America's pyramids: Presidents and their libraries

As the days pass, preparations continue to establish the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas. America's tenth Presidential Library is in its early period of formation. In Fall 2000 a former auto dealership's building, with 30,000 thousand square feet of space and plans for adding another 20,000 square feet, in Little Rock, Arkansas began as the home for the team of archivists organizing Clinton's presidential records. Projected to be the largest of the Presidential Libraries, the records and memorabilia will fill 67,000 cubic feet while the William J. Clinton Presidential Foundation raises funds to build a permanent home for the library. Quietly, with little fanfare, begins yet one more Presidential Library in a system that has been lauded, lambasted, and lamented since its start more than sixty years ago with the founding of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library in New York. While the stones of this new pyramid are dragged into place, the federal government continues in its struggles to resolve the ownership of the records of one of its deceased pharaohs. On June 12, 2000 the U.S. Justice Department approved the payment of $18 million to the estate of former President Richard M. Nixon in "compensation" for records seized when he resigned in 1974. The bulk of the funds, nearly half, would be going to the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California. Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the National Security Archives, remarked, "It is unfortunate that taxpayers have to pay for what is already rightfully theirs."' It is also unfortunate that yet another presidential library has gained funding that will keep it in the business of commemorating the legacy of this particular president, both competent and disgraced, in a manner that sees no end and that is contributing to a system spinning out of control. The original pyramids were carried on the