American Notes Congress

The presidential papers of Franklin Roosevelt, who was elected to four terms in office and served more than twelve years, are housed in a 72,000-sq.-ft. library in Hyde Park, N.Y. The presidential papers of Gerald Ford, who was never elected to the office and served less than three years, are housed in not one but two buildings, in Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids, Mich., with a combined area of 80,000 sq. ft.

Appalled at the cost of maintaining such increasingly extravagant monuments to Executive Branch ego (currently running at $14.6 million annually), Congress a fortnight ago passed a bill limiting the size of future presidential libraries. Ronald Reagan promised to sign the measure into law --but only after pressuring the bill's authors to exempt the presidential library he plans to build at Stanford University.