Presidential Library

Last week Yale librarian James T. Babb announced that after more than a year of "agonizing" decisions, the list of books for the first permanent, purposefully selected White House library had been completed.

Mr. Babb's committee imposed two limitations on itself in compiling the list. First, the authors represented, with only a few exceptions, are American; and second, no living writers of fiction, or poetry are included. Within these limits, the White House library is a good one. Its 1,780 titles include a fair cross-section of American literature, an excellent collection of works on the history of the United States, and intelligently chosen samples of American scholarship in most significant areas of study (with the exception of the natural sciences).

The White House library is fundamentally a personal library; it does not pretend to be comprehensive. Mr. Babb and the others who collected it had to draw the line somewhere. Unfortunately, they drew that line right around the borders of the United States. The result is a library that is as provincial in terms of what it excludes as it is sophisticated within its self-imposed limits.

To show that the White House library, in its present projected form, cannot truly be the library of a cultivated man, it is sufficient to mention a few names. In history, Thucydides and Gibbon. In philosophy, Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas and Kant. In political theory, Machiavelli, Locke, and Marx. In literature, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Rabelais and Cervantes. It may be argued that these authors are not crucial to the working reference library of an American President. But certainly they deserve as much place in such a library as (to choose an unfair example) Herbert Warren Wind's The Story of American Golf.

The second limitation, which excludes living writers of poetry and fiction, does not harm the library nearly so much as the first stricture. All the same, it is an unnecessary restriction. Presumably, the White House did not want to involve itself in any tiresome little literary wars, and therefore decided to wait until poets and novelists are safely dead and buried before venturing to choose among them. If this was their reasoning, though, why didn't they exclude living political scientists and historians, too? In the academic world, where publishing a book is a condition of existence, professional jealousies, if anything, are more bitter than in the world of fiction and poetry. Besides, a collection of Americana which does not include Farrell or Baldwin or T.S. Eliot is not really representative.

When the Presidential library is expanded, as it surely will be, hopefully its scope will be broadened. The writings of living authors can be just as rewarding as those of dead ones. And isolationism, in literature as in diplomacy, is a barren policy.