A look at presidential libraries as the Obama Presidential Center opens to the public this week

Since FDR helped launch the modern system of presidential sites in the late 1930s, a network of museums and research facilities has grown nationwide, overseen in part by the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, but otherwise as varied as the men they honor. They are set everywhere from the scenic Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum in California's Simi Valley to the small-town setting of the Herbert Hoover Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa, to the vast Barack Obama Presidential Center that opens to the public on Friday, Juneteenth, in Chicago.

Historian Douglas Brinkley, who says he has visited all of the post-FDR libraries, calls them vital hubs for lectures, research, school tours and tourists.

“Each of the libraries have their own aura," Brinkley says. “Roosevelt came up with a perfect idea by gifting his home in Hyde Park to the people of America, instead of having his papers stored in a warehouse in Virginia or Maryland. He started a tradition of having them go where the president lived.”

A little presidential spin

Libraries carry with them a given president's personality and legacy. Brinkley and others note that while the library archives are managed by NARA, the museum is funded by private donors who are likely to prefer a given president's more favorable moments be emphasized or less favorable ones softened.

On the Hoover website, a page dedicated to the Great Depression emphasizes that some of the policies enacted by Roosevelt, who easily defeated Hoover for reelection, were first proposed by Hoover. The Richard Nixon library in Yorba Linda, California, was for years at the heart of a battle between museum administrators and the former president and his supporters over everything from control of his archives to how much space should be dedicated to the Watergate scandal that helped lead to his resignation.

Max Boot, author of a 2024 biography of Reagan, contrasted his access to the Reagan archives with the museum itself. The late president's records were “administered by federal employees in an entirely professional and apolitical fashion. There is no attempt to hide anything,” he said. The museum “naturally focuses on Reagan’s achievements and shortchanges his failures.”

“It’s designed to present a positive portrait. Thus, volumes critical of Reagan are not sold in the library bookstore,” Boot said.

Historian Ted Widmer, a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton, said, “While it’s inevitable that the presidential libraries will present the highlights of a presidency, there has been some progress toward transparency in recent years.”

He praised the Lyndon Johnson library, located in Austin, Texas, for its willingness to take on LBJ's widely criticized handling of the Vietnam War. In 2023, the library helped revive interest in one of Johnson's most notorious campaigns — the 1948 Senate campaign now widely believed to have been stolen — by posting recordings on its website of interviews by Associated Press reporter James W. Mangan with a former Texas election judge who acknowledged certifying false votes that helped LBJ win.

“It is hard to know if future libraries will continue that trend, in an era in which history is increasingly politicized and polarized,” Widmer says. "But it’s healthy for our democracy to encourage the study of history as it really happened — not a sanitized version.”

The Obama experience

Obama officials have faced criticism for the center's size and aesthetic — “The building has an ominous presence, its mostly windowless heft recalling a menacing sci-fi headquarters,” wrote The Guardian's Oliver Wainwright — and for their decision not to have a NARA facility on site. A substantial amount of the former president's records are digital, a trend Brinkley expects to continue with future libraries.

As many as 1 million people are expected to visit the center's 20-acre campus each year, with highlights including a public library branch, an NBA-grade basketball court, a fruit and vegetable garden and a playground. Obama tested out one of the high metal slides in May.

“That was fantastic,” he said after zipping down, according to a video posted to the Obama Foundation’s social media. “I was a little tall for it.”

Obama also decided many of the center's details and features, from textured stone on the museum’s 225-foot tower to a pair of high-backed reading chairs inside the library. Among his favorite items, though, are charcoal grills that will be available for public use. He floated the idea to the public at a 2017 community meeting and was met with warm laughs from the hometown crowd.

“We don’t have any folks who grill here?” Obama said at the time. “I thought this was the South Side of Chicago.”

Associated Press writer Sophia Tareen in Chicago contributed to this report.