Of the 15 presidential libraries run by the National Archives and Records Administration, this one is devoted to perhaps the most effective yet controversial president of the 20th century: Lyndon Johnson. If there’s one word that defines this museum, it’s “legacy.”
George Washington’s plantation home is still around, and it’s still presenting a somewhat airbrushed image of the man.
It’s almost exactly 198 years ago that John Adams died (July 4, 1826), and 18 years since the HBO miniseries “John Adams” caught the public imagination and led to a widespread reconsideration of America’s much-maligned second president. The hoopla around that series has died down but the Adams’s home is still open to the public.
When I finally got around to visiting Harding’s home in Ohio I was reminded about the 29th president’s contrast with Abe Lincoln as well as my own long-standing ignorance of the Teapot Dome scandal.
It’s funny the impact a memorial can have on you. Sometimes you see one portrayed in a book or TV show or film and, perhaps because of the context within which it was shown, and because it looks cool, it leaves a real impression in your mind. Then you forget all about it until, maybe years later, you see the memorial in person from a particular angle or in a particular way, and the mediated memories come flooding back.
FDR was one of America’s greatest presidents, and also one of the most controversial. I’d known that for a long time. What I hadn’t known for quite so long was the extent to which that controversy extended into the bedroom. I was reminded about that quite forcefully when I visited the president’s family home at Hyde Park, New York.
The JFK Library and Museum is like a physical evocation of Kennedy’s “New Frontier.” The whole place so evokes the optimism of that period in American history that I found myself wishing I could be transported back in time to see it for myself.
I felt a familiar Lincoln buzz the first time I walked up Washington, DC’s 10th Street NW to visit Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site in Washington, DC. The street has changed significantly since the 1860s, though the theater and the Petersen House are still there. Both are now run by the National Park Service.
Dougie Does Monuments 