A Line Forms to Check Out Clinton Library

[Mrs. Sharon B. Hodge]

A Line Forms to Check Out Clinton Library
by Scott Gold


LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - In the waning days of World War II, U.S. troops opened the doors of aNazi boxcar to find the spoils of war: crystal, artwork, gold and more that had been seized from Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. The items were not returned.


They were plundered by American officers, who walked away with fine rugs for their floors and china for their tables. Other pieces were auctioned off to raise money for relief agencies. Some just disappeared.

For nearly six decades, the U.S. government staved off survivors' efforts to win compensation for their property -- until the survivors found legal recourse last year at a converted car dealership in Little Rock. There, among former President Clinton's archives, were 58 boxes of documents, many of them never seen by the public, describing the looting of the train.

The papers, including documents generated by the Army in the 1940s and notes from a commission on Holocaust assets that Clinton established in the 1990s, made clear that the federal government violated its own restitution policies when the property was not returned.

The documents helped resuscitate the survivors' claims, and today settlement negotiations are underway in their lawsuit against the government -- talks that could result in the first U.S. payment to Holocaust survivors.

It is a stark example of the intense and early interest surrounding Clinton's archives as he prepares to open his $165-million library in Little Rock.

"Nobody in the government had taken the time to flesh out the story, either for the benefit of history or for the people themselves," said Samuel J. Dubbin, a Florida lawyer who represents the Holocaust survivors. "When we went to the archives we found a mountain of evidence."

Clinton, who served as governor of Arkansas before reaching the White House in 1992, is scheduled to open the nation's 12th presidential library Nov. 18. When he does, most of the focus will be on the library itself, a five-story structure whose modernist design plays off Clinton's well-worn allegory of a "bridge to the 21st century."

For months, however, historians, federal officials and political partisans already have had their eye on an adjoining facility -- the one that houses Clinton's archives, now that they have been ferried over from the old car dealership where they were stored after he left the White House.

Inside, behind metal detectors and armed guards, archivists are cataloging an astonishing collection of material. In sheer volume, federal government archivists say it is the largest record of any U.S. presidency.

There are nearly 2 million photographs, for instance, whose negatives are being stored in a sealed, high-tech room under ideal conditions: 35 degrees, 35% humidity.

Some are historic, such as the famous images of Clinton smiling as Yitzhak Rabin, then the prime minister of Israel, shook hands with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1993. Many aren't, such as thousands of meet-and-greet handshake photos.

There are 79,000 objects, many of them gifts from world leaders or knick-knacks that Clinton picked up during his travels. Some pieces will wind up on display in the library. Most will be housed in a room that, so far, looks like the warehouse where the Ark of the Covenant gets lost at the end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Box after box is labeled with chicken-scratch -- "Harlem welcomes President Clinton," "Damaged Jesus" -- that means something to someone.

There are scores of paintings that were received as gifts -- oil portraits of Columbus' ships, for instance. One box near the front door says "Cat House"; an archivist explained that it contained one of the shelters where Socks, Chelsea Clinton's tuxedo cat, spent his days in office.

The main storage area is reserved for what archivists say is the library's most important collection: 80 million pages generated during Clinton's tenure, many of them detailed and handwritten exchanges between Clinton and his staff. The documents are under heavy guard, largely because their public release will be controlled carefully, and many will remain confidential for years.

"Can't see the cameras?" asked David E. Alsobrook, director of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and a federal archivist for 28 years, as he walked through the room. "Good!"

Clinton is just the third president to fall under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which established that records generated in the Oval Office, such as memos, briefing books and drafts of policy papers, are owned by the public, not the president. That includes papers, such as the Nazi train records, that are collected or generated by the president's advisory commissions.