraise in office, how Donald Trump might make existing problems even worse and – of course – some stuff about one president’s unique inseam.

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