Designers Bracing for Reagan Exhibit Reviews

Professional New York museum designers are bracing for criticism of the exhibits at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library near Simi Valley, which portray Reagan’s life and presidency from his point of view.

The long-awaited public reaction will begin today as the Reagans welcome a horde of news reporters to a sneak preview of the $7-million museum inside the massive library complex. The museum, built by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, will not open to the public until Wednesday, after a series of invitation-only ceremonial events.

“I know it’s coming, I just wish it were over,” said Nancye Green, one of several museum designers hired by the Reagan foundation. “The exhibits tell the story from the President’s point of view. It is not going to be totally objective, nor highly critical. We try to take a balanced point of view.”

A sympathetic portrayal of a President at his museum is not unique, nor is the resulting criticism.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, who said he wanted his library to show “history with the bark off,” caught flak when his museum’s opening exhibits neglected to mention anything about Vietnam War protests.

The Richard M. Nixon Library and Birthplace was savaged in some press accounts for providing only selective recordings of the Watergate tapes. The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library was critiqued harshly for failing to detail the extent of the nation’s economic malaise during his presidency.

Museum designers and National Archives staff members suspect the museum will be criticized over its cursory treatment of the Iran-Contra scandal, which is sandwiched in a time-line exhibit of Reagan’s foreign policy called “Freedom and Democracy.”

Taking a dispassionate view of the Reagan era, they say other shortcomings might be that there is no mention of the growing homeless population among the library’s exhibits, or that the museum takes interpretive license in a stirring video about the collapse of the Berlin Wall and other dramatic world events since he left office. The video that unfolds in sync on three screens is called “Legacy.”

“It is impossible to create a museum exhibit that can’t be criticized,” said John T. Fawcett, assistant U.S. archivist for presidential libraries.

Americans hold passionate views about their Presidents, he said, making it difficult for any exhibit to match an individual’s memories of a presidency.

Moreover, he said, the opening exhibits in presidential libraries are typically assembled by the former President, his friends, family or staff--with little or no direction from the National Archives.

Only after the exhibits are complete do the Presidents turn over the museum to the National Archives. Typically, the National Archives staff will rework the exhibits after a few years, often revising them to focus more on the issues and controversies of the period.

Fawcett said he expects that the Reagan library will be no exception.

It took three years to design and assemble the museum that compresses Reagan’s life, presidency and the history of the period into an exhibition that designers hope is accessible to the typical visitor. One challenge was that the designers had too much material to choose from: more than 1.5 million still pictures and miles of video tape and motion picture film.

“An exhibition has tremendous limits,” said Stuart Silver, former director of design for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who was brought into the project. “Its greatest strength is delivering an impression, and its greatest weakness is delivering factual information.”

Silver and Green, with help from the Reagans and other consultants, decided to take a broad thematic approach to defining Reagan as President. They said Reagan’s conservative agenda has been remarkably consistent over the years.

“Before he was President, he said he was going to take on communism head-on and look what happened,” Silver said. “Whether he was the luckiest man in history or he had some impact will be left for history to judge.”

Green said the museum also strives to help visitors make an emotional connection with the Reagans. “Mrs. Reagan wanted visitors to come away with the feeling that they know the Reagans better,” she said.

The second half of the museum is devoted to life in the White House and Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign and other programs. “Our whole effort was to put the more intellectually challenging part in the first half and then soften the second half,” Green said.

Richard Norton Smith, director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, said the museum strikes an appropriate balance between education and entertainment.

“An awful lot of people who come to the Reagan library will not be coming for the finer points of domestic policy,” said Smith, who volunteered as a consultant. “A lot of them will come out of curiosity of what it is like to be President of the United States.”

Smith said the Reagans seemed to have “an instinctive grasp” of what the general public would like to see. He said he was impressed by how much time each devoted to the project.

The Reagans would join consultants at monthly meetings that would often last three days, selecting photographs, poring over captions and reviewing designs.

As a result, Smith and others said the Reagan museum may be more balanced than the opening exhibitions for other Presidents.

“They both wanted it to be objective and balanced,” Green said. “They were very concerned that this was going to look like a monument to themselves. That is not what they wanted.”

For example, the Reagans wanted to make sure that the Iran-Contra scandal was “tackled head-on,” Green said. And, at one point, Nancy Reagan asked that the First Lady’s Gallery be reduced in size.

Nancy Reagan, who often created a stir about her expensive taste in designer clothes, has limited the gallery to only four of her outfits. The outfits are her gray wedding suit, a blue suit she wore at her husband’s inauguration for his second term, and a Burgundy-and-black dinner gown from designer James Galanos that she wore at a state dinner with then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

The fourth is her “Second-hand Rose” costume, which she wore in a self-deprecating song-and-dance routine at the 1982 Gridiron Club’s dinner and comic variety show that lampoons official Washington.

Wearing a feathered hat, pantaloons, yellow boots and a flowered skirt held together with safety pins, Reagan poked fun at herself and helped improve her image in Washington for several years.