Fifty three years ago…
Groundbreaking ceremony for the Herbert Hoover Presidential Museum. The little house in the background is Hoover’s birthplace cottage. West Branch, Iowa. 5/4/1959
-from the Hoover Library
President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore after the signing ceremony of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
At the Library of Congress, Main Reading Room, Washington D.C. 2/8/96.
Source: presidentialtimeline.org
Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library. The only entrance requirement is interest.
Meanwhile: President Franklin Roosevelt draws this sketch as he envisions what his library might some day look like.
Source: fdrlibrary.marist.edu
What was President Franklin Roosevelt doing on December 7, 1941, before he learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor? Which advisers did he summon when he realized that America was on the brink of war?
Most Americans know where the President was on December 8th, but where was he on December 6th … or the 9th? Find the answers in a new feature from the Roosevelt Library, FDR Day by Day, an interactive timeline that traces FDR’s appointments, travel schedule, social events, guests, and more.
On the afternoon of December 7, 1941, President Roosevelt was in his Oval Study in the white House having lunch. The lunch was interrupted at 1:40 p.m. by a telephone call from Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, who told him Pearl Harbor was under attack and that the military command had emphasized that this was “no drill.” This Memorandum was one of the first written damage assessments presented to the President. In his own hand, Roosevelt indicated the date and time he received it.
Source: fdrlibrary.marist.edu
Tonight: Harry Belafonte / Tomorrow: Tom Brokaw
The Carter Presidential Library has quite a line up of guests this week. This evening, November 16th, Harry Belafonte will visit. The entertainer and civil rights advocate will be speaking about his life and new autobiography.
Tomorrow night, November 17th, television news anchor and author Tom Brokaw will be speaking about his latest book, The Time of Our Lives.
The Carter Library is in Atlanta, Georgia and both events start at 7 pm. Learn more about events at the Library here.
Pictured: Harry Belafonte at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963.
Source: research.archives.gov
“Then there are the happenings that didn’t make the headlines like when we found a baby rattlesnake two floors below ground in a restroom or the time I got stuck in the elevator with then Secretary of State Condelezza Rice or being questioned by a visiting head of state asking why we didn’t serve his country’s beer in the Ronald Reagan Pub…
I will never forget the time that the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court helped me play a joke on our Supervisory Archivist. Yes, the Chief Justice!”
-Duke Blackwood, Director of the Reagan Presidential Library
It’s been 20 years since the Reagan Library first opened. Five living presidents gathered for the first time ever at the dedication in Simi Valley, California. Here they are at the Library opening - Presidents Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and Richard Nixon.
Check out this post about some incredible events that have happened at the Reagan Library over the past two decades.
Source: facebook.com
A Library is born.
Here’s an unsigned letter from John F. Kennedy to “begin working out the concrete plans” for the Kennedy Presidential Library. September 20, 1961.
Kind of cool to think about the imagination stage of a future Library.
What Presidential Libraries have you visited or would like to visit?
In Her Voice: Jacqueline Kennedy, The White House Years
Today, the Kennedy Library opens a new exhibit highlighting Jacqueline Kennedy’s 1964 oral history interview.
Sealed for 47 years and scheduled to be published today is a series of wide-ranging conversations with historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in which Mrs. Kennedy reveals her thoughts and impressions on topics spanning John F. Kennedy’s early campaigns to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The conversations cover Mrs. Kennedy’s impressions of world leaders and events, her role as First Lady, and her life as a wife and mother living inside the White House. In Her Voice will feature excerpts from these conversations, presented alongside the objects, documents, and photographs that chronicle the events Mrs. Kennedy describes.
