George Bush has spent the last four years deciding how to deal with Japanese corporations, oil producers, bankers and the leaders of other nations. Now he will be asking them for millions of dollars.
Like presidents before him, Bush will be turning to those sources and others to raise $40 million to build his presidential library at Texas A&M University.It's illegal for presidents to accept cash gifts, but it has become a routine way of doing business for former presidents.
Raising money to build these libraries is not only legal, it's required by law if a former president wants to start a library. But after they are built, they become the property of the federal government, which picks up the operating costs - some $15 million, or about half the money spent on former presidents each year.
To build his Atlanta library, Jimmy Carter accepted money from Japanese corporations, the indicted president of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. Likewise, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon accepted money from Japanese executives, oil companies and rulers of Mideast countries. Reagan even got money from the government of South Korea.
Like many government programs, presidential libraries started small and then grew like Topsy. For the first 150 years in the country's history, presidents kept their papers. George Washington planned to build a library near his home in Mount Vernon but died before he could begin.
Presidents could keep their papers, sell them, give them away or destroy them. Chester Arthur burned his shortly before his death. Calvin Coolidge ordered his destroyed, but a friend saved some of them. Papers that remained behind in Washington were often left to mildew and rot in the attics of government buildings. Some papers, including Abraham Lincoln's and Theodore Roosevelt's, went to the Library of Congress.
During his second term, Franklin Roosevelt picked a site next to his Hyde Park, N.Y., home and raised from friends $359,000 to build a single-story fieldstone structure for his papers.
Harry Truman built a library near his home in Independence, Mo. It cost $1.7 million and opened in 1957. To help Truman, Congress passed the Presidential Library Act in 1955: If a former president can raise the money to build the library, the government, through the National Archives, will operate it at taxpayer expense.
The latest presidential libraries also feature museums that have turned into giant tributes. The Gerald Ford library contains 95,000 square feet in two buildings - three times larger than Roosevelt's library - with nearly half set aside for a presidential museum. Reagan spent $70 million on his library and museum.
The libraries kept getting bigger and the cost to the taxpayers greater until 1986, when Congress said enough. Then-Florida Sen. Lawton Chiles introduced a bill to limit the size of the library the government would support. At the time, Chiles said the system "makes each former president try to outdo his predecessor and you end up with huge marble pyramids more fitting as monuments to the pharaohs."
The legislation was passed and signed into law by Reagan, who obtained an exemption for himself. His library is 123,859 square feet. Under the new law, Bush will be limited to 70,000 square feet.