PIEN HUANG, HOST:
NPR national political correspondent Don Gonyea has spent a career reporting on politics and, at times, witnessing history. That was the case this week, when he attended the opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.
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JOSHUA DUBOIS: Move about this center. Let it be an epicenter of innovation, a balm...
HUANG: This week's ceremony was different from typical presidential library openings. While former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were in attendance, they didn't give speeches. Obama did.
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BARACK OBAMA: And yet, more than anything, I hope this center will serve as an affirmation of just how special, how precious our democracy truly is.
HUANG: Former first lady Michelle Obama spoke too.
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MICHELLE OBAMA: Failing to see the humanity in all people puts us all on a slippery slope that flies in the very face of our faith and of the founding promise of this democracy that all of us - all of us - are created equal.
HUANG: But what made the event for Don and others were the performances.
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THE ROOTS: Let me hear you say, I feel. I feel. Say real good. Real good.
HUANG: That was The Roots. This was the third presidential center or library event that Don Gonyea reported on in his decades at NPR. He was present for the opening of President Clinton and George W. Bush's libraries as well. So for this week's Reporter's Notebook, I wanted to get a sense from Don about what he had learned covering these over the years. I started by asking him how far back this tradition of presidential libraries goes.
DON GONYEA, BYLINE: The first presidential library was FDR's, at Hyde Park, his family home. And it was not like one of these big library complexes that we see now. It's just kind of nestled in the Hudson Valley up there. Now, of course, they've become these places that are libraries. They house the archives from a presidency, and there's always a research facility attached and then a museum that tells the story of a person's time in the White House.
I will tell you that the Obama library breaks with that tradition because the Obama presidency took place fully in the digital age. They basically decided, look, all of the archives are available digitally, or they're in the process of being digitized. So we don't need to have this be an official presidential library. That's why this one is called a presidential center.
HUANG: Got it. So there's the Obama Presidential Center. There's presidential libraries that have come up in the tradition of FDR. Is the through line here that they are about burnishing a particular president's legacy?
GONYEA: They certainly do that. It's not that they don't take on difficult topics, right? If you go through any presidential library, you generally see the passage where the president struggled or had trouble with a particular issue. The Gerald R. Ford presidential library in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for example, deals with the very messy pullout from Vietnam that took place under his presidency. So those things are in there, but mostly it's a journey through time, and you see it all through their perspective, and you see why they made the decisions they made.
HUANG: I want to take us all back to 2013, when you covered the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas. I'm wondering what you did in the lead up to that reporting trip.
GONYEA: I did a lot of homework, anticipating that all of the former presidents would speak. That was the tradition. If a former president showed up, they would say some words about this other member of this ex-presidents club.
Knowing they were all going to speak, a lot of my attention beforehand was on Jimmy Carter because probably more than any of the others, Carter had been a very, very, very strong critic of the George W. Bush presidency, specifically the foreign policy. Carter was just a very tough, tough critic of that White House. So what's he going to say? What is he going to do when he stands up on that stage?
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UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #1: President Jimmy Carter.
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GONYEA: And it shouldn't shock us because it's Jimmy Carter. And I guess it shouldn't shock us because, again, the tradition is to say something nice, but you never quite know. But Carter delivered a very heartfelt speech, saying he was there to praise George W. Bush...
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JIMMY CARTER: That ended a war that had been going for 21 years. George W. Bush is responsible for that.
GONYEA: ...In ending a war in Sudan, addressing the AIDS epidemic.
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CARTER: He established the PEPFAR program. There were 50,000 HIV sufferers in Africa being treated when he came in office. When he left office, per year (ph), 2 million. I'll let you figure...
GONYEA: Carter said that was one of the most significant things that any president had ever done in terms of foreign policy. And it was a really remarkable moment for its graciousness but also because of what we wondered what he might say.
HUANG: So, Don, you've covered a lot of these events, and you're going to be hanging up your microphone with us later this summer. It's our loss. But I'm wondering if there's any particular moment that sticks out to you from your times covering these.
GONYEA: For me, it goes beyond the speeches, even though I am fascinated by the speeches, but I always like to see what performers have been invited to attend and to do something on the stage. And at that Clinton Library event in 2004, The Edge and Bono, from U2, of course...
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UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER #2: Please welcome Bono and The Edge.
(CHEERING)
GONYEA: ...Came up on stage. And just as they took the stage, it started to pour down rain, and they were not under cover, and the crowd was getting drenched, and umbrellas were coming out all over the place.
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GONYEA: And they had a program they planned on doing, but they went into an impromptu version of that great old Beatles song called "Rain."
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BONO: (Singing) The rain comes, they run and hide their heads.
GONYEA: And then he ad-libbed the lyrics to something like, it fell down on our heads, and he said, we got five presidents out of bed - or four presidents or...
(LAUGHTER)
GONYEA: ...Whatever it was. I'll let him sing it.
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BONO: (Singing) We got four presidents out of bed. When the rain comes...
GONYEA: It was a moment that really put a smile on my face and also just reminded me that these things happen obviously in the realm of policy and history, but they also exist in the realm of culture. And little moments like that always really stood out to me.
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UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (Singing) Change (ph)...
HUANG: That was NPR national political correspondent Don Gonyea, remembering his time covering the openings of presidential libraries.
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UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (Singing) You better believe... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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