Mike Devine Oral History Interview

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Opened March 2026
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

[1]

RUSHAY: Ok, alright, Mike, well, good morning to you, sir. It is Thursday, August 14, 2025, and I have the the honor to speak with former Truman Library Director Mike Devine, who was director of the Truman Library between 2001 and 2014. Good morning, sir, and thank you for agreeing to participate in this oral history interview.

DEVINE: Good morning, Sam. Good to be with you.

RUSHAY: Thank you. To get things started, can you tell us where you were born, and where you grew up and where you went to college?

DEVINE: I was born in Aurora, Illinois. I grew up in Joliet, Illinois. I went to high school there, then I went to college in a small college in Iowa, called Loras College. It's L-O-R-A-S. You'll have to look that one up. But it’s still going well out there, it’s just unheard of. But when I went to graduate school, I went to a school that everybody's heard of, The Ohio State University, which you know well. And, I tell people I went to Ohio State for the same reason the football players go there: they offered me money [laughter].

RUSHAY: That’s a good reason.

DEVINE: And they were very generous with teaching assistantships throughout my time there, and I really enjoyed the graduate experience at Ohio State.

RUSHAY: That's great. Did you go to graduate school there, too?

DEVINE: My undergraduate work was at the small college in Iowa. [For] graduate school for both my master’s and doctorate, I went to Ohio State. In addition to the nice money they gave me, I had a very good summer job for four summers. The last year I was an undergraduate, and then during graduate work, [I was] a brakeman for the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern Railroad, now a short line railroad that was a freight line that connected steel mills from northern Indiana over into Illinois and up towards Wisconsin. It no longer exists. It's been bought out by Canadian National Railroad. But back in the 60s, it was a real going operation. The steel mills were big employers then.

RUSHAY: Yeah, sure.

DEVINE: I made a lot of money.

RUSHAY: What did you get your degrees in, Mike?

DEVINE: History. Undergraduate. For my master's degree, I worked on American revolutionary, early national period, but then when I came back to Ohio State after a few years off, I taught at my old alma mater. Then, I was a Peace Corps volunteer, and during that Peace Corps experience, I became more interested in US diplomatic relations, US Far Eastern diplomacy, and so I moved into that area.

RUSHAY: Okay, can you tell us a little bit about your academic and professional career before you became the Truman Library’s director in 2001?

DEVINE: Yeah, most of my career has been involved in, well actually just about all of it, management of historical agencies. While I was finishing my dissertation at Ohio State, I had a nice part-time job at Ohio University in Athens, another school that you're familiar with.

RUSHAY: Sure. Yes, sir.

DEVINE: And they had a great history department there. I had some good relations with some of the faculty, particularly John Gaddis, the diplomatic historian, who let me use part of his book budget to buy things I needed for my dissertation, and he read some drafts of my dissertation. Also, Tom Smith, who taught Ohio history. Tom Smith was on the state’s American Revolution Bicentennial Commission; and, in 1974, when my part-time position was about to be eliminated because of funding problems at Ohio University, he suggested I put my name in for the directorship of this commission. It was a very small commission, with only one staff member. It was housed in the Ohio Historical Society. Tom showed me the job description, which was pretty vague. The commission hadn't met for six months and didn't have much of a budget. And the requirements for the job, and this was just right after I defended my dissertation–so I was a newly minted PhD and maybe feeling pretty good about it–but the requirements for this job were a bachelor's degree in any field and a valid Ohio driver's license.

RUSHAY and DEVINE: [Laughter].

DEVINE: [Laughter] I didn't think this was the kind of job I wanted. But then I looked at the salary and said, "well actually, maybe that's something I could do." And after a half a dozen people turned the job down, more political types, because they wanted a real job with the Department of Corrections, or Transportation, or something like that. They turned to me, and I had a lot of fun; it was a great experience.

DEVINE: I found out I had some administrative talents that I didn't know that I had, and I went on from there to be the assistant director of the Ohio Historical Society. Then for a brief time, I was in university administration in Cincinnati. Then I went back into the history field as deputy director in Maryland for their program at Historic St. Mary’s City, then State Historian of Illinois, from there to the University of Wyoming to direct the American Heritage Center, and then from there to the Truman Library job.

RUSHAY: How did you first hear that the director position at the Truman Library was open? And when you heard about it, did you know right away that you wanted to apply?

DEVINE: I heard about it after I had interviewed for the directorship of the George H.W. Bush Library. A head hunter called me, and he had been hired by the Truman Library Institute to assist the National Archives in identifying candidates. So I said, I was very interested but I was already at that time a candidate for the job as director of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library. I'd interviewed for that job with John Carlin, the Archivist of the United States, and also some people from the George H.W. Bush Foundation, including General Brent Scrowcroft, and it looked pretty good for that job. So I called Jerry George, who I'd known for at that time at least twenty years and who was a special assistant to the Archivist. I said, look, I just got a call from these people at Truman Library. I'm interested in that job but I don't want to mess up my opportunity to be a director of the Bush Library. And he said, "Well, Carlin really likes you. There's a couple of jobs open." FDR was coming open then. The LBJ library was about to come open. He said, "So we want you for one of the presidential library jobs." So, I said, "Okay, I'm in." And this thing worked out. The search went on for, I don't know, six or eight months. Typical NARA kind of personnel things. And it took so long that I had pretty much given up on ever hearing about the Truman Library job. And so I had verbally accepted a job to be director of the North Carolina State Museum. And then I got a call a day later from John

Carlin, and I turned the Truman job down. "I've verbally told these North Carolina people," I said. He said, "Don't sign anything and don't make any commitment. I'm going to call you next Monday with our best offer." Actually, he made me an offer I couldn't refuse.

RUSHAY: Right. Good.

DEVINE: So that's how I ended up with the Truman Library. I was very happy to come to the Truman Library. I felt of all the presidential libraries, my background and interest would be most in line with what the Truman administration was all about. So, it turned out well.

RUSHAY: Carlin, who was the Archivist of the United States you mentioned, did he or anyone else at the National Archives suggest to you some goal or accomplishment that the agency was looking for, that the next director should execute at the Truman Library? Or was it pretty much sort of up to you to determine those priorities?

DEVINE: Yeah, I think it was pretty much up to me. I don't recall ever having a discussion with John Carlin or anyone at NARA about where they wanted the Truman Library to go. I think they were generally pleased with the direction that Larry Hackman had taken; raising a lot of private sector money to redo the educational programs and the exhibits. I think it was a ten or twelve million capital campaign that he had launched at that time, which back in the 1990s, that was real money [laughter]. And, in fact, the only time I interviewed with John Carlin was for the Bush Library job.

RUSHAY: Right. Yeah.

DEVINE: And so we discussed more what would be needed at the George H.W. Bush Library. The only time I talked to him after that was when he made the job offer. It was clear to me, right off the bat, that there were several things that needed to be addressed right away. One is to get the museum open again. I came on in September, just a few days before the 911 attacks, and the library was shut down. We had police barricades out in front and that sort of thing. That was a pretty exciting period. But we, the renovation of the building had been delayed already, and there were very high expectations for the new programs and the new exhibits. A lot of prominent people in the Kansas City area had contributed significant money and staging a rededication of the library just a few months out. We wanted to get it done in 2001; and, as I said, I came on in September, so there weren't that many months left to get things done and get things open. But we did have a great break on the weather. On opening day, we had coverage on C-SPAN and even CNN and local stations covered it. We really got a great boost out of that rededication. So, it was not only getting the place open but getting these programs that people had been anticipating up and running–particularly the White House Decision Center as well as some of the other outreach and education programs that we had been, the staff had been working on prior to my coming.

RUSHAY: Right.

DEVINE: It was also clear that we needed to make some drastic changes in the expenditures of the Institute. We were looking at about a $600–$700,000 deficit. There had been a lot of big contracts for public relations and other things. But we were a little bit top-heavy in staff and in contractual obligations. So that needed to be addressed. And we also had a financial problem with the Trust Fund. This is the money that comes into the library through admissions and gift store sales and some gifts. Because the library had been closed for a time, for over a year, there was no admission or gift store sales income. Also, we still had non-revenue producing staff on the Trust Fund because of problems in Washington some years earlier. These staff should ordinarily have been on federal funding but were moved to the Trust Fund funding by NARA.

RUSHAY: All right.

DEVINE: So we had to address that. Within the first year, we were able to deal with the Institute funding. We got the programs up and running, and I felt also we needed to do more with the academic community, academic conferences, seminars, and closer relations with universities in our area like Truman State University Press (TSUP).

RUSHAY: Yes.

DEVINE: We did a joint publications project for twelve years with TSUP, and with institutions like the Little White House in Key West, Florida, and the University of Missouri in particular. We never got much, in spite of my best efforts, with UMKC, although I was named to the board of their Edgar Snow Society, which supported US-China initiatives. There was a lot more interest in the faculty at MU and part of it was because the University of Missouri had a Korean studies program and they were particularly interested in Truman.

RUSHAY: Yes.

DEVINE: So we worked very closely with them and then also we developed some relationships with universities overseas, in particular Yonsei University in Korea and Korea University, also in Seoul.

RUSHAY: Had you had any discussions with outgoing director Larry Hackman about the path moving forward?

DEVINE: We had a very good personal and professional relationship. Larry was kind enough to have a little reception at his apartment on the Plaza with some donors and benefactors prior to my coming on board. So my wife Maija and I got to meet a lot of folks in the Kansas City area before I even took the job. Larry, Sandy, and Maija and I went to a ball game or two at the Allen Fieldhouse at KU.

DEVINE: But I don't think we really sat down, other than when I came to Truman Library to interview for the job, and Larry talked about some of the issues, including the financial issues. But, beyond that, no. Larry did come into the building a couple days a week for the first couple years I was on board as director. He was writing a report for NARA and he had a contract or employment relationship with NARA.

DEVINE: And so I would see him from time to time and we'd exchange pleasantries and talk about the Chiefs or the Royals, whatever [laughter]. But, I don't think Larry felt it was his job to tell me how to run the library. I was working with staff on that. I think I knew what we needed to do. Some years ago, I had a staff member who was leaving to take another job. I had encouraged him to take this job, a nice promotion for him. He was all concerned about leaving things in order for his successor who would take over his job. He was going to write all these memos for him and make sure that he'd be available for that successor. And I said, "Forget about it." And I said, "Whoever takes your place, won’t call you. Don’t expect that new person coming on to give you a lot of calls and don't feel bad about it when they don't call because you left it in such good shape that there's no need for that person to call and ask for advice or where things are. Either everything's been left in perfect order or it was left in such bad shape that no one’s going to call a knucklehead predecessor and say, "Hey, how do I solve this problem?" But I said, when you leave, you're not going to get calls.

RUSHAY: Yes.

DEVINE: Just assume it's because you left things in good order and nobody needs to call you.

RUSHAY: And the expectation is that you've hired someone who is capable of taking over and making those decisions that are required. And related to that, Mike, what did you feel in your background and experience had best prepared you to be the director of the Truman Library?

DEVINE: I think my academic experience was very helpful. I think it's really good for people who are running historical agencies to have an advanced degree in history, if not a doctorate, at least a master's degree. Because you need to know the history related to the operation that you're working with, the history that is being presented to the public. And I've had the good fortune during my career to go from Ohio history to Maryland history, back to my native state of Illinois, and out to Wyoming, where we had big collections on Wyoming and western history. Illinois, of course, had the Lincoln thing. I had to read biographies of Lincoln because everyone expected me on day one when I was State Historian of Illinois to know all about Illinois history and be an expert on Lincoln. Because I had a background in history, I knew who the major historians were of the different areas and what the schools of thought were. I knew where to find the information that I needed, and I loved reading history. I've been reading history since I was a kid.

DEVINE: I was one of these types of guys who in school read books that weren't even assigned. [Laughter] So I enjoyed becoming a Truman expert, as quickly as I could. Just as I had done in Wyoming and Illinois and Maryland and Ohio. So, I think the background in history and the ability to read history, understand history, know what's good history and what's not, this is absolutely essential. Beyond that, I think just the experience of having put programs together, beginning with the Bicentennial in Ohio where there was a commission that the governor had appointed but had no programs. The previous director of the commission had left for a job at the Smithsonian. He became a very prominent historian of early aviation. Went to the Air and Space Museum and had a great career. But he was not interested in the Bicentennial. The commission hadn't met for six months. It didn't have much of a budget. There were no programs. It was really a commission that was stuck in the mud, and the whole attitude of the country in 1974 was "Do we really need a Bicentennial?" It was right at the time Nixon had resigned and there was kind of a "malaise," I guess is the word Jimmy Carter used. Some even were suggesting that the Bicentennial be cancelled.

RUSHAY: True.

DEVINE: So picking up that program, raising money, getting an appropriation through the state legislature was a challenge for a new administration with no experience. The chairman [of the Bicentennial Commission] told me about a grant that had been proposed by the George Gund Foundation in Cleveland. Over $100,000. It was really about $150,000, which, in 1970s money, I mean if you look at it today that would be half a million, maybe more. This was huge money in my world, just coming out of being a part-time instructor at Ohio University.

RUSHAY: Right.

DEVINE: Holy cow! But he said that money is probably lost because the deadline for having a plan and how to spend it is next week. It was to run programs in colleges and universities and we had to have a college coordinator on board. We had a week or ten days to do that. And I said, "Hey, that's a lot of money. Let's see if we can't get it."

RUSHAY: Yeah. Sure.

DEVINE: So, the next day, I was in my little VW zipping up to Cleveland. I'd never been to Cleveland before. Met this gentleman at Erieview Plaza in his huge office of the director of the George Gund Foundation overlooking Lake Erie. And he took me to lunch. We had a good discussion. And he said, "But the deadline is there. It's ten days.”

RUSHAY: Yeah. Right.

DEVINE: He asked, “How can you get a college coordinator on your staff and have a plan?" I said, “Well, I can do it, just watch me." He said, "My only stipulation is I want to see your plan and I want to interview your college coordinator that you hired." So when I got back to Columbus, I got on the phone, called the chairmen of the history departments at Ohio State, Western Reserve, Cincinnati, and

Miami. All had a PhD program then. I told them I was looking for a recent PhD or an ABD who was looking for a job. I knew there would be a lot of them out there [laughter].

RUSHAY: Yeah. Right.

DEVINE: I needed somebody who was not only a good historian but somebody who was not terribly academic, somebody who could meet with people.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Great.

DEVINE: I needed an academic with a bit of an outgoing personality. I found a fellow at Western Reserve University who turned out to do a wonderful job. I interviewed people within two or three days, arranged for this fellow to meet with the head of the Gund Foundation, and the Gund Foundation director said yeah, that's fine, you get your money. And not only that, but a year later they gave us another $100,000 because they were so pleased with the program. So that was my first experience in getting programs up running, getting them off the ground, putting staff together. Eventually, we went from one staff to five or six to run these programs. I think even people at the Bicentennial administration in Washington, DC were impressed that we had one of the better programs in the country.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Right.

DEVINE: Later in my career, I faced the same situation at Historic St. Mary’s City. The director there was a retired NARA official and I think he saw working for the State of Maryland as a nice retirement sinecure. But we had to get the program up and running and it was fun to do that. I enjoyed getting programs that look like they were stuck and putting them together and making them work. Illinois, the same thing. The State Historical Library had been pretty much morbid for a decade or so in spite of some good people working there, including the director. It all had to do with politics. When I got there, the governor [James R. Thompson] was going to reorganize the Illinois State Historical Library into a larger agency that would include historic sites and also the State Historic Preservation Office. And I found within three months I was not only director of the State Historical Library, but I became director of the larger agency and found myself in charge of the historic sites as well as serving as State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO).

RUSHAY: Yeah, sure.

DEVINE: So that was a fun, interesting challenge to put things together and do that. Same thing in Wyoming. So when I came to the Truman Library, I felt of all the places where I had worked that the Truman Library was in the best shape of any of those places. It had a good federal staff, for the most part. There were a couple of staff issues that needed to be addressed, but we had some really good people like Ray Geselbracht and Clay Bauske. And Amy Williams had just joined the Library staff. The current director of the Truman Library, Mark Adams, was leading education programs then.

RUSHAY: No. Uh-huh. Sure. Right.

DEVINE: Education was under the Institute at that time. And the Institute was housed within the Truman Library. We had this program funding that had been raised for the renovation of the Truman Library.

RUSHAY: All right.

DEVINE: Most of that funding had already come in or been pledged. It was just a matter of following up with people on their pledges and so forth. But getting things up and running was the issue. I didn't have to go out and raise money as well as get the programs

up and running. It was a situation where the folks at NARA, particularly Archivist John Carlin, Jerry George, who was on his staff, and others, were very supportive of what presidential libraries were doing at that time.

RUSHAY: What did you see as your major challenge or difficulty that you wanted to try to address, either that you expected or was unexpected?

DEVINE: We did have a couple of staff issues that needed to be corrected.

RUSHAY: Right.

DEVINE: And it took a lot of time to document issues that needed to be addressed. The National Archives personnel office was very adverse to terminating people or even instituting discipline. I think one of their problems was that there was a feeling on the part of some of the people at NARA that they should be running the presidential libraries from Washington. Some NARA offices believed in keeping a close watch on them, the presidential library directors. There were already ten or eleven presidential libraries when I came on in 2001. There was no way offices within NARA could manage day-to-day operations, so it was somewhat difficult to get approved for things where we needed to move ahead on certain things.

DEVINE: The Federal Trust Fund was a particularly challenging issue. It was easy to put money in there. They liked anything that came in, gifts that would come in, admissions, gift store sales, great. But the people who managed the Trust Fund didn't like to spend any money. They liked to see big balances. I described it as one of those old-fashioned ceramic piggy banks, where you could put the coins in a little slot on the top, but you couldn't get any money out of it without breaking the bank.

DEVINE: I mean, if you wanted to get a nickel out for a candy bar, you had to turn the piggy bank upside down, just shake it like crazy and hope that a nickel would fall out. That's what it was like dealing with the Trust Fund people, for even small little things. They required you to spend a thousand dollars of staff time on paperwork to get them to release a couple hundred dollars. If we had teachers come in to judge a History Day program or we did a little seminar on how to use the White House Decision Center for teachers, we would buy pizza and cokes and soft drinks, maybe sandwiches and chips. It was a nice thing to do for people who were staying after school or through their dinner hour to give them a little snack. But, it was such a difficult thing to do that. I ended up buying the treats myself. I discussed this with Kurt Graham, my successor, how much we had to just dip into our own [laughter] little checking account and write a check for $120 for pizza and coke for ten teachers.

RUSHAY: Sure.

DEVINE: It was just that kind of silliness. No Archivist seemed interested in dealing with the Trust Fund or personnel offices.

RUSHAY: How did your relationship with NARA change during your almost thirteen years as Truman Library director?

DEVINE: The biggest change came with Archivist David Ferriero. I think I and the other library directors had a very good relationship with John Carlin. He was not a historian or museum or library person. He had been the governor of Kansas. But he was a very savvy political guy and understood delegation. He understood what we were trying to do and really saw it as his job, and I think this was true of Allen Weinstein as well, to support the presidential library directors. Although Weinstein had a much different managerial style, he supported you to help you do your job.

DEVINE: So within the first eight years that I was at the Truman Library, first eight or nine years, we went through Carlin, he was removed unceremoniously by George W. Bush, and then Alan Weinstein came. I had known Allen from before he became Archivist, and I

knew him professionally. I think when he came on, I was the only presidential librarian that he knew on a first name basis. So that went very well. Then we had for about a year an acting Archivist before David Ferriero came on. So within the first eight or nine years, we had four archivists. Ferriero came in with some feeling that the presidential libraries needed to be brought under control, that library directors were loose cannons and were out there. I think his problem was that when he came on he surrounded himself with a lot of career people from NARA in Washington. They gave him some bad advice and he really didn’t know what the presidential libraries were about. He was very much an eastern guy. He had never had a job more than a hundred miles from the Atlantic coast.

RUSHAY: Right.

DEVINE: He grew up in Boston and then was at Duke and the New York Public Library. And he didn’t really like going west of the Allegheny Mountains. I remember when we were dedicating the George W. Bush Library down in Dallas, Texas and his staff were trying to tell him he should go out the night before the ceremony.

DEVINE: He said, "No, no, I don't want to have to stay overnight in Dallas. I'll just take an early six o’clock flight from New York and get there at 7:00 or 7:30 Central Time and drive out, and I'll be there by the 10:00 opening of the 10:00 ceremony."

RUSHAY: Yeah, right.

DEVINE: And people were just horrified. What happens if the plane's delayed? You really must make sure you’re there well out the night before.

RUSHAY: True.

DEVINE: And I saw this a number of times. He just seemed to be very uncomfortable outside of Washington, DC. He also had this managerial style, and this is my opinion, but I think maybe some others might agree, that the way one makes his mark as a new administrator was to change everything that the previous administrations had done. Everything! The whole table of organization had to be redone. He’d move boxes around on the table of organization lines going different places. There are instances where maybe your predecessor wasn't a particularly gifted administrator and you need to make some adjustments. But you need to set three, four, five goals. Here's what I want to accomplish in the next few years and do that rather than say let's just change everything for the sake of change. And that was my opinion of his managerial style. For whatever reason, when he re-did the table of organization, he put the presidential libraries (library directors) at the very bottom of the organization chart. We had previously reported to an assistant archivist for presidential libraries and that person had direct access to the Archivist. With Ferriero, we went through three or four layers of bureaucracy before you got to the Archivist. In fact, we were so low on the table of organization, I pointed out at one time that the exhibits person downtown at the regional archives in Kansas City, a wonderful lady who I've known professionally in her different roles for years, she had no staff, she had no budget, she didn't even have a toolkit.

DEVINE: When she came on, she was so distressed that they (NARA in DC) said: "Why do you need a tool kit?" We're getting traveling exhibits. Well, how do you open the crates? She had to bring her husband's tool kit from home for framing pictures and doing matting. I said come on out here. You can work with Clay and his staff, as we had a nice facility. So, she was out here a lot doing work. We didn't go through NARA and ask for permission for that. Under Ferriero’s regime, they would have had to ruminate about it for six months. But, we just did that for this person. At any rate, she reported on the same level in the Ferriero table of organization as I did and as all the other presidential library directors did. The directors of Roosevelt and LBJ, Kennedy, all of us.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Right.

DEVINE: We were all at the very bottom of the table of organization. Meanwhile, Ferriero had over on the side this box with presidential library foundations and they had a line directly to him. So he really seemed to enjoy taking calls from the foundations directly, hobnobbing with the Kennedy family and some of the others. Foundations had some high powered people, Nancy Reagan's group particularly. Also, the LBJ (Foundation) had some nationally prominent people. We did too early on. So I think that he just felt that this was a way that we library directors should be kept under control or punished. I don’t know what his plan was, but we ended up at the very bottom of the table of organization and it led to some problems that exist even today. Since right now NARA doesn't have an Archivist other than the Secretary of State Marco Rubio (among his other three or four positions), you would know better than me what's going on now.

RUSHAY: No.

DEVINE: As I wrote in 2018 in the article that appeared in The Public Historian, you can hold that as my assessment of the situation.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Sure.

DEVINE: I wrote there really needs to be some adjustment here. Some of these foundations are really not supporting presidential libraries. They have their own agendas, which is fine, but if that's going to be the case, then the Libraries have to have their own little support group that can raise some money.

RUSHAY: Yes. Sure.

DEVINE: Some of these foundations are, in my view, using money that was given years ago to support the library but they're supporting other things. I pointed out at that time there was some controversy going on around the Barack Obama Library. That eventually fell apart and the Obama Library doesn't exist. There’s an Obama Presidential Center on South Lakeshore Drive in Chicago. And I don't have any idea what's going on with Joe Biden's operation. And Trump? I haven't heard much about anything there, but surely his relationship with NARA is not a happy one. And I think that it's pretty clear that the current president wants to take some kind of revenge on NARA. It's really gotten to the point where I wonder what is going to be the future for presidential libraries if we are stuck at the twelve or thirteen [sixteen] presidential libraries that exist now.

RUSHAY: Right. Right.

DEVINE: If no more are added under the old system, are the twelve or thirteen just going to kind of wither away and die on the vine? Or will there be some other system altogether?

DEVINE: I really think that there needs to be some major evaluation of presidential libraries and their foundations. How are they going to go forward?

RUSHAY: Sure.

DEVINE: How are they going to be set up in a way that they will accurately present public history as well as provide access to important government documents for research?

RUSHAY: Sure. And as the director of the Truman Library for a very long time, I think from the beginning of the existence of the Truman Library Institute, the director had the title of being the Secretary of the Institute. Did you have a firm idea in mind what your relationship as director was going to be with the Institute?

DEVINE: Yeah, I think I saw the Institute as a support group for the library. That the Institute functioned the way the Ohio State University Foundation supports Ohio State University. There is not an Ohio State University Foundation football team. There's the Ohio State University football team that gets money from the foundation and boosters’ clubs and so forth. There's not an Ohio State University Foundation College of Agriculture, although the Foundation supports the College of Agriculture.

DEVINE: At Truman Library in particular, the director of the Library was always the Secretary up until Larry Hackman’s time and then University of Iowa President Sandy Boyd, the chair, was in charge of signing off on all the billing, that sort of thing. And he was at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and he said, “Hey Larry, why don't you just become the director?” Okay. So Larry became the director of the Institute as well as a member of the executive committee; and somebody else, I don’t know whether somebody else took over the duties of secretary at that time or not. So when I came on, I was director of the library and director (president) of the Institute. I think president was the title. Maybe it was president or something. I forget. But we had a chair and so I was handling the budgetary expenditures. I was signing off on those things and this created all kinds of conflicts with NARA. Along with Duke Blackwood at Reagan for a time, I was the only director of a presidential library who was also director or president of the foundation, so I had to frequently get exemptions from the NARA legal office if somebody invited me to a dinner or event as happened a couple times. We got support from the Kansas City Chiefs as one of the many companies in Kansas City that supported us.

DEVINE: I got invited to their skybox a couple times. As a federal employee, you're not supposed to have a lunch provided for you that costs more than, I think at that time it was $12. The lunch at the Chief's Skybox with Lamar Hunt was more than a $12 lunch, I can tell you that. My bar bill was more than $12 and that was before kickoff. So, I had to get NARA's permission to accept this invitation to meet with Lamar Hunt, who wanted to know why Carl Peterson and his staff were buying a $10,000 table at “Wild About Harry” each year. So, it was that kind of conflict or kind of a nuisance thing. And I felt that at some point we needed to have the director of the library be on the executive committee but not necessarily be in charge of the day-to-day operations of the Institute.

RUSHAY: Right. Right.

DEVINE: The other thing that caused a problem with the Institute was that a federal employee can't directly supervise non-federal employees. So I couldn't supervise the Institute staff. If there was an issue there, I had to go to the chair and say, "Hey, we got a problem here." And the chairs really didn't have much day-to-day contact with what was going on at the Institute office. That needed to be changed. A couple things happened. One, after the economic meltdown in 2008, we had this Dodd-Frank legislation to look at how organizations were managed. Our chairman at that time, Bill Nelson, who had been a prominent banker in Kansas City and was retired, felt we needed to redo the constitution or the bylaws of the Institute. I didn't feel that was necessary, but I really didn't want to make a big fuss about it. When Bill leaves, we'll just kind of make some adjustments and get back to the way we need to be. So, I went along with it. But then the next year, when we had term limits in this new constitution, Bill Nelson didn't want to abide by the term limits. I said, "Hey, you went through this whole business of re-doing the bylaws, and now we get to the first instance where the bylaws take effect, which is you moving on and we get a new chairman."

DEVINE: I mean, you're term limited and you want to change that. And I told some other board members that I thought that was inappropriate. He should not be doing that. I think he got very angry when he found out that I didn't agree with him on his disregarding these new bylaws that he had been so keen on.

RUSHAY: Right.

DEVINE: It led to this unfortunate situation. I think NARA should have been more supportive of me. There were some instances with our board, but others too. FDR was a really nasty situation at the same time. Also, a few years later Kennedy the same thing. It was I think because the presidential library directors were placed in a weak position by Ferriero’s administration. We were not reporting to someone who reported directly to the Archivist of the United States, but people from all the presidential library institutes and foundations were calling Ferriero and his staff every day telling them things that, in many cases, were not factually correct.

RUSHAY: Okay.

DEVINE: And, at least in our case, I wanted very much to keep any disputes we had in house.

RUSHAY: Right.

DEVINE: I didn't want it to be on the front page of The Kansas City Star, which would have led to it to be on the front page of The New York Times the next day. I managed to keep it in house. But, it was for me an unpleasant transition that should have been very smooth and orderly.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

DEVINE: In my view, the responsibility for it being as messy as it was was with NARA and Ferrerio.

RUSHAY: Do you feel…? Go ahead. Go ahead.

DEVINE: From that point on, Ferriero’s situation between foundations and the libraries has only gotten worse.

RUSHAY: You're referencing your 2018 article that appeared in The Public Historian in the May issue.

DEVINE: Like I said in my 2018 article, and I still feel this way today, there needs to be some reckoning, some kind of adjustment. And unfortunately, with the way Congress is now, it may be almost impossible to get Congress to even pay attention to this issue.

RUSHAY: You did write, quote: “The traditional role of the foundations as organizations providing funding support to build and endow presidential libraries and enhance public and academic programs has gone off the tracks.” And then, furthermore, you say, quote: “New library foundations for some present and all future libraries should be required to have support of the library as their sole mission.” Did your experience as Truman Library director help shape that point of view? I mean, you've kind of alluded to some of this already, but from your own background maybe you can speak a little bit more to what helped shape this article?

DEVINE: Yeah. Yeah. My experience and the experience of other presidential library directors led to that statement. I think that when you have presidential library foundations that are building huge edifices that dwarf the presidential library, when they have all kinds

of displays and exhibits that are not accurately telling the history of the administration, I think when you have foundations using their buildings, that you're using the name presidential library, then problems arise. They have activities like political debates, Republican party debates at the Reagan Library. Well, they're actually at the Reagan Foundation’s building, which is the airplane hangar.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Yeah.

DEVINE: I really think if they want to have a foundation to perpetuate the memory of a particular president, build a giant edifice, build a school of government, that's fine and good. Then you need to have a support group that is dedicated entirely for the presidential library.

RUSHAY: Right.

DEVINE: And again, I use the university model because I've been in and out of university administration. I've frequently taught at universities. You don't want to have a university foundation that goes off and builds its own law school. Okay?

RUSHAY: All right.

DEVINE: It supports the university’s law school, the ag school at the university. And there's input from the university. The university president sits on the board, provides guidance, provides information that the foundation needs for university priorities and goals, that sort of thing. You have universities that are run by a president. The president does not report to the university foundation. The president of the university reports to a board of trustees appointed by the governor. I think there was some misunderstanding on the part of our chairman, Bill Nelson, that the foundation ran the library and I think this was true not just here at the Truman Library. That presidential library directors reported to the foundations and how they got that notion, it was things that were said and done by NARA and Ferriero.

RUSHAY: Right.

DEVINE: Certainly, they (foundations) were aware of how low we were on the NARA totem pole, which was just totally, in my view, a bogus table of organization. It didn't reflect the reality of how things were done. Again, I think what Ferriero called the grand reorganization or something like that, and very grand, yeah. I don’t see anyone looking back at the "grand transformation" would see it objectively and assess it as a positive development.

RUSHAY: Maybe transformation, right?

DEVINE: Right.

RUSHAY: Was there a point where you were no longer secretary of the Institute?

DEVINE: I don't think I ever was. There was a time up to 2008 when I was, in addition to being on the executive committee, serving as the Institute’s executive director (or president).

RUSHAY: Okay.

DEVINE: I was the director, but then for 2008 or 2009 NARA told me essentially to get out of the executive job. But I was still on the executive committee.

RUSHAY: Okay, great. Let me just go back to NARA just for a little bit, about some of the people that you worked with most closely at the presidential libraries central office in Washington and College Park. Do you recall the names of some of the people you work most closely with during your tenure?

DEVINE: When I first came on, Rich Claypool, a longtime NARA official, was deputy or assistant archivist for presidential libraries. I think he really knew the culture of NARA. He'd been there a long time. He liked presidential libraries and was very supportive. After he left, I don't know if there's anybody in between him and Sharon Fawcett, who came on. I think Sharon was a wonderful person, a great longtime NARA employee, but in that position, I think they needed someone with a little more gravitas. I think she was kind of overwhelmed by some of the foundation people. Another person, towards the end of my career, I worked with Susan Donius. David Ferriero pretty much moved Sharon Fawcett out of her job and she retired.

RUSHAY: Yes. Great.

DEVINE: Then Susan Donius moved up into a new role at a lower level on the table of organization. Susan did what she could for library directors. Another person towards the end of my career that I worked with was Jim Gardner and he had come over from the Museum of American History. He had been an assistant director there and came over. I had known Jim for maybe thirty years by the time he came on. I knew him way back when he was on the staff of the AASLH, American Association for State and Local History. He was education coordinator on Jerry George’s staff. That’s where I got to know Jerry, going back to the days when I was with the Ohio Historical Society. We worked closely with AASLH especially, even during the Bicentennial. The AASLH had a big grant from NEH to do publications and other programs related to the Bicentennial, and Jerry George was the coordinator of this big publication program at AASLH, and I was director of state Bicentennial programs in Ohio.

RUSHAY: All right.

DEVINE: So, that's what that goes back to, the mid ‘70s when we became friends.

RUSHAY: Okay.

DEVINE: And I don't recall exactly when Jim Gardner came on the staff, but he was certainly there by 1978 or 1979. At NARA, Jim’s position was not clearly defined regarding presidential libraries.

RUSHAY: We're almost at the one hour mark. We're actually past the one hour mark. I wanted to ask you, and then maybe this could be our last question of the morning if you'd like. We have others to cover, which we could cover maybe next week or another time. But I wanted to ask you about whether you think the budget that you had during your Truman Library directorship was adequate. Do you feel like you had the necessary operating expense budget? You made a reference earlier to the Trust Fund being difficult to use. But of course there's also the support that the Institute provided, and also for the Gift Fund. But I guess I'm thinking more in terms of the federal budget and the operations. If you will, was that adequate to support the programs at the library?

DEVINE: Yeah, it was up until right towards the end. Carlin, and particularly Allen Weinstein, were very good at getting appropriations through Congress. They were actually getting into the president's budget, which was the key thing. I don't think Congress looked that carefully at NARA in particular as a line item in the budget. Both Carlin and Weinstein were really, really excellent at getting support. After the financial meltdown in 2008, things started to tighten up. But we didn't see that until maybe 2010 or 2011. NARA had a lot of money for digitizing collections and going electronic, and so a lot of that money was just sacrificed to keep staff and other operations going. So it really wasn't until the fiscal years ‘11 or ‘12 that we started to see the federal side cutting back. At the same time,

the recession impacted the Institute and foundation fundraising corporations. There was one year where the Kaufman Foundation, which had been a big benefactor, simply didn't give any grants at all to anybody.

RUSHAY: Okay.

DEVINE: That made things a bit more difficult. We just had some tight years, but we were never in a position where we had to lay people off, either on the federal side or the Institute side. But things were getting more tight on the federal funding. Now again, as I said, with the Trust Fund, we had a nice balance there. We just couldn't spend it. NARA just wouldn't let us use any of that money.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

RUSHAY: You were able to move several positions off of the Trust Fund in the visitor services staff, right?

DEVINE: Yeah. Yeah.

DEVINE: That came about in large measure because of things Allen Weinstein did in my view. We got a healthy appropriation. So we had enough OE money that we could take people that had been placed on the Trust Fund during an earlier downturn in federal funding and temporarily moved.

DEVINE: And it was people like our volunteer coordinator who were on Trust Fund money. And there were a couple of other people that were not ordinarily on Trust Fund money.

RUSHAY: Donna Denslow maybe. Yeah.

DEVINE: Donna Denslow, who ran the volunteer program, and some of the public programs.

RUSHAY: All right.

DEVINE: So we had some non-revenue producing people on the Trust Fund. People on Trust Fund money were supposed to be those who took tickets, sold items in the gift store, not people who managed the volunteer program or education and outreach, that sort of thing.

RUSHAY: Yes.

DEVINE: When we had the opportunity, because funding was a bit better, we made that change. So, I’m not sure whether that was in the final years of Weinstein or not. I think it was, but I’m just not sure when that took place. But for the most part, we were funded sufficiently. Things did start to tighten up in the last couple fiscal years, like 2012 or 2013, but not to the point where we were looking at making layoffs. In my last couple of years at Truman, life was complicated by federal government shutdowns.

DEVINE: And another thing about the budget of the Truman Library, we had about eighty people working in the building including Institute staff (who have since moved into their own building). But of those eighty people, only about twenty-two or twenty-three were federal employees. Everyone else was contract, maintenance, groundskeeping, security, and the HVAC electrical people. We spent a million dollars a year in our budget for security that hired people on through some security firm that hired retired police officers. They paid them on an hourly basis. They had no benefits or health care, but they had benefits and health care from being retired police officers. So that's why they worked here. So, that was a kind of a strange situation for our government, not just at presidential libraries but all over the place including the military. Yeah. You have more people on contract than on the federal payroll.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

RUSHAY: And I think that's still true today, Mike, in terms of that proportion.

DEVINE: Yeah.

DEVINE: Very good.

RUSHAY: We are set here.

RUSHAY: Good morning to you, Dr. Devine. This is the second part of our two-part oral history interview with former Truman Library Director Mike Devine.

RUSHAY: It is Thursday, August 21st, 2025. Good morning, I guess we'll just pick up where we left off last time. I think we're good. Thank you. Thanks very much.

DEVINE: Good morning to you.

RUSHAY: And ask you, where did the concept for the Key West conferences originate?

DEVINE: It originated with a colleague of mine, Dr. Robert Watson. At that time, he was with Florida Atlantic University and he proposed we do a conference in Key West on some aspect of the Truman administration. We decided to do it on national security, and in 2002 I guess it was that we had the first conference. It was the 50th anniversary of the last year of the Truman administration and we were able to bring several members of his administration down there. Ken Hechler, a former congressman from West Virginia, Milton Kayle, who had been a legal adviser in the Truman administration and went on to a very distinguished law career in New York, and most importantly, George Elsey, who was a key foreign policy adviser during the Truman administration. He had actually been in the White House as a military aid and naval officer during the Roosevelt administration. So, the three of them came down.

DEVINE: We had a wonderful time, and Bob Watson suggested we publish the papers that had been delivered there, not only by the participants in the Truman administration but the scholars we brought down there. We had an arrangement with Truman State University Press to publish the papers and that led to a series of twelve books. We did twelve conferences in a row. All of them were videotaped. A number of them appeared on C-SPAN. There were some who criticized that we only got thirty or forty people to attend these conferences in Key West along with the scholars. They said, "That's a lot of money." Besides our travel money, we put in a couple thousand dollars of Institute money, but most of the money came from the Little White House in Key West and other partners. And I agreed that we didn't draw a big audience down there. It wasn't that Key West was known as a center of scholarly activity. There

were no large educational institutions there. But we published the papers. So they reached a wide audience on library shelves throughout the country. And when we appeared on C-SPAN, we reached an audience that would fill Arrowhead Stadium two or three times.

RUSHAY: Interesting. What?

DEVINE: So, yeah, we were very pleased with that program. It was very cost-effective for us at the Truman Library and to the extent that we put in Institute money, I thought it was a very effective way of looking at the Truman administration and getting aspects of his administration, from Native American affairs to environmental issues explored in new ways. Ken Hechler pointed out in the Truman administration we never used the word environment. He never mentioned that word, but his administration did a lot of things in nuclear energy, the Florida Everglades, all over, and had a great impact on environmentalism. So, even though you didn't call yourselves environmentalists, Ken, your work impacted the environment.

RUSHAY: All right.

DEVINE: So, yeah, it was a lot of fun. We brought a lot of great Truman scholars down to Key West, and I think we put a lot of information on the record that quite frankly needed to be on the record. We looked at aspects of the Truman administration that, in many cases, had been ignored, such as public health, civil rights, that sort of thing. I'm very proud of that program. Yeah.

RUSHAY: Shifting from Key West to Independence. Do you recall how the Truman Working Office renovation came about and what was your role in that?

DEVINE: For a long time, people had been trying to figure out how to make the Truman office in the Truman Library building accessible to the public or at least have a way that the public could see the office and understand how Truman used the office during his time and actually how he actually used the whole Truman Library during his retirement. Unlike other presidents, who would visit occasionally or didn't visit at all, Truman was a frequent visitor almost on a daily basis early on.

RUSHAY: Right.

DEVINE: So, we looked at a number of different options and decided to build basically a gallery space outside the picture window that Truman had in his office. People could actually look in. Also, it gave us a chance to use some video material to show Truman in his office moving around, meeting with people and talking. It offered some information about how the library itself was built. We did have a little mini campaign for about $1.5 million. It was hard to do a campaign after you've just completed a Classroom for Democracy Campaign, which I inherited and came in right at the tail end of. People were still paying off their pledges in some cases in 2004 and 2005 and to go into another little mini campaign was not a good idea. But we did get some good help. We got some investment tax credits from a state board. Actually, Bill Nelson was key to our getting the helpful tax credits. He was, I think, Institute vice chairman at the time, but he was helpful in getting the Truman Library some investment tax credits which helped us raise about $1.5 million to build that addition onto the library. And I think it's fair to say it's been a successful addition. It has been very popular with people. I've heard many good comments. It didn't

really encroach much on the burial site, the garden space within the Truman Library. We had to take some of that space, but not so much. I think the architecture blends in nicely with the architecture of the building, which I guess you describe as a kind of a neo-Soviet 1950s style, concrete brutalist building. But that's what was popular then. So yeah, that was a nice addition to the interpretive program at the Truman Library.

RUSHAY: I also recall NEH funding. I think that we successfully got a Saving America's Treasures grant through the National Endowment of the Humanities to help with this renovation.

DEVINE: I recall something about that, too. I just can't tell you the specifics. This is back when the NEH was still alive and an important factor in supporting cultural and historical programs across the country. I don't recall the specifics of how that tied in with the Truman Working Office, but I do recall getting that grant. It's been almost twenty years now.

RUSHAY: Sure. Yeah, and I recall to this day that the Truman Working Office renovation is one of the highlights of people's tours here at the library, and I know we take people through that exhibit very frequently. So, shifting over to partnerships and stakeholders, Mike, what new local or national or international stakeholders and partners did you seek to develop to support the Truman Library and its programs?

DEVINE: First off, I thought we should try to work more closely with the Truman Home, which is just a mile away, and many people who visit the Truman Library also visit the Truman Home. And we had only limited success in working with the Truman Home because of the rules and regulations of the National Park Service. They are the most hidebound agency I've ever dealt with. There's a little story. We sought a method whereby people could not get tickets to the Truman Library when they visited the home and vice versa.

DEVINE: The Truman Home had a ticket office several blocks away from the home. It was in what used to be the county courthouse and jail for Jackson County. And they had this big pegboard with clothes pins in it, and they would schedule tours for four people at a time every twenty minutes.

RUSHAY: Come…

DEVINE: So, when they scheduled a tour for three people, they would take three clothes pins out of the pegboard and say,” We got room for one more person on this tour.” That's how they were keeping track of their tours. And we said, "We are all on computers now." We explained to them that visitors could buy a ticket from us, just as people buy tickets to the opera or to the Kansas City Chiefs games, and you can buy the tickets at dozens of locations, even on your own computer at home. And as soon as you buy it, the computer takes that ticket off the system. It's no longer available to anyone else. Explaining to them that we can do this technology in the early part of the 21st century. And they agreed that this seemed like a good idea. But they said, "But we got this pegboard with the clothes pins, and how's that going to fit in?" I mean, it was just impossible. But more successful efforts were working with the Truman Little White House down in Key West, which I identified early on as an important component of the Truman story. He spent a lot of time down there when he was the president. He didn't like Camp David

that much. Shortly after I became the director, I was asked if I could serve on the advisory board for the Little White House. I'd never been there. I'd never seen it. Once I got permission from the NARA legal office that this would not be a conflict of interest and all that kind of stuff, I decided to go down there and that's what led to my meetings with Bob Watson at Florida Atlantic University (now at Lynn University in Florida) and meeting the people down there who are very interested in partnership with the Truman Library.

DEVINE: I think another very successful partnership was with the Korean studies program at the University of Missouri-Columbia. We never really did that much with UMKC. I think it's in part because of their history department. They're nice people, but there's no one there who's really a Truman scholar. There's no powerful East Asian Studies program or that sort of thing. But there was a very ambitious program in Asian studies, and Korean studies in particular, at the University of Missouri. Another little story. I was told that the reason a great many Korean students went to the University of Missouri is because of Truman. Truman, either while he was president or afterwards, prevailed upon the Board of Curators at the University of Missouri to give special tuition breaks or free tuition to Korean students. And as a result, a great number of people have degrees in journalism, engineering, or just about every profession you can imagine. Koreans have degrees from the University of Missouri. I was told, I never was able to verify this, that there were as many people in the Korean National Assembly with degrees from the University of Missouri as there were in the Missouri legislature. That seems a bit incredible, but maybe it's true.

DEVINE: I met a lot of people in my time in Korea who had some connection with the University of Missouri, but I've never been able to verify that Truman had any correspondence with the Board of Curators at the University of Missouri. I had a discussion with President Brady Deaton, and he had people look through the University of Missouri archives and their Board of Curators’ minutes. I was never able to find any documentation of this request by Truman or suggestion by Truman.

RUSHAY: Okay.

DEVINE: So, if it happened, it must have been a very informal thing. But the fact remains that there are an awful lot of Koreans who have degrees from University of Missouri. They have a big alumni association in Seoul, so it was a natural partnership for us.

RUSHAY: I recall that question coming up, Mike, and we looked into that in the archives department to see if we could find documentation and we never did, but perhaps it was more of a verbal agreement, or maybe there is something in the archives and we just haven't found it yet. But it's an interesting story.

DEVINE: Yeah, I would think it would be more likely to be in the records of the University of Missouri, if it even exists. Maybe some committee meeting or some resolution of their Board of Curators, but when I asked them if they would check, they came back and said, "No, we couldn't find anything." So, the folklore continues. It reminds me of one of the final lines in one of my favorite westerns, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” This young reporter finds out the real story of who shot Liberty Valance and

said, "What do I write now?" His editor says, “This is the West. When the myth becomes reality, you print the myth.” That's where we are on that one. It's a nice myth.

RUSHAY: You mentioned Seoul and…

DEVINE: And I guess the results are that there are a lot of Korean students who have gone through the University of Missouri. They have a big alumni association that's very supportive of the University of Missouri. The alumni association in Seoul is huge. So something happened somewhere. Yeah.

RUSHAY: How did you seek to cultivate relationships and partnerships with Korean universities, especially Yonsei University?

DEVINE: I had been at Yonsei University as a senior Fulbright Lecturer in 1995, when I had a semester off from the University of Wyoming. And while I was there, I met Dr. Horace G. Underwood, who had been the president of Yonsei University at one time. His grandfather was the founder of Yonsei University. Horace S. Underwood had been an important figure in Korean higher education, and I actually worked on editing his memoirs that were published by Yonsei Press. So I had a good relationship with Yonsei. We did a number of exchanges with them. Also, Yonsei was making a concerted effort to acquire the presidential papers of Korean presidents since their creation of the Republic of Korea in 1948 following a UN supervised election.

DEVINE: And I'm often told, in fact, I'm working with an editor right now who questions when I said that in 1950 during the time of the Korean War, Korea was a fledgling democracy. This editor said, “No, no. Everything I've read says it was a dictatorship and that the election in 1948 had serious questions about it." And I said, "There may have been some irregularities in the election in Korea 1948." And, of course, the North Koreans refused to participate because they knew they wouldn't do very well. "But keep in mind,” I said, “there was an election in 1948 in the United States that had some serious irregularities. For example, blacks couldn't vote in many of the southern states. So, we basically disenfranchised millions of men and women just because they were black."

RUSHAY: It's a good point.

DEVINE: Truman would have won anyway, but I said this was not a very fair election if you look at it that way. Plus, we didn't have the kind of voting mechanisms that we have now. So, it was easy for big city politicians to rig elections and there were always questions about the Daley machine in Chicago stealing votes.

RUSHAY: Right?

DEVINE: But, I can tell you, as someone who grew up in what was then considered downstate Illinois, there was a lot of voting fraud in downstate Illinois, too. One of the jokes in Illinois was that (Mayor Richard J.) Daley always withheld a Chicago vote until he saw how many votes were stolen down state, and then he would adjust to compensate for that. I mean, there was stuff that went on in Will County, Illinois, where I grew up, that was just totally ridiculous in terms of vote counting.

RUSHAY: Okay. Anything else you'd like to say on that subject, Mike? In terms of partnerships with Yonsei or with anyone else?

DEVINE: No. I guess that's probably about enough. We did meet with a lot of foreign officials. I think the partnerships that we put in place, especially with the University of Missouri, continued under Kurt Graham. Some of the overseas and other partnerships continued.

RUSHAY: Okay.

DEVINE: People came in from the archives of the Russian Federation and they invited me to go there and we actually loaned them some non-collection items for an exhibit they did. I was asked to speak at the NATO headquarters and at the Czech Republic. So we were open to spreading the word and meeting with institutions around the world as well as in the United States.

RUSHAY: Sure, sure. Yeah. And I recall a very successful conference in 2010 with the Central Intelligence Agency exploring declassified materials about the Korean War.

DEVINE: Right?

RUSHAY: You may recall here on site here at the Truman Library.

DEVINE: Yeah, that was a good example of interaction with a federal agency.

RUSHAY: One, right.

DEVINE: And I think the Central Intelligence Agency was very pleased with that conference and the way it turned out.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Yeah, they published a very nice volume after it, including a CD ROM, I guess, in those days. And yeah, it was one of the few large scholarly conferences [in recent years], the type that we used to have fairly frequently. So I recall that.

DEVINE: Yeah.

DEVINE: I could add, too, that when I was mentioning Yonsei University, I should note their efforts to collect the presidential papers of every president in Korea. The one president they couldn't get a hold of was Park Chung-hee, who was the president-slash-dictator between 1961 and 1979. He was certainly an authoritarian ruler in Korea but actually an authoritarian reformer in a lot of ways. His family actually developed their own Park Chung-hee Presidential Library, which I went to after I retired. I happened to be in Korea. I had a Fulbright Senior Lectureship (2017-2018) after I retired and visited that institution just on my own. Yonsei was interested in collecting presidential papers. They were interested in how presidential libraries worked in the United States.

DEVINE: The papers that Yonsei was collecting, and they had also at that time just taken over the library of Kim Dae Jung, a Nobel Peace Prize winning president of Korea, were the private papers of the presidents. I actually had an audience with Kim Dae Jung when I was there, and he met with me and also with Scott Rolley, who was deputy director at that time. We did a seminar with Yonsei and the National Archives of Korea. Their National Archives holds the presidential papers of their presidents and what Yonsei was collecting were the private papers. That was a very interesting and informative meeting. Ray Geselbracht also was involved in that. Just another example of the kind of fun, interesting and, I think, very productive partnership that we were involved in during my tenure.

RUSHAY: Yes, yes, indeed. Those are excellent examples. Changing subjects here, Margaret Truman Daniel, the Truman's daughter and only child, died in 2008. A few years later, we acquired Bess Truman's papers that had been in Margaret’s possession. Her family donated the papers to us. We got some very interesting financial records and documents that show the Truman's connections to Independence, their very deep connections in their community, their bank records (they kept every receipt), every canceled check, their tax returns, etc. It was really one of the best acquisitions we got during your tenure.

DEVINE: Yeah. Amazing.

RUSHAY: Can you speak a little bit about your relationship with Margaret Truman Daniel and her family, especially Clifton Truman Daniel?

DEVINE: I met Clifton shortly after I became director. He was very supportive of me and made a lot of phone calls and public appearances. He came down to Key West every year we did our conference and would make some introductory remarks. It helped bring some attention to that program down there just by his presence and of course he's a very polished speaker. He trained as an actor and was just a very good representative for the family. So, shortly after I became director, I called Clifton and told him I wanted to visit his mother.

DEVINE: I was going to be in New York on some other business. I forget what it was, something related to the National Archives. And I said, "I'd like to just play a courtesy call." And he said, " Fine. I'll give her a call and tell her to expect you to give her a ring." So, a few days later, I called Margaret Truman Daniel, told her who I was, and said, "I'd like to stop by and say hi." And she said, "That'd be fine." So, we arranged a date. She said, "What time do you want to stop by?" And I said, "10:00." "My god! No, that's much too early. No, no, no, no!” I asked, “How about 2:00 in the afternoon?” So, we arranged a meeting at 2:00 in the afternoon. So, I went to her apartment on Park Avenue, just up the street from the Grand Central Station, in a big building. She had an apartment that was on essentially the ground floor, but it was up a half a story. As I recall, it was a first floor apartment, and I don't know how many bedrooms they had; it was a big apartment. There was a front desk there. A door man there said that's her apartment right over there. So, I went up these half a flight of stairs and got ready to knock on the door. And just in front of the door was one of these welcome mats, only instead of “Welcome” it said “Go Away.” I thought this is nice. But I knocked on the door anyway, or rang the doorbell, and she came and she was very gracious. We had, I don't know, a cup of tea or something and I just talked about the library and what we were doing and mentioned some people that I'd already been in contact with that she knew, George Elsey

and Milton Kayle and others. A year or so later I went back to New York, and this time my wife Maija was accompanying me. I had told her the story about the welcome mat that said “Go Away.” And so we got to Margaret’s, and she knew that Maija was coming along on this trip. When we got to her door, there was no mat there.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

DEVINE: There was no mat saying go away. So that was fine. We had a nice meeting, and as we were leaving I noticed she had taken that mat in and stuck it behind the door. So, I guess she felt because Maija was going to be there, she'd be on her best behavior. But she was a very feisty lady. She was probably into her mid-80s by the time I met her. Of course, she had an interesting career as a singer and entertainer, then later as a talk show host with Mike Wallace as her talk show host companion. Kind of an early version of “Regis and Kathy Lee.” She was a real packrat and we're happy that she was, of course. So were her parents. They kept everything except for the letters that Bess Truman destroyed. There's the famous story of Harry Truman coming down the stairway and seeing Bess sitting there with the shoe boxes throwing letters into the fireplace and Harry says, "Bess, think of history." She said, "That's what I'm thinking of." But the letters that were in the possession of Margaret survived and we're certainly glad that they did. It gives us a tremendous insight into what was going on in the family, in the household, and also into Truman’s private financial situation.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Right.

DEVINE: There was always this notion that he didn't have any money when he left the White House, that the only income he had was from his retirement from the Missouri National Guard. But the fact is he had some good investments. He owned at least half, as I recall, of the thousand-acre farm down in Grandview, Missouri. And at that time, the land was selling at about $2,000 an acre. So, he had that plus a number of investments and even owned a part of the Los Angeles Rams football team at one point.

RUSHAY: Yeah, through Edwin Pauley I believe.

DEVINE: Yeah.

RUSHAY: Right. I think that was. Yeah.

DEVINE: Yeah. Edwin Pauley was a wealthy California oil man who was apparently handling Truman's investments after the president retired and did very well for Mr. Truman.

RUSHAY: Fortunately, about two hundred of Bess Truman's letters to Harry Truman did escape the destruction that you described. So, we're fortunate for that.

DEVINE: Yeah.

RUSHAY: I recall, too, there was a Churchill painting that you may have seen in her apartment or maybe that had been gifted to Harry Truman.

RUSHAY: I don't know if the Truman Library ever got that. I don't think so.

DEVINE: No, I think the Trumans’ sons, Clifton and Tom and Harrison, held on to that one.

RUSHAY: Right.

DEVINE: Certainly all of the letters in a lot of the books. Truman had a tendency to write notes in books, write things in the margin, which of course turned a book into a manuscript when he did that.

RUSHAY: Yeah, exactly.

DEVINE: So, in many ways the Truman Library was a very fun job. I met with the Truman family, with Margaret, with especially Clifton, but also Tom, another one of the four grandsons. In fact, I was just on the phone last week with Gates Daniel, who is Clifton's son.

RUSHAY: Sure.

DEVINE: He has been in Korea for a couple of years and now is planning to go back to Korea and wanted to talk a little bit about what kind of career he might have in US Korean relations.

RUSHAY: That's great.

DEVINE: Yeah. I think so.

RUSHAY: Shifting over to the National Archives. We talked a little bit last week about NARA and the central office and the people that you worked with. Do you feel that during your tenure as Truman Library director that NARA provided adequate budget and staffing support for the Truman Library?

DEVINE: The budget was in pretty good shape up until about 2010, 2011, when the impact of the financial crisis of 2008 took its toll on the federal budget. Certainly during the time when Carlin, the former governor of Kansas, was the Archivist and also during the time of Alan Weinstein, we did very very well. The support from those two Archivists was really great. Things changed with David Ferriero, who didn't seem to have the same feeling for presidential libraries. It seemed to me that he had been convinced, maybe before he came on or maybe with people he met in Washington, that these presidential libraries were rogue operations with their own private foundations and these directors needed to be brought into control. And so when he reorganized, he put us, as I mentioned the other day or last week, at the bottom of the table of organization. He also moved funding from field operations to support his growing central office staff in DC.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Yeah.

DEVINE: He put the foundations at a spot where they reported directly to him. We (library directors) had to go through several layers of bureaucracy.

RUSHAY: Right. Right.

DEVINE: And the people he surrounded himself with took his approach towards presidential libraries. I mean they realized how their boss felt about presidential libraries and wanting to please him I suppose, took it out on us. It became increasingly difficult my last three years. I mean they restricted travel, they restricted budgets, made it almost impossible to spend money out of our trust fund, which is money that we earn through admissions and gift store sales and various gifts. Ferriero questioned

partnerships with institutions overseas, any kind of partnership we developed, even with another federal agency.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

DEVINE: It was really an effort to get things done.

RUSHAY: The Key West conferences, Key West travel, and that sort of thing.

DEVINE: Everything. They just became very very difficult.

DEVINE: At the same time, the federal government was going through a budget crisis following the economic meltdown in the last year of the Bush administration.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

DEVINE: It took a while for things to recover. So they were having their problems in Washington. It just became a very stifling work environment. I remember one time we were supposed to report on behind the scenes tours that we would give to VIPs. And we've been doing this for years. Senator Chuck Grassley, who was a senior senator from Iowa and head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, contacted Emanuel Clever's office, who was the US Congressman from Independence. He had made arrangements to come to the Truman Library. So I was informed by NARA that they had this VIP who was going to be coming through. I said I'd be happy to give him a tour and I'd be happy to give him a behind-the-scenes tour. The NARA official I was talking to, who was one of the direct reports to David Ferrerio, said that you need to give him this briefing before he goes through and make sure that his wife, who's going to be accompanying him, leaves her purse outside and that they don't take any cameras into the storage room. This is the United States Senator and head of the Judiciary Committee! I'd been giving VIP tours to people at the University of Wyoming, Illinois, the Ohio Historical Society, going back to when this NARA guy who was giving me these instructions was in kindergarten. I mean, the notion that we needed to frisk the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and his wife, that sort of thing, because they may be lifting collection pieces! It just got to be really frustrating to go to a conference like the American Historical Association.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

DEVINE: I had to get permission from someone in Ferriero’s office who was younger than my kids and who had no idea what the American Historical Association was. I had to write several paragraphs about why one would go to such a conference. It would seem to me that someone who's a presidential library director at that senior level should be able to figure out for himself where one should go and just get the travel approved routinely rather than write a little dissertation. So, it became quite frustrating. On the other hand, the other presidential library directors and I used to kind of joke about it and how they were trying to micromanage everything and couldn't possibly do it. It reminded me of a saying that I heard when I was in China teaching for Johns Hopkins University. I've had a year off from my time at Wyoming to teach at the Johns Hopkins Graduate Center in Nanjing. I heard this story of the

ancient Chinese officials back during one of the early dynasties. They'd be sent out to their provinces with all kinds of detailed instructions about what they were supposed to do.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

DEVINE: Once they got to their provinces, they took the attitude that the mountains are high and the emperor lives faraway. In spite of all of these misguided attempts to micromanage everything at the Presidential Libraries, we did get things done. The fact of the matter is the mountains were high and the emperor lived far away and things just had to be done.

RUSHAY: How would you describe your own managerial style, Mike?

DEVINE: I think it's more that of a coach or maybe the manager of a baseball team. You try to let people know what the goals are and how you want to accomplish them. Much of management is dealing with personnel, maybe 90% is personnel.

DEVINE: I remember one time when I was in high school our basketball coach was asked what he would do if he caught one of the players smoking. And this was right after the head football coach at our high school had kicked an all-state tackle off the football team because he saw him smoking while he was standing at a bus stop. Our basketball coach, who was more of a cynical type, he said, "It would depend on who I caught smoking." He said, "If I caught Mark smoking (this was a “13th man” on our basketball team), I'd just kick his ass right off the team." He said, "On the other hand, if I caught our star Junior smoking, I'd find out what it is he likes to smoke and I'd buy him a carton." Well, that was a bit cynical, but it did point out you had to treat people differently. You want to be fair, but on the other hand, people have different personalities, different skills, different abilities; and as the manager of an institution, as a director, sometimes there are people who need more motivation. Sometimes there are people who need to be told, "Hey, back off, slow down." You know, that's not your area. We have other people doing that."

RUSHAY: Right. Right.

DEVINE: Sometimes, a baseball manager has to move somebody from the leadoff position to batting cleanup or further down the lineup. Sometimes they shouldn't be a starter. Maybe they should be on the bench or maybe sent down to the minor leagues. Those kinds of things. Now, within the federal government in particular, moving people around was a challenge. The personnel office in NARA was very very cautious about making any changes at all. They were terrified of people filing lawsuits or whatever they might do.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

DEVINE: So one had to move with more caution than was necessary. Obviously, you have to respect people's rights. Certainly want to give people warnings. You want to give them a little coaching about how we want the job to be done. But when you have people who are not contributing and in some cases even working against their colleagues, you have to make some changes and it takes a while. But we worked through a few things and I really believe that by the time I retired we had a very good staff in

place. We had uniformly, across the board, people who knew the mission, who were interested in advancing the Truman Library and I think that came out in the Employee Satisfaction Surveys that were done. The presidential libraries in general did much better than NARA in Washington, DC or the regional archives. The Employee Satisfaction Survey results were much much higher at the presidential libraries. And among the presidential libraries, the Truman Library was at the top. At one time, I was criticized by David Ferriero. He said, "I heard you have staff meetings that sometimes run two hours. You shouldn't have meetings that last more than twenty minutes or something.” Well, sometimes I had meetings with a lot to discuss and there were problems to be worked out.

DEVINE: And I remember the last NARA survey that was done when I was director. I was the only person in NARA as far as I know who got a perfect score on “Do you as staff members believe the administration takes your point of view seriously?”

RUSHAY: Right.

DEVINE: You have to spend some time listening. You can't just come in and say, "Here's the way it's going to be. Thank you very much. Meeting's over."

RUSHAY: Right. Sure.

DEVINE: So, yeah, in all honesty, I had some serious disagreements with David Ferriero’s approach to management. His approach to the way he organized and his approach in dealing with the libraries’ foundations in a number of instances undercut the work of library directors. I think the Kennedy Library and Roosevelt are good examples of that. So, when you get to that point, you realize, hey, it's time to retire. And, I was approaching my 70th birthday, and I thought that'd be a nice round number to go out at. I was in my final year when my wife got a grant to attend a writer's workshop with some really high powered, very famous American writers in Italy at Lake Como. And I thought I'm just not going to let her go off to Lake Como by herself. So, I retired six months earlier than I had planned, largely because the library was in a good shape. And there was some new leadership on the board of the Truman Library Institute that would be helpful to Kurt Graham when he came in following me. So, it was not only because of my approaching the 70th year, but a lot of things were kind of falling into place that made it a good time to move out.

RUSHAY: You retired in 2014 as I recall.

DEVINE: Yep.

RUSHAY: And what achievements as director are you the most proud of?

DEVINE: I think I'm really pleased with the staff that I left in place for Kurt Graham. I'm very pleased with what we did early on in completing the projects that were planned and funded with the Classroom for Democracy Campaign. I think the exhibits were very good, state-of-the-art, but by the time I left they were no longer state-of-the-art, and it was time to redo them. Again, because the technology had rapidly evolved. What we did in 2002 was revolutionary for its time. But, maybe I mentioned this earlier, within five years, we couldn't replace the TV monitors in our exhibits because they weren't making TV

monitors. Everything was flat screen TV. So if you're going to put in flat screen televisions, they don't fit in the cabinetry.

RUSHAY: Right.

DEVINE: So you have to redo the cabinetry and rewire the computer programming. It was just amazing how quickly things changed. Under Ferriero’s approach to things, it was just hard to have partnerships. I mean, you can't have partnerships overseas when you're not allowed to travel overseas or even to Key West. The last conference that we organized in Key West (and I've organized this conference), I'd like to go down there. No, you don’t go. They wouldn't approve of my transportation! How about if I even paid my own way? No! They didn't want me to do that either. So partnerships that we developed, other than the University of Missouri, I think kind of languished but they were important when we did them. I'm very pleased with the series we did with the Truman State University Press.

RUSHAY: Truman State University. Yes.

DEVINE: Yeah. Yeah.

RUSHAY: Okay. Right.

DEVINE: In Kirksville, Missouri.

RUSHAY: Right. Yes. Yes.

DEVINE: And I think too that, as you mentioned, as we talked about this earlier, the Truman Working Office exhibit, the little mini campaign that we were able to do at a time when fundraising was not that easy.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

DEVINE: We got that thing done. So yeah, looking back on it, I feel very good about my tenure here and it was in spite of some issues that we had with the central offices (NARA) in the last few years, not just me but the others (library directors). Also, about the time I retired, the people that John Carlin had brought in to be library directors were moving on. We had a really good group of people.

DEVINE: I just really enjoyed their company and meeting with them. But by 2014 most of them had already retired or moved on. People like David Alsobrook who was at Clinton, Cynthia Koch at Roosevelt. Deborah Left at Kennedy had moved on. And Betty Sue Flowers at LBJ had run off with a former player from the National Basketball League (the NBA). Did you know that?

RUSHAY: No, I didn't hear that. No.

DEVINE: Yeah. She just left everything and ran off with this former professional basketball player.

RUSHAY: Okay.

DEVINE: He was also a former United States Senator and Rhodes Scholar.

RUSHAY: Bill Bradley?

DEVINE: Sure, Bill Bradley.

RUSHAY: Sure.

DEVINE: Yeah.

RUSHAY: Yeah. I thought maybe that's who you meant.

DEVINE: So, that was an interesting career move for her. But I'd been here for thirteen years by the time I retired.

RUSHAY: Sure.

DEVINE: It was a good time to move on. One of the things I kind of have seen over the course of my career is that directors of agencies that work with boards and commissions, and even when you're working with university presidents, there is more frequent regime change. Early on in my career, back when I was working with the Ohio Historical Society (the Society was a private organization but it received state money) and new bylaws were insisted upon by the governor, who felt we should be more open, have term limits and get more diversity on the board, that sort of thing. The fellow who had been the legal counsel for the Society, he was a gentleman who I thought was quite elderly then. He was in his 70s, and I don’t see 70 as being so old anymore. Anyway, I was just 29 at that time, and he said, "Mike, there's all these reforms, all this openness and term limits. This is all great stuff." He said, "But let me tell you, when you work for a board, you can never have a board that's too old or too rich. And it also helps if they live far away." And looking back on it, there was something to what old Fred Milligan said. Now, in our institutions, whether it's museums, historical societies, or universities, there's so much turnover on boards that after six or eight years there's nobody on the board who remembers why you were hired in the first place. They don’t know the kind of problems and challenges you faced and overcame. All they see are maybe some current little piddly problems.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Right. Right.

DEVINE: I've noticed during the careers of my colleagues that you no longer have people who run institutions for twenty, twenty-five years. I mean, that was once the case. The Ohio Historical Society, before I got there, had a chairman of the board and a director who were there for twenty years.

RUSHAY: True. Right.

DEVINE: And this was not uncommon, even for university presidents in those days to be in positions for twenty, twenty-five years.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

DEVINE: And since the 70s, I think the turnover in boards and commissions and directorships has just accelerated. And maybe there are some advantages to having quick turnover. Maybe twenty

years was too long to begin with. But I see in a lot of instances unnecessary turnover that leaves institutions destabilized.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

RUSHAY: And there’s the loss of institutional memory and that sort of thing as well.

DEVINE: Yeah.

RUSHAY: Do you…

DEVINE: Another thing I wanted to mention in terms of legacy and things I'm proud of. Two of my former staff members are now presidential library directors. Mark Adams at Truman Library and Tom Schwartz at Hoover.

RUSHAY: Sure.

DEVINE: Tom Schwartz was my first hire in 1985 when I became Illinois State Historian.

RUSHAY: Yes.

DEVINE: I hired him to be the curator of the Lincoln collection.

RUSHAY: I didn't think I knew that connection. Okay, Mike, that's interesting. And on the flip side of that, I guess you'd say, is there anything you felt was left undone or was a failure for whatever reason during your tenure?

DEVINE: I think that the transition from myself as the executive director of the Institute while remaining a board member and the Executive Committee Member was a necessary transition that should have been made, maybe even before I came on. Some Institute board members seemed to think the presidential library director was an Institute employee! It could have been handled in a much more competent and smooth manner. But things seem to be working well enough now. Although, as I said in my 2018 article, I think that the foundations have pretty much moved on to things other than supporting their libraries. Now, at Truman, they did support the new campaign and the renovation of the library, which is something that the foundation's other places haven't done. I think it's unfortunate that the Barack Obama institution in Chicago is not part of the NARA system, that there is no physical Barack Obama presidential library. And I think there's really no playbook for how the Trump library is going to be organized or put together. I think that's just wide open. So I mean, that's all outside my area of authority.

Before I left the Truman Library, I made some suggestions to NARA officials. Publicly, in my article I wrote about these issues. But I don't see anyone paying a great deal of attention. So, yeah, when I look back on it, I just see a lot of success. I feel very good about my tenure. I think I left a very good staff in place.

RUSHAY: Thank you.

DEVINE: And I hope that people in Washington appreciate them.

RUSHAY: Thank you. Yeah.

DEVINE: What presidential libraries, including of course the Truman Library, have to offer the American public as well as the scholarly community is important. And I hope that somehow continues in the future.

RUSHAY: Did you have any role in the selection or the transition to Kurt Graham following your directorship? Did you have a role?

DEVINE: No. I went off onto other things.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Yeah.

DEVINE: So I had no official role as a federal employee. You don't become director emeritus, you just become a former federal official. You just leave.

RUSHAY: Right. Yeah.

DEVINE: So, and the search went on. I think it was an entire year before Kurt came on.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Yes.

DEVINE: This is typical even though I gave them four or five months' notice that I was going to be leaving. They (NARA personnel office) didn't even advertise the position until after I left town. And I went on to other things right off the bat.

RUSHAY: You want to speak about that? Yeah.

RUSHAY: Let's talk a little bit about your retirement activities, Mike, in the eleven years since you left the Truman.

DEVINE: Within a week after I retired, my wife and I took off for Italy (for her seminar at Lake Como) and were gone for about a month. Then when I came back, I began working on a book which is

now published by University of Nebraska Press. It was a long effort, but it's out now and I am pleased to say has some great reviews. Most recently got a really nice review in the Journal of American History as well as The Public Historian. So, I began working on that project, and we did a lot of traveling overseas. We went to Colombia, Canada, India, and Mexico.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Yes. Yes.

DEVINE: We did several trips to Korea. I spent a summer at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC as a visiting fellow (2017), then followed that up with a year in Korea as a Senior Fulbright Lecturer at a university in Seoul, Korea (2017-2018). So even if they (NARA) wanted my opinion, I would have been hard to find. I also served two years on the Missouri State Humanities Council, did a lot of public speaking for the University of Kansas Osher Program, and authored articles for The Public Historian, the Woodrow Wilson Quarterly, and the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society-Korea. I would have been hard to track down. But it's not something that the federal government does. They don't, as far as I know, contact former federal employees and ask them for their opinion. But, I think the process went well. I'm very pleased to see that they hired someone of Kurt Graham's background and ability. I think he did a wonderful job. But, I understand he's now moved on to Boston to work with the John and John Quincy Adams sites [the Adams Presidential Center in Quincy, Massachusetts].

RUSHAY: And for just a point of clarification, we may have discussed this in our previous interview, Mike, and I'm going kind of back-tracking here just a moment. For people who may not know, did you have a role in the creation of the Classroom for Democracy as it's termed? That is the creation of the White House Decision Center. What was your role in the education program?

DEVINE: The Classroom for Democracy programs, things like the White House Decision Center, the other programs had already been pretty much outlined.

RUSHAY: Right.

DEVINE: Staff was on board, including Mark Adams. They had been working with some consultants, whose names don't come to me right now, but they were very good people who had worked on a number of museum programs, including at Union Station. They worked on Union Station, so I was very pleased with the direction that they were going and supported it wholeheartedly. For the Classroom for Democracy, I think at the time I came on they were already working on maybe just two scenarios, the Berlin Airlift and desegregating the armed services, for the White House Decision Center.

RUSHAY: Right. Civil rights.

DEVINE: They were and I wholeheartedly encouraged them to work on the Korean War, Truman's reaction to the North Korean invasion. And they had decided early on not to try to do anything on Truman's decision to use the atomic weapons. I felt that we should go ahead on that project, as it was really a pivotal moment in Truman's administration.

RUSHAY: Right.

DEVINE: This project came about later on, but the issues involved were something we just couldn't ignore. And so Ray Geselbracht worked very closely with the education people to pull documents and put that scenario together. So everything that was outlined in the Classroom for Democracy Campaign in terms of education, my role was to see the work completed and up and running. The new exhibits, outreach and so forth, the outline for those programs had already been put together under Larry Hackman. The exhibits were pretty much underway in September 2001. It was hard to make any real substantive changes because we were just a few months from having our grand opening. So my job was to get them done. And get the thing open.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Right.

DEVINE: We had to make sure that what we did in the Classroom for Democracy Programs met the expectations of the donors and benefactors. We couldn't let people down. We had to open up in 2001.

RUSHAY: Right.

DEVINE: There was a setback and everything we were doing was halted because of the attacks on 9/11 in September. I mean, just a couple days after I came on the job, we had to deal with that.

RUSHAY: Right, right.

DEVINE: But we did have a grand opening or a rededication (December 9, 2001). It went very well. We had a beautiful day. The reception of the general public to the programs, I think, was very good. Also, the exhibits, the education programs, and outreach were all well received. Other than tweaking a few things here and there in the programming, that was about all I could do.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

DEVINE: When we did reopen, Larry Hackman had felt that doing the exhibit on the lower level called “The Life and Times of Harry Truman” was too much for the staff to do. And so that whole exhibitry which had been funded by a large grant from the Morton Sosland family, the Sosland Foundation, that hadn't even started yet.

RUSHAY: Right.

DEVINE: So, I did have a significant role in seeing that exhibit come to fruition, with the exhibits dealing with the Truman administration’s White House activities and Truman’s pre-presidential family life.

RUSHAY: True.

DEVINE: The presidential years were pretty much set in place.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

DEVINE: I wasn't in a position to make much of a change in the presidential years. After the exhibits were up and running, I felt there were a few things that we should be tweaking. But it was hard to

do it without changing the whole exhibit. I thought we didn't do enough in our script on the United Nations that was a really important aspect of Truman’s administration. And I thought we kind of stopped the narrative with the outbreak of the Korean War. There wasn't as much on the Korean War, on the MacArthur controversy, and not enough McCarthyism and also the campaign of 1952.

RUSHAY: Right.

DEVINE: We just had this wall with these Life magazine covers showing this is 1952, stuff happened.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right.

DEVINE: I thought we could have done more.

RUSHAY: Almost like an afterthought.

DEVINE: Just like the exhibit kind of ran out of energy.

RUSHAY: Sure.

DEVINE: But again, we got the place open. This is me as a historian looking at things and saying, "I think we should have done this." But to the general public, it seemed to work. And to have made those kinds of changes, we would have had to take sections out, move things around.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

DEVINE: You almost would have had to redo the whole thing to start changing things.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

DEVINE: And we had a "Life and Times" exhibit for our staff to work on. I think we opened that in 2004, something like that. We were working on traveling exhibits and partnerships, a lot of things. So, while I as a historian would have liked to have seen more on the United Nations, a little bit more on the Korean War, and I think we could have delved more deeply into 1952 and McCarthyism and that sort of thing, to begin redoing that whole exhibit area right away would have been foolish.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

DEVINE: There were other priorities. And the exhibit wasn't wrong.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

DEVINE: It wasn't bad. (In fact, it was really good.) It's something I just kind of let go because it just really wasn't worth making those picky kinds of changes when there were other priorities that needed to be addressed.

RUSHAY: And you can always supplement some of those inadequacies, which every exhibit has, with some temporary exhibits or online exhibits I suppose that can kind of supplement.

DEVINE: Yeah. You're right. In fact, we did a number of exhibits on Truman and civil rights. We did a number of things on the Korean War, including conferences.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Right.

DEVINE: At Key West, we devoted sessions to those topics. So, there were other ways we could address these things. And I haven't spent a lot of time on the new exhibits (the 2001 exhibits).

RUSHAY: Very true.

DEVINE: The new renovation that took place the last couple years certainly looks spectacular and it'll be interesting to see how long it remains state-of-the-art as we come up with artificial intelligence and all these things.

RUSHAY: Very true.

DEVINE: In just five years will people say, "Man, this thing's really old-fashioned?"

RUSHAY: Yeah, that's the challenge.

RUSHAY: These days, to keep audiences engaged and keep visitors engaged and keep them coming to the library, I think that's a challenge throughout the museum industry. And on the archive side, I think we're continuing to put more materials on our website, keeping the legacy of Harry Truman alive. So, I hope you can come out to visit us sometime on site to see the recent exhibit.

DEVINE: Yeah.

DEVINE: I was there to give a little book talk about a year ago, was it? I forget now. I guess it's been a year.

RUSHAY: Yeah, it was. Yes. Yes. I had to miss that unfortunately. But you got to see the exhibit I hope when you were here.

DEVINE: I only was able to go through it for about a half an hour, but it looked good.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Right. Right.

DEVINE: And when I first heard that the plan was to redirect the traffic flow in the building and move the entrance from the front entrance that looked out on the park over to the side, I thought that sounded like something that really is unnecessary. To do such a big reordering of the whole flow of the building. Really? But, it turned out very well. I mean, it really works nicely.

RUSHAY: Yeah. Yeah.

DEVINE: You still have the Thomas Hart Benton mural.

RUSHAY: I agree.

DEVINE: People can see that. You can use that area as a reception area or staging area. And certainly coming in the east door, the east entrance, makes a lot more sense than coming in the south side.

RUSHAY: Yes. Right.

DEVINE: It really was a smart move. Like I said, when I heard about it, I thought, man, that that's really going to be really expensive. And is it really necessary? And yeah, it turned out to be necessary. It makes a big difference.

RUSHAY: Yeah.

RUSHAY: Thank you very much, Mike. I don't have any further questions.

RUSHAY: If it’s okay with you, I'll stop the recording now unless there's anything else you want to add.

DEVINE: That's it.

DEVINE: We've talked this thing through about as much as we possibly can.

RUSHAY: Okay.

DEVINE: We actually beat it to death here, Sam.

RUSHAY: Okay. I hope it doesn't feel that way, but anyway.

DEVINE: I hope it's useful at some point down the road.

RUSHAY: Okay, I'll stop the recording at the moment here. We'll keep talking but for a moment.