IN 1971, two years after leaving the White House, Lyndon Johnson dedicated his sleek, windowless eight-storey presidential library at the University of Texas. But in the pages of The Post, editorial cartoonist Herblock depicted Johnson as an Egyptian pharaoh opening “the Great Pyramid of Austin”.

That’s a perfect metaphor for presidential libraries, which memorialise our leaders — and their often-monumental egos — in brick, concrete and stone. Like the ancients, presidents start planning these shrines before their rule comes to an end. So early this year, President Barack Obama will decree whether his own library will be in Chicago, New York or Hawaii.

The competition is fierce. It was reported recently that Obama’s library foundation was sceptical about a bid from the University of Chicago because the university does not own the locations where it proposed placing the building. So Chicago mayor and former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel swung into action, announced on Monday that the city would help the university acquire the land it needs.

But why should each president get his own library? Multiple libraries are wasteful, costing taxpayers millions of dollars every year. And they’re undemocratic, because they allow our presidents — not the people who elected them — to define their legacies.

Presidential libraries aren’t mentioned in the Constitution or in any of our other founding documents. They date to 1938, when Franklin D. Roosevelt — midway through his second term of office — announced that he would personally construct a public archive in his native Hyde Park, New York.

Roosevelt was worried that the records of his administration — like many prior presidents’ papers — would be lost, destroyed or sold off to private bidders. He also wanted a place to write his memoirs and, most of all, to burnish his image as a defender of democracy.

So when Roosevelt opened his library in 1941, shortly after winning a third term, he contrasted American traditions of freedom to the looming threat of fascism. “This latest addition to the archives of America is dedicated at a moment when government of the people by themselves is being attacked everywhere,” he declared.

In 1955, the Presidential Libraries Act converted Roosevelt’s precedent into law. Each succeeding president would raise money to construct his own library, while the federal government would pay for its operation and upkeep.

But the act allowed the president to retain legal ownership of his papers, even as he deeded them to the government. That would change after Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation, when Nixon sought to retain control of secretly recorded conversations and other material from his scandal-tainted administration.

Congress responded by seizing Nixon’s papers, insisting that they were public rather than private property. And four years later, in 1978, the Presidential Records Act confirmed that the government retained “complete ownership, possession, and control” of all such materials.

Even so, presidents would continue to fund the libraries where the papers would be stored. That gave them the right to determine the sites of these facilities and — most of all — the stories that would be told in them.

So Bill Clinton’s presidential library in Little Rock, Arkansas, gives only a brief nod to Monica Lewinsky and the sex scandal that nearly ended his presidency. And the recently opened George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas offers none-too-subtle defences of Bush’s most controversial decisions, especially the invasion of Iraq and the interrogation techniques of suspected terrorists.

All of this historical revisionism is subsidised by taxpayers, of course. The annual operating expenses of our 13 presidential libraries is almost $100 million, which is hardly chump change.

But it pales next to the sums that the presidents themselves generate, which raise another set of concerns. George H.W. Bush received substantial library donations from foreign governments — including Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — as well as from the father of a man he had recently pardoned.

Most notoriously, Clinton issued an 11th-hour pardon to fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich after Rich’s ex-wife donated $450,000 to Clinton’s library foundation. And we don’t know the full financial story of other presidential libraries, because the libraries aren’t required to disclose their contributors.

To its credit, Obama’s library foundation is releasing the names of everyone who gives more than $200. The foundation has also declared that it will not accept donations from foreign nationals, a welcome step as well.

But it’s still worth asking whether Chicago investment manager Michael Sacks — who also served as one of Emanuel’s biggest campaign donors — expects to get something for his $250,000-to-$500,000 contribution to the Obama library. And, most of all, we should wonder why the president should have a separate library in the first place.

If all presidential records were located in one place — say, a Center for Presidential Research — we wouldn’t have to operate 13 of them. More Americans would be able to visit the facility. And most of all, we would all participate in telling the story of our presidency. That’s how it should work, in a government of the people by themselves.

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University.

By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn January 13th , 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play