Reagan Library Chief Leaves for FDR Museum Post

Politically, it’s quite a switch. Mark Hunt, director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, will soon leave for a job at the home of liberalism’s patron saint.

Hunt will become deputy director and curator of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, N.Y., which canonizes a president noted for establishing the modern liberalism Reagan opposed.

The soft-spoken, bearded Hunt, wearing a tie with Reagan’s signature scrawled across the bottom, said he’s leaving Simi Valley because the Roosevelt library position will allow him to build new museum programs and foster new exhibits--an opportunity he says he couldn’t ignore.

Also, Hunt was attracted to the Roosevelt facility because it is the first of the country’s 10 presidential libraries.

But the facility, which dates to 1939, is outdated compared with other presidential libraries. And thanks to $8 million in federal funds, and, organizers hope, an additional $5 million from private donations, the Roosevelt library will build a new gallery for temporary exhibits and a visitors’ center. With the new construction will come additional volunteers, new exhibits and more programs, Hunt said.

Hunt, 50, built his career on supervising such museum expansion programs. He oversaw construction of a 90,000-square-foot museum for the Kansas State Historical Society two decades ago. And he sees similar opportunities at the Roosevelt library.

The deputy director position is technically a step down for Hunt, who has served as the Reagan library’s top administrator.

“You don’t often get two chances in a lifetime to be a part of such a major undertaking,” Hunt said. “It took that kind of opportunity to take me away from here.”

During his four years at the Reagan library, Hunt established a new full-time position designed to educate the public and schoolchildren on Reagan’s presidency and the presidency in general. Visitation last year reached about 189,000 people--the highest since the library opened in November 1991.

And Hunt arranged for visits of traveling exhibits of the paintings of Norman Rockwell, relics from the turbulent 1960s and, most recently, the art and jewelry of Louis Comfort Tiffany, which is still on display at the library.

Joann Cook of Thousand Oaks, a volunteer docent at the Reagan library, said Hunt will be remembered for his ability to rally staff members around his projects.

“He’s so enthusiastic about everything he does. He makes us want to be here,” she said. “We’re so sad. We will truly miss him.”

Hunt is the museum’s fourth director, arriving after a six-year stint running the national scouting museum of the Boy Scouts of America in Murray, Kan. He replaced Richard Norton Smith, who left the library in 1996 to work at the Gerald Ford Presidential Library in Grand Rapids, Mich. Before Smith, Clarence Henley, the Reagan library’s inaugural director, left in 1990. Henley was replaced by Ralph Bledsoe, who left in February 1994.

Hunt said such turnover at museums is common.

“Museums in general have frequent changes of director,” he said. “An institution goes through a certain pattern of growth just like a human being does, and it calls for different kinds of expertise.”

Hunt decided to leave the Reagan library around the first of the year. He was initially drawn to the job through his acquaintance with Smith and his own inquiries.

His last day at the Reagan library will be April 7. Hunt begins work at the Roosevelt library four days later. Hunt will get an apartment in New York while awaiting his wife and daughter to join him in June after his daughter finishes her junior year of high school. His son will stay in the Los Angeles area to finish his bachelor’s degree at Pepperdine.

Federal officials, based in Washington and Maryland, have interviewed roughly a dozen applicants to replace Hunt from a field of about 60 candidates, said David S. Peterson, assistant archivist for presidential libraries. The field will be narrowed to finalists in a few weeks.

Hunt’s replacement will eventually be picked by John W. Carlin, archivist for the United States, who will confer with former First Lady Nancy Reagan and the Reagan Library Foundation Board of Trustees.

Hunt went through a similar process to secure his jobs at the Reagan and Roosevelt libraries, he said.

A lover of presidential history, Hunt said he’ll miss one of his favorite Reagan relics--a speech card from Reagan’s address in Germany in the mid-1980s--which reads in the former president’s own shorthand, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

“That had tremendous impact,” Hunt said of Reagan’s speech and the impending dissolution of the Eastern Bloc. “It was a premonition of what was going to happen so rapidly just a few years later.”

Despite the obvious conflict of ideologies between Reagan and Roosevelt, Hunt is more likely to point out similarities between the two presidents than their differences.

Reagan was a Roosevelt Democrat before becoming a Republican, and “the Gipper” frequently quoted Roosevelt, Hunt said.

Roosevelt entered America’s living rooms via the radio regularly with his fireside chats; Reagan, a former Hollywood actor, was a charismatic presence on television.