Presidential libraries, once serving as record houses for former commander in chiefs, have become poster-boards of accomplishments through programs and exhibits, according to Mineola native Anthony Clark, author of The Last Campaign: How Presidents Rewrite History, Run for Posterity & Enshrine Their Legacies.

“The theme of the book is how far presidents will go to establish their legacy,” Clark said. “Before presidential libraries, presidents didn’t establish their legacy. Historians did.”

Clark visited each of the 13 presidential libraries across the country since 2003. He also worked on a congressional subcommittee for Senator Lacy Clay during the 111th Congress..

The first president to create a library to their cause was Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he treated the space as an archive to his personal and official documents for public consumption.

“Roosevelt at the time, he was the world’s largest stamp collector,” Clark said. “He had 1.2 million stamps and was one of the largest collectors of naval memorabilia.”

With Roosevelt, his goal differed from his modern counterparts.

“The goal was to preserve in an incident-proof location, his records so historians could come and write up the history of the New Deal, WWII, what have you,” Clark. “That’s now completely flipped.”

The modern presidents have opted for a more glamorous feel when it comes to their library, which highlight key points of their run in the Oval Office. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) opens a presidential library usually four years after the current leader leaves office. But with time and resources as issues, library archivists sort through and document decades of papers…papers that they may not even be alive to see hit public eye.

“They don’t open the library, they open a museum,” Clark said. “But the records won’t be available for at least 100 years.”

The George W. Bush Library is the most recent one to open. To date, the library has 70 million pages of records and 80 terabytes of electronic records to sift through. According to Clark, every document needs to be reviewed for national security, confidentiality, etc., one at a time. The backlog comes from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which at minimum take 12 years to be fulfilled.

“There’s systematic processing, which lets you deal with thousands of documents very quickly,” Clark said. “But then there’s FOIA processing when people request specific documents. That’s slow. In the G.W. Bush library, there’s one archivist on systematic processing but at least 10 on FOIA.”

With Barack Obama’s term ending in January 2017, the location of his future library has been debated so much that it dominated the recent city of Chicago mayoral race. Former Obama chief of staff and incumbent mayor Rahm Emmanuel was re-elected.

To view more photos of presidential libraries, click here.

Obama planned to announce the location at the end of March but held off until after the mayor’s election on April 7. He has yet to make a decision.

The libraries are built by nonfederal money with unlimited fundraising by presidents during or after their term, according to Clark. According to the Bloomberg News, Obama would need to garner $500 million to construct his library. Last week, the Illinois legislature rushed a bill through that would allow the Obama library to be built on public land. It currently awaits Governor Bruce Rauner’s signature.

“The big controversy is the University of Chicago is the front-runner and they want to place it in one of two historic parks,” Clark said. “But there’s a lot of people that don’t want it in that spot.”

The building of these libraries have been nothing short of controversial. Clark’s book uncovers a secret plot by President Richard Nixon, who wanted his library cemented in Camp Pendelton, a Marine Corp base in Southern California, rather than his birthplace of Yorba Linda, CA.

The issue with Nixon’s first choice? The California site was on federal property and the Presidential Libraries Act of 1955 prohibits the use of federal land for a presidential library.

Nixon attempted to forge a program to transfer the land into state control via a public park.

“I wanted to see every other president’s site selection process so [NARA] said ‘the reason we keep denying your request about site selection is we don’t hold any records about site selection because we don’t play a role in it,’” Clark said. “[A few days later] I get a package from a FOIA request from a year before. It wasn’t about site selection.

“But in that package was a memo to the archivist from NARA saying they were going to meet with President [Bill Clinton] to talk about the library,” Clark said. “The memo said NARA plays a key role [in site selection.]”

After the threat of a lawsuit from Clark, he was given 500 pages on site selection pertaining to the Reagen, Bush and Clinton libraries.

“No one knew that [Nixon] tried to build his library by stealing land from the Marine Corps and then covering it up,” Clark said.