OPINION

Summer at the presidential libraries

Michael Smerconish
Exhibit showing a re-created Oval Office at the John F. Kennedy Library, in Boston. JOHN F. KENNEDY LIBRARY

Should summer travel take you to Iowa, New York, Missouri, Kansas, Massachusetts, California, Michigan, Georgia, Texas or Arkansas, why not plan a visit to a presidential library?

For far less than the price of admission to a theme park, you can explore: the tiny farmhouse built by Richard M. Nixon's father out of a kit he purchased from a catalog; Franklin Delano Roosevelt's model ship collection; Lyndon Baines Johnson's 5,100-pound presidential limousine; a piece of the Berlin Wall, a gift from the City of Berlin to George Herbert Walker Bush; the actual Air Force One that flew Ronald Reagan during his time in office; and the John F. Kennedy-era Mercury Freedom 7 capsule from the first American manned space mission.

You have 13 sites to chose from, which comprise the Presidential Libraries system, managed by the National Archives and Records Administration, and five more in Virginia, Illinois, Mississippi, Massachusetts and Ohio, if you count the libraries that are independently operated.

Presidential libraries do more than house books and papers. As NARA explains on its website, "they are archives and museums, bringing together in one place the documents and artifacts of a president and his administration and presenting them to the public for study and discussion without regard for political considerations or affiliations."

Admission is a relative bargain. Disneyland costs $78.43 per day. A trip to a NARA library runs between $7 to $16 for adults; children are usually admitted free.

Presidential libraries are a relatively recent phenomena. FDR's opened first, in 1941, in Hyde Park, N.Y. Today, it's common for presidents to not only play an active role in their creation, but also to use their library as a post-White House working address.

"There are lots of great presidential libraries to visit. I think this one happens to stand tall because of who it represents, President Reagan, who we consider to be one of the greatest presidents of our lifetime," said John Heubusch, executive director of the Reagan Library.

His favorite part of his own museum is the Air Force One exhibit, the Boeing 707 aircraft that flew Reagan 660,000 miles to 26 countries and 46 states.

"Here you can actually go on board Air Force One. You can walk through the aircraft and see history. It's just an amazing experience."

But Michael Ellzey, executive director of the Nixon Library, less than two hours south of Reagan's, doesn't cede any ground.

"This is a very unique space in that it has the birthplace of the 37th president and the resting place just a few feet away," he said. "The home was built out of a kit from Sears by Nixon's father and it is located in precisely the location that it was when it was originally built: the cornerstone of a nine-acre presidential library venue."

California may have two libraries in close proximity, but Warren Finch, the executive director of the George H.W. Bush Library, says Texas tops that.

"You can do three presidential libraries here in Texas and they're all within driving distance," he said. "There's ours, 41, there's 43 up in Dallas on the campus of (Southern Methodist University), and then the Johnson Library in Austin is just about two hours from here."

Visitors to the George W. Bush Library often arrive with a quest for more information about a most consequential day.

"The Sept. 11 part of our exhibit we knew was important to do in an appropriate, respectful way," said Alan Lowe, the director. 

In Boston, director Tom Putnam takes pride in what is represented at the JFK Library.

"Our entire museum is designed to put people back into the 1960s," he said. "We use it to talk about the most dramatic speech JFK gave on civil rights in June 1963, where he called civil rights a moral crisis facing the country."

President Obama's foundation recently announced that his library will open after 2020 in his adopted hometown of Chicago. When constructed, rest assured its leader will tout it as the best.

Michael Smerconish writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and is host of "Smerconish" on CNN. Readers may contact him at www.smerconish.com