About the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Museum...:
Unfortunately, the documentary's title ("Dwight Eisenhower: American") was not alluding to some forgotten controversy surrounding Eisenhower’s birth certificate; though I would like to take this time to advocate the necessity of these short documentaries that appear at several, if not all, presidential museums--no matter how bland and uncomfortably political.
That said, the rickety, 24-minute, documentary--possibly made in the 1970s--was mostly bland and uncomfortably political. The film chronicled the rise of a “compassionate” and “reliable” soldier who had so much, Abilene-inspired, “common sense” that he would never be found wanting a job, but rather any employment would find him. In line with this sentiment, the film is mostly devoid of facts, figures, testimonies or even anecdotal specifics regarding the leadership of Eisenhower, remaining instead on a stream of broad, subjective generalizations. Eisenhower was “a decent man” who garnered “respect and affection” from all people around the world. Some of the sweeping compliments provoked derisive sneers from Matt, perhaps emboldened by the otherwise empty theater.
Matt’s wordless sarcasm can’t be defended without a greater grasp of one of the inherent difficulties in discussing history—that is, that history is neither definite nor even over. Anything can be viewed with a political lens, and the resulting analysis can be contorted, stretched, squeezed, flipped around, smacked and given The Flying Dutchman. Often times it’s good to look at events and people with a different, even extreme, lens; but other times the lens conceal what other people see: gaping contradictions. Hopefully, my own lens is that of being a perpetual storyteller and so I see things not so much as political, but rather as a narrative.
And with a narrative mindset, I can say that complicated, paradoxical and even flawed protagonists are generally more interesting than impervious and infallible ones. In just one example, the conservative Eisenhower appointed the liberal Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But in this documentary, the moral, cultural and political ambiguity that previously defined the Eisenhower administration in my eyes was traded in for grandiose praise and unnecessary whitewashing in a celebration of America’s Grandpa.
From the film, we stumbled back outside—still no rain—and toward Dwight Eisenhower’s boyhood home: The Bethlehem of Kansas. Maybe it didn’t have that name, but it was advertised as the origin of “greatness.” Standing on the wooden front porch of the two-floor house, I wondered what it would be like to grow up in a park dedicated to your own forth-coming greatness. Did Little Ike like the statue of himself forty years in the future? Did he and his punk teenage friends ever tee-pee or tag the Visitor’s Center?
Ignoring my questions, the tour guide gave Matt and I a detailed history on the house’s ownership. Abraham Lincoln Eisenhower (the most American name since Chilidog Freeman) sold the house to Dwight’s dad, who felt like dying and Ike and his six other brothers kept the house, with their mom still living in it. Like the homes of all old people, most of the furnishings are originals and haven’t been touched in years. Other stuffs (wallpaper, etc.) are exact replicas.
The historic house can be interesting, but for most requires a substantial re-imaging of history. For instance, the tour guide pointed out a piano in one of the rooms, saying that while the future President, along with the other boys, was taught to play, Dwight didn’t continue to play into adulthood. Learning this, I had to envision some scenario where President Eisenhower was asked to play the piano but couldn’t and thus set off a chain of events for a reporter discovering that the leader of the free world had been replaced by a look-a-like. Maybe that really happened. Maybe it didn’t.
I noticed the house also had security cameras and so asked for proof of their authenticity. Mr. Killjoy informed us that, no, the cameras were not fixtures of the house in 1915, but in fact a response to a daring midnight heist years back when somebody lifted one of the original—and this is true—sugar cups from the Eisenhower tea set. It would seem even Batman would stay plenty busy fighting crime in Abilene, Kansas.
For reasons beyond me, the tour of the Eisenhower home required additional tickets to the tickets for the Presidential Museum. Seeing the house was two bucks, but if that was too cheap for anybody, there was also a tip box in the kitchen that I doubted was authentic to the house. Matt and I were quicker to take the tour of the house when we discovered, back in the Visitor’s Center, that the museum had a $3 discount on Wednesdays. Even with going to the house, I would save a dollar—or enough to buy half of a beer at the bar down the street from my apartment, which is how I’ve begun to measure money.
Back in the Eisenhower house, Matt noted the hat rack and flippantly suggested we get a hat rack for our place back in Lawrence. Tour Guide McFunderful, immediately went silent and looked around the room, as if seeing it the first time himself. Sometimes it takes an awkward person to sense an awkward moment, and with that I realized the false assumption. I wanted to say, no, no, we’re not gay…but then I figured it didn’t matter too much as the tour seemed finished anyway. And just for kicks, I put a dollar in the tip box after writing down a hotel address and room number for Mr. Part Time Tour Guide.
Learning, having fun and alienating people in our wake, we went back outside and made the short walk to the Eisenhower Presidential Museum. The entrance lobby was classically marble and ended at the far end with a large desk and, possibly, Clint Eastwood’s dad behind the desk.
The kindly gentleman who would make Old Ben Kenobi look like Young Ben Kenobi took our tickets and told us how to become “a Friend of the Eisenhower Foundation.” Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Friend? Eisenhower? Foundation? There’s no part of that I don’t like!” But one of the benefits was free admission for two to any NARA-operated Presidential Museum for the next year and I figured I would get rowdy at the Truman one in Independence at least four or five more times within the year. Frustratingly, I couldn’t buy the membership, refund my Eisenhower ticket and then come back to the Eisenhower museum four minutes later. So just like that, I was out 2.5 beers.
To my own continued chagrin, the first two rooms of the museum’s linear path were under massive, (authentic?) renovations. 2x4 wood planks and almost-discarded Pepsi cans gave the allusion of some temporary exhibit at least a month away from completion. Leaving the work zone, a sign hung advertising the forth-coming, temporary, exhibit: “Eisenhower: Agent of Change.” The details were murky but had a faint, unidentifiable, scent—raising my suspicions. I was not aware of any large-scale, politically motivated, re-imaging of Eisenhower’s legacy on the scale of FDR or Reagan. Then again, I was at this Presidential Center because one could fill a warehouse with what I didn’t know about Eisenhower—or, in this case, almost fill a museum.
To be continued...
No comments:
Post a Comment