by Sarah Vowell
“Yeah,” he says. “Unless you get a clear direction from the president that he wants it all laid out. In the case of Johnson, I’ve been director here from the beginning. On one occasion when he was concerned that we might be too protective he said to me, ‘Good men have been trying to protect my reputation for forty years, and not a damn one has succeeded. What makes you think you can?’ So we have not tried to do that.”
Mr. Clinton, here’s a list of things you should not whitewash. Before we even discuss the scandals, let’s talk about the ordinary failures: What about one of your key campaign promises, to reform health care? A fiasco. Ditto Waco. Or the 1994 congressional elections, in which the voting public punched Republican names on their ballots with one hand, while using the other hand to give you the finger. I’m not even mentioning all the half-ass policies like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, or Bosnia or Somalia.
Finally, you did have sexual relations with that woman. You have to confront this. I do not know how. What I do know is that if your library’s only exhibits from 1998 are celebrations of the budget surplus and a copy of the Wye River Memorandum between Netanyahu and Arafat, those of us who lived through that excruciating impeachment trial are going to feel cheated. I suppose everyone has a favorite artifact from that era (insert stained dress joke here), but I always thought that gift of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that you gave to your mistress helped me understand you better. Perhaps your exhibition designers can do something with a line or two from “Song of Myself.” No, not “Smile, for your lover comes.” The best description of you I’ve ever read was published in 1855:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Mr. President, take heart. Someday, there might be people in this country who think that cheating on your wife and lying about it is not as embarrassing as being one of the presidents who got 58,000 American soldiers killed, not to mention more than 3 million Vietnamese.
Harry Middleton insists, “I think that a library should not proselytize. It should not sugarcoat and should not distort the facts or the truth in order to hide a controversy surrounding the president. Otherwise, it’s just not fair to the public.”
Meanwhile, in Yorba Linda, California: “First of all, I don’t think a presidential library should necessarily bend over backwards to be objective and fair and inclusive of every important telling fact on all sides of the argument.”
This is John Taylor, director of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace. It’s about a fifteen-minute drive from Disneyland. Just as Harry Middleton of the LBJ library is doing his job according to LBJ’s wishes, John Taylor is doing his job the way Nixon would want. He tells me, “People expect presidential libraries to reflect the point of view of the president, the president’s family, and the president’s institutional advocates.”
I am ambling through the museum, past pictures of Nixon, all smiles in China, and one of the other visitors asks a guard, “Where’s Watergate?” The guard tells him, “Keep going straight. It’s a dark room.” And it is, a very dimly lit tunnel chronicling the break-in at the Watergate Hotel through President Nixon’s resignation and farewell.
It does take you back. Have I mentioned that Nixon’s face on television is my very first memory? Born in the first year of his administration, by the end of it, during the ever-present Watergate hearings on television, I thought Watergate was just a regular TV show, like Bonanza or Scooby-Doo. My mother claims it was unnerving to have a four-year-old always tugging at her hem saying, “Mom, Watergate’s on!”
There are stations in the Watergate gallery where one may listen to the famous tapes, and there are intricate text panels with labels like “What Did the President Do and When Did He Do It.” John Taylor says that one of the purposes of this exhibit is that people come here expecting the museum to avoid such a sore subject, and that dealing with it in such an info-packed manner gives them credibility.
According to Taylor, “The most important reason to tell the story is that it happened. It was an amazing outbreak of political passion. The anger that Congress expressed during the Senate investigation in 1973 and the impeachment investigation in 1974. It was passion that had been building probably since the events around the time of Kent State. I think one sees the same effect with President Clinton, who was also a figure about whom there were simmering passions among many conservatives. There was a strong feeling among many conservatives, as we all know, that he “was not legitimate.” Or that he had been engaged in activities that had never been fully revealed to the American people. And many of those passions came forth during the impeachment investigations and proceedings in 1998 and 1999.”
Offering advice to you and your library director, President Clinton, Taylor says, “I think that it would be appropriate for the Clinton presidential library that there was a political dimension to the Clinton impeachment. And there were people who did not think President and Mrs. Clinton should be in the White House who used the impeachment effort as a way to accomplish that end. Pointing that out is fair comment. We point it out in our museum, and I would think and assume that they would attempt to do so in Little Rock as well.”
In fact, Taylor says that one curious effect of the recent impeachment is the way it retroactively colors the Nixon legacy. Even if Nixon looks no better, his enemies don’t seem quite as pure. Now, Taylor says, people are more likely to notice the vindictiveness and the sheer partisan glee that are bound to shadow any presidential impeachment.
There’s a lot you can crib from the Nixon library, Mr. President. Just substitute the name Clinton for the name Nixon in the following text from the Watergate exhibit: “Nixon himself said he made inexcusable misjudgments during Watergate. But what is equally clear is that his opponents ruthlessly exploited those misjudgments as a way to further their own, purely political goals.”
One caution, Mr. President: the Nixon library can sometimes seem a little defensive. In the LBJ library, a visitor’s view of history is complicated by the presentation of both sides of the Vietnam dilemma. It’s an emotional place, but it still operates within the language of good old-fashioned civics—a president and constituents loudly agreeing to disagree. The Nixon library asks, You want facts? We’ll give you some facts! And, oh, by the way, grow up, because you’re not going to like any of them.
Recalling the Nixon library’s exhibit marking an anniversary of the deaths of four students at Kent State, Taylor asserts, “Thanks to the Neil Young song, thanks to the way that event is generally packaged in the media and in history, one rarely hears about it from the perspective of Richard Nixon. But when you hear President Nixon talking in our presidential forum about what a dark day that was for him, it challenges the prevailing thought that he was callous and unfeeling towards the families of those who had died. In fact, he says in this museum and says in his memoirs that it was the darkest day of his presidency. And he includes Watergate when he makes that calculation. At the same time, however, you also learn, when going through the museum, that President Nixon had to weigh the lives of those four innocent young people against the lives of innumerable South Vietnamese and American soldiers whose lives were saved as a result of the incursion of Cambodia, which was the proximate cause of the demonstration at Kent State, which got out of hand and led to the deaths.”
President Clinton, perhaps you’re wondering if the Nixon library changed my mind about anything. You’re wondering if citizens who shook their fists at your face on TV might someday drop in on a building with your name on it and maybe give you a break.
All I can tell you is that I still think Watergate’s a horror and Vietnam was wrong. But I do find it useful to remember that those decisions, even the most deadly ones, were made not by a supernatural monster but by a real man whom we elected, a man who at least believed he was right. And that is not nothing.
In fact, the Nixon and Johnson libraries were my favorite ones to visit because t
hey deal with quarrelsome subjects. Once, years ago, I was at the LBJ. I was walking away from a copy of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 toward a photo of a serviceman who had been killed in Vietnam. In the ten seconds it took to walk from that law to that face, a song from a nearby pop music exhibit started playing: “Louie Louie.” And I felt like all of America was in that ten seconds: the grandeur of civil rights, the consequences of war, and the fun, fun, fun of a truly strange song.
Mr. President, Americans like contradictions. We elected you, didn’t we? So in your library, own up to your failures, but don’t stop trying to win us over. In other words, just think of it as running for president forever.
God Will Give You Blood to Drink in a Souvenir Shot Glass
A few years ago, I was in Paris, taking a walking tour of the French Revolution, because that’s how I spend my vacations. I also took another walking tour on the Fourth of July about Thomas Jefferson’s Paris years, because I celebrate the Fourth of July—I do—but I take walking tours, I and the other retirees, because—I think I can bring myself to admit this—I am a history buff: I am one I-800 number away from ordering the Time-Life World War II series off the TV. I have set my alarm so I wouldn’t miss a C-Span morning live remote from the house of the Revolutionary War pamphleteer Thomas Paine. I celebrated my thirtieth birthday at Grant’s tomb. My airport reading material—a novelization of Gettysburg here, a Lyndon Johnson biography there—always receives an approving glance from whatever middle-aged man on my flight is perusing the new Stephen Ambrose book, because every domestic flight requires a middle-aged man with a Stephen Ambrose book in his carry-on luggage—it’s an FAA regulation.
When I was in Paris on the Thomas Jefferson walking tour, I learned that the core of the Library of Congress’s book collection was purchased from Jefferson after theirs got burned down by those British bastards. Though I could be wrong about that, since a car was passing and I couldn’t hear too well. Jefferson bought books every day in the bookstalls on the Seine, that I know, and, also, walked everywhere. Walked like a maniac apparently.
The French Revolution walking tour I took was mostly a drag, except for a gripping if questionable anecdote about Danton, whose lip was split when he was sucking milk from the teat of a cow and the bull came up and knocked him down and while he was lying there a bunch of pigs trampled his face. Nevertheless, according to the guide, an Englishwoman in a hat, the ladies adored Danton because he was “so vital.”
But there was this one part, this breathtaking metaphorical jackpot, in which the Englishwoman led us down a cobble-stone street, almost an alley, to the Rue St. Séverin. So we’re in the Rue St. Séverin, which she points out by waving at one of those blue street signs attached to the buildings there. Then she points past the blue modern street sign to the place where “RUE SÉVERIN” had been carved into the masonry in the eighteenth century. In between the RUE and the SÉVERIN is this rough indention. A hole. Englishwoman, who heretofore hasn’t been that dramatic, which is puzzling considering what’s more dramatic than the French Revolution, what with the guillotines and let-them-eat-cake (brioche, actually, I was informed). She flourishes at the scratchy hole thing and says that the word saint was gouged out during the revolution because the revolutionaries were running around destroying references to the church and the monarchy. It was a big rut in the stone where the Christianity used to be. Have you ever heard of anything so beautiful or perfect? A better picture of history itself, a kind of erasing and revamping with fresh new signs hanging below the telltale gaping holes, holes made with meaning and purpose and no small amount of glee? Well, right before some nice old priest got his head lopped off, but still.
The historical periods I like to learn about aren’t so much costume dramas as slasher flicks. The French Revolution is a favorite because it features the beloved plot of carnage in service of democracy, but I prefer American history. And if I had to pick my pet domestic bloodbaths, nothing beats Salem or Gettysburg. I’m a sucker for Puritan New England and the Civil War. Because those two subjects feature the central tension of American life, the conflict between freedom and community, between individual will and the public good. That is a fancy way of hinting that sometimes other people get on my nerves. I’m two parts loner and one part joiner, so I feel at home delving into the epic struggles for togetherness.
Plus, Puritanism and the War Between the States inspired some of the greatest American writing, scary sermons and Lincoln’s speeches, writing which asks, to me, the question: If you’re so gung ho on the fellowship of your countrymen, why have you had your phone off the hook for the last four days? I revere the idea of the Union, adore that phrase of Lincoln’s when he asked the country to carry on “with malice toward none.” And what of the prettiest Puritan sermon, the “city upon a hill” one John Winthrop delivered on a ship approaching Massachusetts in 1630? He aspired toward a covenant of community, decreeing, “We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.” Are there any nobler words than that? And yet, did Winthrop ever live next door to a neighbor who was training a puppy? Would he have been so keen on us suffering together if he had just awoken to screams of “Naughty, naughty, no, no!”
The most bizarre episode in Puritan history is the Salem Witch Trials. Twenty innocent people were executed in Salem during the witchcraft hysteria of 1692. Which is horrifying, yet manages to make for a surprisingly nice weekend getaway. I went up one Saturday, ate dinner in sight of the Customs House where the Salem native Nathaniel Hawthorne began The Scarlet Letter, then got up for Sunday breakfast at the coffeehouse where the Sons of Liberty plotted the Revolution in 1776.
Salem boasts everything you would want from a trip down American memory lane, from information to anxious giggles. At the Witch Dungeon Museum, a place about as dignified as it sounds, there is the fun kind of bad actress in a period costume emoting through a reenactment of Elizabeth Proctor’s witch trial, “I am not a witch! I am innocent!” There’s a colorful old guy walking-tour guide named Bob who must not be a member of the chamber of commerce because he says things like “They hung dogs for being witches, that’s how stupid these people were.” There are freaky talking mannequins in the Salem Witch Museum that recite the Lord’s Prayer and while they do resemble shrunken apples they nevertheless help the visitor understand how hard it must have been for the condemned to say the line about forgiving those who trespass against us. There’s an old cemetery so archetypal it looks as though a child has drawn it as a decoration for Halloween. There is the seventeenth-century House of the Seven Gables that Hawthorne wrote about, where I decide to stop reading The New York Times “House & Home” section because, during the tour, the slave quarters strike me as really pretty. And there are a few yellowing historical documents to look at in the Peabody Essex Museum so that I don’t feel like a total cheeseball, even though I just bought a whiskey glass emblazoned with a little yellow highway sign with a silhouette of a hag on a broomstick that says, “Witch XING.”
On July 19, 1692, a woman named Sarah Good stood on the gallows and answered the minister making a last-ditch effort to get her to confess to witchcraft. She famously proclaimed, to the reverend and, I’m guessing, the town, “You are a liar; I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.” Could she have any idea then that, three centuries later, bloodthirsty tourists would sip her life story from a souvenir shot glass? What would she think of the local ice cream parlor going by the name Dairy Witch? Or that the high school football team is called the Salem Witches? Or that a cartoonish witch logo adorns the town’s police cars and newspaper? Or that the town that put her to death based on the harebrained testimony of a few teenage girls would remake itself as a vacation spot nicknamed Witch City?
As Bob the tour guide said of Salem’s witc
hcraft hysteria, “We’re not ashamed of it.” On the one hand, why not? It’s a shameful episode. On the other hand, there are few creepier moments in cultural tourism than when a site tries to rewrite its past. Once, I took a boat tour up the Hudson and visited a seventeenth-century Dutch farm. At the farm there was a different tour guide at each station—the bridge, the mill, the manor—and to a man (they were all women actually) they described the farm’s slaves not as slaves but as “enslaved Africans.” As in “The mill was worked by enslaved Africans.” Or “Over there were the cabins of the enslaved Africans.” Or “That was the job of the enslaved Africans.” After a while I couldn’t stand it anymore and cornered one of these shawl-wearing tour guides and asked point-blank why on earth nobody used the word slave. And in that singsong dialect of teenage girls, in which every sentence ends in a question mark, she replied, “Because ‘enslaved African’ describes slavery as something that was done to them? Instead of what they were? Enslavement was not their whole identity?”
“Um,” I asked, “isn’t the whole point about being a slave that you don’t have a choice to be anything else?” Prettying up the word slave with that adjective-noun construction makes “enslaved African” sound nonchalant. As in “Those were the cabins of the jolly leprechauns.”
This isn’t anything to be proud of. Those cringing, galling moments are, for me, one of the big draws of visiting historic sites in the first place. I’ll admit, one of my happiest moments in Salem was in a gift shop in which one of my fellow tourists asked the cashier if she was selling any “witchcraft trivets.” To which the cashier replied, “You mean a trivet with a witch on it?”
On one level I understand that it is a disrespectful affront to the twenty people who lost their lives—including Giles Corey who was pressed to death—to such a grave injustice that this tourist wants to remember his visit to their hometown by purchasing an object to protect his dining room table from a boiling saucepan. At the time, that didn’t stop me from enjoying a good chuckle at his expense. But once I returned home, I felt guilty.