The Clinton Presidential Library, A River Building and Its Questions
Near Little Rock, Arkansas
The William J. Clinton Presidential Center opened on November eighteenth, two thousand and four, on a stretch of the Arkansas River waterfront in the East Village neighborhood of Little Rock that had been derelict for decades. The building is a remarkable piece of architecture, a long glass rectangle cantilevered out over the river on concrete supports, designed by James Polshek and nicknamed by some the bridge to the twenty-first century, a deliberate reference to Clinton's favorite campaign phrase.
The construction of the library was part of a broader effort to revitalize a neglected part of the city, and by that measure it succeeded. The neighborhood around the library has been substantially rebuilt, with restaurants, hotels, and a pedestrian bridge connecting it to North Little Rock across the river. The library draws several hundred thousand visitors a year and is consistently rated among the most visitor-friendly of the presidential libraries.
The library contains the largest collection of papers of any presidential library, roughly eighty million documents, more than two million photographs, and twenty-one million emails. It includes a full-scale replica of the White House Oval Office as it appeared during Clinton's tenure, and exhibits that walk through the major events of the eight-year presidency: NAFTA, the federal budget surplus, the interventions in Haiti and the Balkans, the bombing of Iraq, the scandals that led to impeachment, and the acquittal. Presidential libraries exist in tension with history.
They are built by the presidents and their foundations, and they have an institutional interest in favorable presentation. The Clinton Library is no exception. Scholars and journalists who have used its archives have found both extraordinary depth and the selective framing that is native to the form.
The building on the river is beautiful. The man it commemorates was complicated. The river keeps moving.
