CULTURE WATCH : History Lesson

An American reading a history of the United States since 1980 is almost certain to be a college student. The American taste for the past is slight. Like it or not, few among us, unprompted by the need to earn a grade on a school examination, are likely to pick up any product that bears the label history. And recent history--military history aside--sells worse than history remote enough to be romanticized into fiction.

What preserves us, to some extent, from oblivion of our own immediate past is the national taste for presidential biography. In concrete terms, presidential biographies are American history for much of the citizenry. But a glance at the acknowledgements section of recent biographies of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon makes it clear that presidential biographers find the presidential libraries an indispensable tool. And as for biographers, so also for the authors of other, less popular but equally necessary histories.

At the newly opened Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, as at all the others, historiography and the library proper will have to fight for budget share with hagiography and the “theme park.” We predict, however, that at the Reagan Library, as elsewhere, history will take at least a few rounds in that fight, for trustees worthy of trust know that reputation cannot be won the way elections are won. The best course for a President concerned with preserving his place in history--indeed the only course that is not ultimately self-defeating--is to preserve the place of historians in his presidential library.