President Clinton Launches a Library Extravaganza

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The New York Sun

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – From the steps of this city’s historic Central High School, President Clinton kicked off a three-day extravaganza yesterday that will culminate with the opening of his presidential library and museum.


About 30,000 visitors are expected to flock here this week for receptions, ceremonies, and seminars extolling the virtues of the former president and his administration. For many top Democrats, the tribute to Mr. Clinton is also shaping up as the victory party they were denied on election night, when the party’s presidential nominee, Senator Kerry, went down to defeat.


Speaking at a school that became a symbol of racial conflict in the 1950s, Mr. Clinton said he hopes his new library, and its programs promoting public service, will help to heal the present ideological divide in the country.


“I’m tired of looking at maps with red and blue states. I didn’t like it very much when the blue outnumbered the red when I was president,” the former president said. He argued that the political divisiveness in America springs from the same trend that promotes religious and racial violence abroad.


“The world is being torn asunder and terrorism is being fueled by people who say that our differences are more important than our common humanity. Of course, we have to fight that frontally and directly with force,” Mr. Clinton said.


He said programs that bring together volunteers of different backgrounds are another key element of that battle. “We have to make a world with more partners and fewer enemies,” the former president said.


In remarks to a business group, Mr. Clinton talked of his efforts to promote peace and development in strife-torn places such as Kosovo and Northern Ireland. He joked that the outcome of the bitter presidential contest made him wonder if his efforts might be needed closer to home.


“You know, after the last election I thought maybe I needed a religious reconciliation project here in America,” Mr. Clinton said.


For Little Rock, the opening of the William J. Clinton Presidential Center has been nothing less than an economic bonanza. The $165 million project has triggered a wave of building and renovation in the city’s downtown, which is beginning to perk up after years in the doldrums.


“We have almost a billion dollars in redevelopment in the downtown area. Half of that would not have happened without the library,” the mayor, James Dailey, said. “This city is stepping up to another level.”


President Bush and his father, President George H.W. Bush, are both expected to be on hand tomorrow for the library’s dedication. President Carter also plans to attend.


A spokeswoman for Mr. Kerry said he, too, plans to come, which raises the prospect that Mr. Bush and his Democratic opponent could cross paths here for the first time since the election. The aide to Mr. Kerry said it is possible that business on the Senate floor might still prevent him from making the trip.


About 1,100 journalists from around the globe are expected for the gala opening. Reporters are scheduled to get tours of the new museum in waves that were to begin before dawn this morning.


In an interview with The New York Sun yesterday, a key player in the museum’s design said the exhibits will deal with the most controversial aspects of the Clinton presidency, but from a viewpoint that is unapologetically Mr. Clinton’s.


“This is the president’s library and it’s the president’s voice,” the exhibit designer, Ralph Appelbaum, said. “He approved every word, photo, and object that’s in that place.”


According to Mr. Appelbaum, the controversy that resulted in Mr. Clinton’s impeachment is discussed in one alcove, which is entitled, “The Fight for Power.”


“It goes into the Arkansas Project, Whitewater, the investigations, the impeachment, and ultimately the acquittal,” the designer said.


Mr. Appelbaum said the display includes sections about the “new cultural confrontation, the politics of persecution and the politics of personal destruction.” Other events that Mr. Clinton considers related, such as the Republican congressional victory in 1994, are covered in the same part of the exhibit.


Asked if he was concerned that Mr. Clinton’s deep involvement in the exhibits might lead to charges that they are biased, Mr. Appelbaum said, “I never took it that he was being partisan or one-sided.”


Mr. Appelbaum said one wall of the alcove includes this quote from Newt Gingrich: “I think one of the great problems of the Republican Party is we don’t encourage you to be nasty.”


“Is that partisan? Is that nonpartisan?” Mr. Appelbaum asked.


Mr. Appelbaum said about two dozen employees at his New York-based firm Ralph Appelbaum Associates helped design the Clinton museum. The first design meetings took place in 1999, while Mr. Clinton was still in office.


According to Mr. Appelbaum, Mr. Clinton was impressed with two of the firm’s previous projects, the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the Rose Center at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The former president also selected the architect that oversaw those two projects, James Polshek, of New York’s Polshek Partnership Architects.


The design of the new Clinton Center is modern and striking. The building juts out toward the nearby Arkansas River and is intended to evoke one of Mr. Clinton’s most famous metaphors, “the Bridge to the 21st Century.”


The design of the exhibit space is based loosely on that of the library at Trinity College in Dublin. “It evokes the feeling of a classical library,” Mr. Appelbaum said.


The exhibits are spread over two floors. The lower one is devoted to the substance of Mr. Clinton’s presidency, while the upper one largely discusses life in the White House during the Clinton years. One of the first things visitors will encounter is a short film devoted largely to Mr. Clinton’s first presidential campaign. “It gets people back into that space of time when there was that tantalizing enthusiasm for him and his message,” Mr. Appelbaum said.


The film was produced by a longtime Clinton friend, Harry Thomasson. He also recently produced a documentary, “The Hunting of the President,” that argues that Mr. Clinton was persecuted by political enemies.


A time line tracing Mr. Clinton’s presidency runs through the center of the main gallery, while 16 alcoves on either side are devoted to various topics. “We were really telling not just the story of the Clinton administration but telling the story of what would be known as the Clinton era,” Mr. Appelbaum said.


Other displays include a mock-up of the Cabinet Room, in which visitors can sit in the chair that belonged to their favorite Cabinet member, the designer said. There is also a replica of the Oval Office that Mr. Appelbaum said is more faithful to the original than those at other presidential museums.


“Unlike all the other libraries, it’s exactly to scale, including everything in it on a particular day,” he said.


Despite the hoopla and palpable excitement in Little Rock, it wasn’t hard yesterday to find indications that the prospects for the detente Mr. Clinton is advocating remain remote. Outside a convention center where the former president spoke, a band of protesters stood with large signs that said, “Clinton Raped Juanita.”


The signs referred to a claim that, during his gubernatorial campaign in 1978, Mr. Clinton forced sex on a supporter, Juanita Broaddrick. The president’s attorneys have denied the allegation, which got brief attention from news outlets in 1999.


“It’s just amazing how so much of the press, the majority of the press, hides these facts about how he raped his own campaign worker,” a missionary from Denver, Kenneth Scott,55,said.He said he has participated in 144 protests against Mr. Clinton across the country and overseas.


Asked why he was continuing to protest against a man who left office four years ago, Mr. Scott noted that Mr. Clinton has been mentioned as a possible secretary-general of the United Nations. “If he wants to run for president of the world, we still have to keep exposing him,” the missionary said. At least a half-dozen young children were part of the demonstration, cheerfully handing out flyers that described the former president’s alleged crime in graphic detail.


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