Rocky Start for Clinton Presidential Library

With a price tag topping $200 million, the Clinton Presidential Center will be the most expensive presidential library ever built.

The archives and museum documenting Bill Clinton's administration will be situated on a 27-acre complex in downtown Little Rock. In artists' renderings, the large glass library building perches on the banks of the Arkansas River, sticking out over the water as the land slopes towards the river. Around it are planned grassy open spaces, broken up by walkways and fountains.

Institute of Politics (IOP) Director David H. Pryor, a former senator from Arkansas and a longtime friend of Clinton who has known the former president since he was a teenager, is one of three trustees overseeing the library's fundraising and construction.

Pryor does not oversee the library's day-to-day progress--"It's not a place where I'll go down and see if they're laying the concrete right," he says--but he says he remains interested in the project's historical potential.

This project, like many of Clinton's other endeavors, has not escaped the touch of scandal. Two currently pending lawsuits stand in the way of the library, objecting to the way the city of Little Rock has paid for the land it bought for the presidential park.

The latest controversy, which has drawn national media attention, has swirled over a 5,000-square-foot penthouse planned for Clinton on the top floor of the library.

Eugene M. Pfeifer, who owns a three-acre riverfront plot located in the center of the proposed presidential library, has challenged the city's attempt to make him give up his land. He has claimed that the city government cannot use its eminent domain powers to seize his property if it will be used to build a residence for Clinton.

Pryor defends the apartment, calling it "very appropriate" that the presidential library would include a space for Clinton to stay since he plans to host programs at the library--and since Clinton owns homes in New York and Washington, but not in Little Rock.

"I don't know if he's mad at President Clinton, or just mad," Pryor says of Pfeifer.

In an interview, Pfeifer says he is simply using the apartment issue as a legal device to fight the city in a battle over municipal funding for land acquisition.

Current plans for the presidential center place the library building directly on Pfeifer's land. Now all that stands there is a warehouse that Pfeifer used to rent out but that has recently been sitting empty.

"With the threat of being evicted, not many people want to go to the trouble of moving into the property with the possibility of having to move back out," he says.

Pfeifer says he was offered a fair price--$400,000--for his property. But he objects that the city of Little Rock is using funds from the municipal parks department to partially finance the purchase of property for the library. The other landowners whose property was condemned have settled with the city. But Pfeifer has been holding out.

If the presidential library foundation reimburses the city and pays for the land acquisition itself, Pfeifer says he will withdraw his suit. But no ongoing talks are planned between Pfeifer and the foundation.

The other lawsuit, filed by a retired hospital employee who lives in Little Rock, also objects to the parks department funding.

"I had had my grandchildren to the zoo quite a bit and I noticed that it had deteriorated," says Nora Harris, who filed the suit three years ago. "That's what got me interested in it."

When she learned that the city planned to finance part of the library land acquisition using funds earmarked for the zoo and parks, Harris says she became interested in the case.

Harris lost in a lower court and appealed to the state supreme court, where she lost again--in part because no money had yet been transferred from the parks department to pay for the land purchases. Harris says the decision leaves room for her to re-file her suit once money is spent.

This is the second lawsuit Harris has filed since her retirement (the other unrelated suit challenged the assessment of a county tax) and she says she will not let up. But Harris insists her legal action is aimed against local officials for misusing government money and denies that her aim is to slow construction of the presidential library.

"I know the city tried to make it sound like I didn't like President Clinton," she says. "I hope [the library] is the best one in the country when it does get built."

National newspapers and major TV networks have reported the lawsuits over the presidential library as yet another legal battle--like the controversy over Clinton's last-minute pardons--surrounding the former president. And Pryor says that comes as little surprise.

"I don't see what the fuss is all about," he says. "I think they're going to find something to criticize Bill Clinton about anyhow and this is what it is now."

Boxes And Boxes

Not long after Pryor retired from the Senate in 1996, an 18-wheeler rolled into the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. On it were some 1,100 boxes of papers--loaded and shrink-wrapped on wooden pallets--bound for the special collections division of the university library.

In the boxes were campaign materials, videos of Senate proceedings and committee hearings, thousands of letters processed by congressional staffers, even thousands of telephone message slips taken straight from secretaries' desks--all the remains of Pryor's 18-year career in the U.S. Senate.

Together, the boxes hold about as much as 140 four-drawer filing cabinets. Even after more than a year and a half of work, at least two-thirds of the materials remain unsorted. Library personnel and graduate students have been working on an inventory of the boxes, trying to make sense of the contents for future researchers.

"It's a tremendous, job but you've got to understand that for people in public life who have staff, like senators and the president, generally their material is in pretty decent shape and arranged in a recognizable order," says Michael J. Dabrishus, who heads the special collections division. "This isn't as if the files in someone's cabinet were just dumped into boxes."

Many of the boxes are either unmarked or labeled only with vague descriptions such as "letters."

"I can't imagine what all's in it," Pryor says of the collection of papers he sent to the university. "I would hate to go through it myself."

In addition to thousands of press releases and official photographs, as well as hundreds of video cassettes, the boxes record much of Pryor's correspondence with constituents, even many of the cards Pryor received from well-wishers after suffering a heart attack in 1991.

Pryor says he tried to save everything. But he recalls colleagues who threw away--even burned--the bulk of their records, a policy he compares to the Taliban's destruction of ancient Afghan statues.

After retiring from the Senate, Pryor donated $250,000 in unused campaign contributions to the University of Arkansas to help found a center on oral history. One of the center's first big projects, he says, will be documenting the oral history of Clinton's time in public life.

By collecting his speeches on tape and interviewing those who served under him, the project aims to record not only Clinton's presidential administration but his terms as governor of Arkansas and the state's attorney general.

Pryor acknowledges the undertaking will be "mammoth." But eventually, he says, historians will be able to download parts of the oral history from a website--going back to Clinton's first address to the Arkansas state legislature, which he delivered in 1979 at the age of 32.

"I'm a big buff on oral history," Pryor says.

He organized an IOP event on Wednesday night billed as "an evening with Richard Nixon." He brought in a historian at the National Archives to play 45 minutes of the tapes Nixon recorded in the Oval Office during his presidency. He says he plans another evening of oral history, next time with Lyndon B. Johnson.

"I'm no historian but I like history," he says. "I think it kind of binds us together."

Turbulent Legacy

The U.S. is witnessing a renewal of interest in history, Pryor says, particularly in presidential history, which will make the library a major draw for the state capital.

"I've seen what these libraries can do as far as the bus tours--I hate to say the AARP," he says. "The AAA, they put this on the touring maps. It's a very large enticement as a tourist attraction."

The presidential complex will house an enormous collection of memorabilia and gifts from the Clinton years. Already, thousands of boxes of materials are sitting in the former warehouse of an auto dealership in Little Rock. The storage is temporary--planners hope to have the library constructed within several years--and already the materials are slowly being sorted and organized.

Once the library is built and the materials are catalogued, researchers will be able to study them in a climate-controlled wing of the library.

Clinton was a president often said to be concerned about history's judgment of his administration. In fact, the Clinton Presidential Center website already offers three sections: one on the presidential library; one on Clinton's charitable foundation; and one on the president's "legacy."

"It was an eight-year period in our existence in our country, somewhat turbulent, but it's going to be there," Pryor says. "There are always naysayers and people who are negative about anything. But I think the positive elements will prevail."