For years, I assumed it was nothing more than yet another rumor floating through the halls of Annenberg, right up there with the one about intelligent Communications majors able to maintain a worthwhile class discussion for more than five minutes. I mean, really, how many classes here offer an all-expenses-paid trip to any presidential library in the country for all enrolled students?
But there I was last week, cruising in a shiny silver rental car up the 405 Freeway through Los Angeles on my way to five days of fun on the sunny beaches of Santa Monica and the ritzy stores of Rodeo Drive. Oh, and some primary source research at the Reagan Library.
Truth be told, in all the weeks of intense trip planning, I hadn't given all that much thought to the library itself. Growing up with a reference librarian for a mother, I've spent more than my share of time perusing bookshelves -- honestly, how much different could this place be? I figured I'd Xerox a couple of books, do a few article searches and stare out the window at the killer scenic views of the mountainous California landscape until it was time to cruise Hollywood Boulevard.
But somewhere between my arrival at the Presidential Library, complete with the mandatory identification badges, exhaustive security checks and intense application process (all somewhat inexplicable, considering we were the only researchers there), and my fatigued exit two full days later, struggling under the weight of almost $50 worth of copies, I found myself face to face with cart after cart, full of official presidential papers, essentially documenting every minute of Reagan's eight years in the Oval Office.
At first it was pretty neat -- how often do you get to see speech drafts with hand-scribbled edits all over them, signed with the initials of some of the most important politicians of the '80s? After all, the chances are good that the closest most of us will ever come to the president's official notepads are tacky gift shops in the Washington, D.C. airport.
But after a few hours with those file-stuffed fireproof boxes, I began to get that jumpy, tingly feeling that you get when you've been caught reading a roommate's diary. What right did I have, as a mere undergrad, to flip through someone else's private papers, let alone a president's? Of course, I knew that anything remotely confidential, controversial or just plain embarrassing had long been removed and shredded. Still, though, I couldn't help feeling like a creepy stalker, rifling through Ron and Nancy's trash bags for a lipstick-stained napkin or a canceled check.
So as I sat there in that deathly quiet reading room, rifling through stack after stack of handwritten Post-It notes and inter-office memos, I found my concentration slowly drifting back to the chilling November winds of Philadelphia and my own ever-growing stack of notebooks, bulkpacks and planners. Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more fascinated I became: at the end of almost three and a half years of college, what would my papers reveal about me?
The answer is, tragically, very little. Sure, there are hundreds of pages of scribbled, largely incoherent notes, all too frequently, the only evidence of the hundreds of hours I've dedicated to seemingly never-ending, largely incoherent lectures. And yeah, there's certainly no shortage of gossip and catty critiques of countless TAs' perpetual losing battle with fashion filling the margins. Even my once-perfectly organized planner has fallen by the wayside, reduced to brief jottings of meeting times and locations, rarely with further clarification. Considering how often I have nary a clue as to what any of this meant only days later, the odds these scribbles would provide much of anything to anyone decades later seemed frighteningly slim.
So, then, is that it? By daydreaming in class, staring at that crush across the room and passing bitchy notes with friends, have I sacrificed my own chance at everlasting library preservation? When I finally load up that final box and slam the U-Haul door shut in late December, will there be anything left behind to preserve my Penn legacy, save donating that spare few million bucks I've got buried beneath my twin, extra-long mattress to get a bench named after me?
The thing is, I'm not so sure Ronald Reagan would be satisfied with his library collection. Beneath all those tons of speech drafts, letters and schedules, there's not a whole lot of personality left. Maybe I'm politically ignorant, but I'm willing to bet that 20 years later, it's the quiet dinner with Nancy in the Oval Office, the afternoon stroll through the Rose Garden with the first hint of spring in the air, the moment when it first hit him that he was actually making history -- that's what he'd treasure most: the sort of stuff that lives on in the mind and the spirit, not in documents.
So maybe future Eisenhower students'll never get the chance to blow a few days at the Levine Library on Annenberg's dime, flipping through my ancient notebooks and trying to piece together my thought processes, but that doesn't mean that I won't leave a legacy. They'll just have to dig a little deeper...
Rory Levine is a senior Communications major from West Nyack, N.Y.
