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Grace Tully: Note To Self 

New York state’s gift to the nation, Chuck Schumer has a deal for us:

We allow the corporate descendants of Franklin Roosevelt secretary Grace Tully to profit from her absconding with FDR ephemera, and they will graciously donate the material to the Roosevelt Presidential Library for a tax deduction.

The recently bankrupt Sun-Times Media Group holds papers Tully gathered working for FDR, and wants to unload them on the Library for the losses.

But that pesky National Archives says it already own some of the stuff.

However did the Chicago Sun-Times holding company come to own this trove of FDR scraps?
  Its former owner, FDR biographer and torch-bearer for Richard Nixon Conrad Black, is currently a guest of the federal government, convicted of expropriating company funds for himself.  

Black wrote his generally well received Roosevelt book before moving on to criminal genius Nixon, so the papers might stem from the Corporation doing its part for Roosevelt research.

Unexamined in the Associated Press piece and unremarked upon by the ever-flexible Chuck Schumer is the money value of the Media Group’s tax deduction.

Conrad Black: FDR Fan, Fop 

Better Read   

The Thousand Oaks Acorn visits the Reagan Library, dipped in history.

From tiny acorns some mighty old chestnuts swell, as the Reagan Presidential Library finds a willing conduit for its Berlin Wall fantasies.

The Library is going all out to forever tie the Wall’s collapse to Reagan’s utterances, with the keen insights of  “exhibit specialist” Rob Zucca showing Acorn the way.

Apparently, the Wall was a commie trap! 

“They [The Reds] always said it was a security wall to keep the west out. Well, it was to keep their people in.”

“The Library’s claim is the chipping away—and eventual removal—of the barricade paved the way for the reunification of Germany and the advent of freedom and democracy in Eastern Europe.”

– neatly reversing the actual sequence of events, in which the Wall was more the last act of East Germany’s internal collapse, which was itself one of the last Stalinist regimes to go.

Reagan Library director of communications Melissa Giller riffs on Reagan quotes of the 60s, 70s, and today, plugging in “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction” along with the inevitable Thatcher reference.

“It was his lifelong mission to bring the end of communism and he was able to do it, as Margaret Thatcher said, ‘without ever firing a shot’”

But as we now know, Mags opposed German unification, plotting with wiley Frenchman Francois Mitterrand to block it.

But  Giller cannot be restrained:

“…even today, there are places such as Iraq and Afghanistan where American soldiers are fighting for freedom and democracy.“They may not have a physical Berlin Wall,” she said, “but walls still exist.”

Indeed. 

Media Fight Among Selves Over Who Killed Communism, Reagan Apparently Not Present

Your Role In Its Downfall 

Yet another instance of European condescension towards Ronald Reagan, The Man Who Wasn’t There®.

A spat amongst former East Berlin correspondents over who triggered an East German official’s incoherent statement which opened the Berlin Wall has somehow completely ignored Reagan.

Riccardo Ehrman and Peter Brinkmann both questioned Politburo member Günter Schabowski the fateful night of November 9, 1989, as he stumbled through presenting half-way measures easing travel from East to West Berlin.  Reporters pressed the poorly briefed Schabowski over the announcement’s meaning, leading the German Democratic Republic’s unwitting funeral director to say that border controls would relax “Immediately. Without delay.”

Demoralized guards and popular pressure did the rest, and the Wall was breached.

But did either of these esteemed gentlemen put it in writing?

 

To mark his retrospective genius the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library is getting all gussied up,  celebrating the Berlin events Reagan wasn’t President for.

US News & World Report: The Blog breathlessly reports spirited new efforts in the  continuing campaign to link Reagan’s stirring 1987 call for Communism to die swiftly with actual events more than two years later. The Library is going all out: conference on past glories, Checkpoint Charlie memorabilia, and for the kids,

“…the library will display a replica where visitors can scrawl their messages of peace just as the East and West Germans did on the original.”

      No apparent mention of actual events at the time, like the heroic marchers in Leipzig who challenged East Germany’s leadership on the ground.

Reagan-Wall Tumbling claims have settled into a cliche resolutely polished for all occasions,   like the wall fragments incorporated into Reagan’s recently unveiled Capitol Hill statue.

But fact-based snubbing of the Great Communicator remains treasured tradition in some circles.  Who can forget James Mann’s cruel tallying of previous equally ineffectual Berlin occasions when Reagan waxed wistful about the Wall’s fall.

   And lest we forget, Reagan trained his steely gaze upon North Korea too, still standing at last report .

A Bridge In The 21st Century 

Excitement builds in Little Rock, where the Wall Street Journal reports federal stimulus money has been allotted to finally fix the old bridge picturesquely decaying by the

Clinton Presidential Library.  Sure some say the Library promised to repair the bridge to secure the site, but that’s water somewhere when it comes to tourism promotion!

Behold A Pale House* 

From ArchiTakes via the Dallas News parkcitiesblog comes exciting Bush Library news: we [may] now have an inkling of what the already storied George W. Bush Presidential Consequences Corral will look like.                                                                   

Or maybe not, but in any event Bush architect Robert Stern brings out the saucy at ArchiTakes:

“Stern has just the right attributes to be his fellow Yale alum’s architect: conservativism’s DNA-inscribed commitment to tradition, and an inability to refuse any commission, no matter how unsavory…Characteristically, his new gothic buildings will substitute false antiquity for the real thing… Stern’s dismissal of what is authentic in favor of make-believe meshes nicely with his past service on the Disney Company’s board of directors…While demolition of an older building to make way for a larger new one is business as usual in New York, Stern’s replacement is distinguished by how much it looks like an escapee from one of the postmodern development ghettos just across the Hudson…Stern has proven quite capable of doing harm without tearing anything down.”

*

   Your results may vary.