Now open for business

“TELL HIM the truth,” the father in one of our favorite movies, Moonstruck, tells his daughter. “They find out anyway.”

It’s good advice-not just in the movies but for the designers of presidential libraries. Including whoever crafted the (all too) carefully selected exhibits at the presidential library here in Arkansas. You could go through the whole thing and emerge scarcely aware that William Jefferson Clinton was ever impeached. Except for one exhibit safely confined to a little alcove last time we went searching for it.

For contrast, note the presidential library that is being dedicated today in Dallas, specifically on the campus of Southern Methodist University. That’s where the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum is set to welcome its first visitors. Those who have already seen the inside of the place say the library is . . . unusual.

Because those who’ve put this library/museum together-and you’d have to think that a man by the name of George W. Bush had a say in the matter-seem to recognize that his time in office was no picnic. Looking back, surely those eight years will be seen as one of the most contentious, tumultuous, divisive times in American history. Full of sound and fury.

Suffice it to say Mr. Bush left office about as popular as Harry S. Truman did-that is, not very. The second President Bush might not have been as despised as Herbert Hoover when the Great Depression struck on his watch and devastated the American economy. But still, No. 43 would scarcely be the most sought-after jersey if American presidents composed a sports team.

All presidential libraries need to resist a natural tendency to substitute hagiography for history. See the original Nixon Library in California or the Gerald Ford Shrine in Grand Rapids. In neither will you hear a discouraging word about their distinguished namesakes.

BUT THIS new Bush Library sounds different. One of its displays asks: What would you have done after 9/11 with al-Qaida being given safe harbor in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s own generals believing they had weapons of mass destruction at their disposal? (Which just about every intelligence analyst in the world also believed at the time.)

And what would you have done after Katrina hit New Orleans-send in federal troops or back up the locals instead? And what about the financial panic that struck toward the end of that president’s second term-bail out the banks as the Great Recession closed in or let them go under, along with a lot of folks and their money?

Even with the advantage of 20/20 hindsight, some of those questions still aren’t easy to answer. Which might be the point.

This being 2013, the new Bush Library comes complete with interactive gadgets that feature advisers who actually give you advice. As in: “Mr. President, the fact is that Saddam Hussein has WMD. It’s a slam-dunk. You can’t allow the banks to go under. Do you want to be remembered as the second coming of Herbert Hoover?” And so probingly on, hard question after hard question.

Sure, odds are this library will tell the tale largely from the former president’s perspective. What presidential library doesn’t? Word is that the bullhorn President Bush used at Ground Zero in 2001 will be a part of the collection. But so will one of those infamous butterfly ballots from Florida, an acknowledgement of the month of divisive tensions that surrounded this president even before he became president. Not since Hayes-Tilden (1876) has an American president entered the White House in such inauspicious circumstances. And the tensions were shortly to go from worrisome to explosive. Specifically, on September 11, 2001.

IT’S SAID the former commander-in-chief himself insisted that critical letters from the troops be included in the exhibits. Which brought to mind the Truman Library outside Kansas City, which offers teachers lesson plans that include these discussion questions:

-Armed with all of the knowledge that President Truman and his advisors had accumulated, how would you have ended the war in the Pacific?

-Make a table listing the advantages and disadvantages that the atomic bomb presented to modern warfare. Why did the fire bombing of Tokyo just weeks earlier that killed over 120,000 civilians not receive the same moral criticism that the atomic bomb received?

The subject of the Truman Library was a great reader of history, so he may be an exception among presidents. It’s hard to imagine the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock featuring an exhibit asking what you would do if asked to pardon Marc Rich. Or a panel of advisers asking you to intervene in Kosovo while ethnic cleansing was the order of the day there, day after day, week after week, year after bloody year until a British prime minister-Tony Blair-had to drag an American president into doing the right thing. Or an exhibit asking what you’d do if That Woman said you and she . . . .

On second thought, never mind. Lots of children go to presidential libraries. Talking about the Clinton library always makes us feel as if we’ve been poring over an old volume of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia with its doctored photographs and doctored history thoroughly purged of any criticism of Stalin & Co., or of Communism in general. It’s amusing in an ironic way. But we always want to wash our hands afterward.

Most presidential libraries present a saintly side of their ex-president and may roll out the criticisms only after some time has passed, or the ex-president has. Take, for example, the Nixon Library. For too many years, it was more The Nixon Shrine. The exhibits there were laughably one-sided and nary a discouraging word about Tricky Dick was allowed. But after the former president died, the library was re-opened under new management (the National Archives) and Watergate could be discussed as something other than a nefarious conspiracy on the part of Richard Nixon’s enemies.

George W. Bush’s library doesn’t seem prepared to wait till after the man has died to face up to the controversies that marked his tenure. Which is good. History ought to be one of the lively arts. And, who knows? Maybe an honest approach to the man’s time in office might actually enhance his popularity while he’s still around to enjoy it.

Tell them the truth. They find out anyway.