Obama Presidential Center Opens

 

Nearly ten years after leaving office, former President Barack Obama consistently polls as the most popular American politician, and the new Obama Presidential Center will open to the public in Chicago June 19th (Juneteenth). The Center’s buildings and grounds are owned by the City of Chicago with a 99-year lease to the nonprofit Obama Foundation. 

The Center’s buildings include a museum, the first fully digitized presidential library, a public library, classrooms, community meeting spaces, and athletic facilities, all in a scenic 19-acre Jackson Park campus with a Women’s Garden, a Wetlands Walk, a playground, a picnic lawn, and indoor and outdoor art works. The Center is in Chicago’s South Side near its partner the University of Chicago where Obama taught constitutional law for 12 years and is not far from where Michelle grew up.

The four-story Center Museum is the architectural focus of the campus and “explores the promise and power of democracy through the legacy of President and Mrs. Obama.” Some highlights of Obama’s legacy from his 2009-2017 presidency include

·       managing recovery from the Great Recession of 2008-09 so successfully that steady economic growth began in 2010 and continued until the pandemic of 2020 

·       providing affordable healthcare to millions of uninsured or underinsured through Obamacare

·       joining the Paris Climate Accords to slow climate change by reducing use of fossil fuels

·       creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that has returned $21 billion to consumers defrauded by financial institutions

·       killing Osama bin Laden who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks

·       negotiating a successful nuclear agreement with Iran.

The Museum includes immersive exhibits, a replica Oval Office, memorabilia from election campaigns, stories about key events from the President’s administration, and interactive activities for visitors of all ages. While the rest of the Center is free to the public, the Museum has an entry fee of $30 or $23 for children. (June tickets are sold out.) The Obama Foundation expects 700,000 visitors a year. 

The Home Court building features a regulation NBA court, practice courts, classrooms, and flexible meeting spaces, all devoted to wellbeing and health, life and leadership skills, career exploration, and relationship building. The Obama Foundation’s goal is to build a new generation of leaders by offering programs for graduate, undergrad, and high school students as well as for people already in leadership positions. 

In May, Stephen Colbert devoted one of his last Late Show programs to visiting the still unfinished Center Museum where he interviewed the President who then gave him a tour. During the interview, Obama stressed that the Center is nonpartisan, welcoming Democrats, Republicans, independents, and others. He said that the country “is better off with two healthy parties” and expressed concern that only one is healthy now.

During the tour, Obama introduced four young people in a community leadership program soon to be hosted in the Center. Colbert jumped at the chance to have a little fun, teaching one young man how to speak like Obama: Say “Look,” then pause, pause longer, still longer, then speak your piece. Funny, and it worked.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the first presidential library in 1939 by donating his papers to the National Archives and selecting land near his home in Hyde Park, N.Y., for a building to house them. Every president since Herbert Hoover has, or is planning, a library. Because most Obama-era documents were digital, the Obama Foundation is paying the Archives to digitize those that are not.  

The Center is meant to be “a force for change” as we celebrate our change to a nation 250 years ago. 

            

A Warrior’s Wisdom

In an 1879 speech at a military academy, General William Tecumseh Sherman famously said, “War is Hell.” He was right. War is also hard.  

With the U.S. mired in a costly standoff with Iran in Mr. Trump’s war-of-choice, its time to consider how to win a war as seen through the eyes of one of America’s most respected senior officers of World War II, Admiral Raymond Spruance (pictured). His first great success was as commander of a carrier task force that, thanks to Navy intelligence officers who broke the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) code, ambushed Japan’s carrier force attacking the U.S. airbase on Midway Atoll northwest of Hawaii on June 4, 1942. Spruance’s airmen sank all four IJN carriers with the loss of all their planes and many of their best pilots. It was a turning point of the war.

During the war’s last years, Spruance was commander of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet in the Pacific. The Fleet was built around more than a dozen new, fast Essex-class aircraft carriers and included lighter carriers, fast battleships, and hundreds of other combat ships. He was responsible for defeating Japan’s powerful navy, protecting amphibious landings on Japanese-held islands across the central Pacific to the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, and for the innovative fuel and supplies fleet that allowed hundreds of warships to stay at sea for long periods. 

In addition to Midway, Spruance’s greatest victory was the Battle of the Philippine Sea in late June 1944. In two days, his carrier planes destroyed more than 550 Japanese aircraft with nearly all their crews; U.S. losses were 123 (80 of which ran out of gas after dark and ditched in the water, but 75% of their crews were rescued). While the air battle raged above, U.S. submarines sank the two largest IJN carriers. After its Philippine Sea losses, the IJN’s once-superior air power was no longer a factor.

After the war, Spruance, known for his calm under pressure and his razor-sharp intellect, was appointed president of the U.S. Naval War College. He immediately set about developing a new curriculum to enable senior officers to better fight future wars. 

Naval War College courses now stressed the importance of reliable intelligence, thorough knowledge of  international affairs including the foreign policies of the U.S. and other influential countries, and knowledge of new technologies and their likely long-term evolutions. Courses also emphasized orderly thinking and planning and cooperation among the several military branches and the State and Defense Departments. To expand senior officer’s horizons beyond technical aspects of seamanship, Spruance brought in experts from universities and defense industries as visiting lecturers.

Spruance’s liberal education curriculum was intended to make the Navy’s leaders better informed citizens and “to get the best brains we can get.” Academic freedom was fundamental: there wasn’t a single “right answer” to a problem. Students were expected to think for themselves regardless of rank and were expected to have open minds receptive to the views of others. The College was no place for know-it-alls.

Contrast the Admiral’s approach to that of the current political regime’s attack on Iran where orderly thinking and planning was so lacking that the goal was unclear and an exit strategy nonexistent. Spruance’s approach was for professional military leaders, but we should expect civilian leaders who set military policy to share versions of the same qualities. Instead, too many lack a deep knowledge of world affairs, academic freedom in schools and universities is criticized, thinking for oneself is replaced by simple loyalty to one man, and expertise replaced by that man’s “instinct.” Admiral Spruance would be concerned for the future of the country he did so much to protect.