It is the early 2000s and you are the president of the United States, and in a bunker-like room plastered with video monitors, you must decide whether to invade Iraq.

Grim faces appear on the monitors, warning of the wisdom or folly of doing nothing. If that’s not enough pressure, a drumbeat soundtrack accompanies a countdown clock.

And if you choose to “take no action,” President George W. Bush pops up on one of the monitors to explain why you’re wrong.

Welcome to the world of debatable truth presented in the Dallas library dedicated to America’s 43rd president and at the 12 other presidential libraries dotted across the United States. Together, those libraries drew about 1 million visitors in the fiscal 2024 year (from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30). For comparison, Chicago’s Field Museum alone brought in about 1.2 million visitors for the calendar year 2024.

A uniquely American institution, presidential libraries — actually archival depositories hinged to a museum of artifacts and curiosities — have been variously described as monuments to “megalomaniacal self-promotion” and “legacy-polishing temples that all but ignore controversy or criticism.” And when a library visitor does encounter an ugly truth about a president, it may not be framed the way they remember it.

But the declassified documents from those same flawed libraries have also offered an unequaled window into the lives of the men holding America’s highest office.

“The books we have on presidents, the research we have … only exists because we have these places where they are centralized, where you have archivists who really know the material and can help you. Our history would be much more shallow [without them],” said Julian E. Zelizer, a Princeton University historian who has done research at six of the libraries.

Just how valuable the Obama Presidential Center will be to historians remains to be seen. Unlike the 13 existing physical libraries (plus the Biden and Trump collections that don’t yet have permanent homes), Obama’s doesn’t have a National Archives and Records Administration-run research facility as part of the campus. So technically, it’s not a library. All of the material will instead be stored remotely but available to researchers online. The Obama Foundation has said the decision to go online is, in part, about saving itself money.

Hyde Park, New York, is home to the nation’s first federal presidential library, opened in 1941 and illuminating the life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Artifacts include a wheelchair (with a modified kitchen seat) the polio-stricken president used, as well as a lead bullet, one of five fired in a failed attempt to assassinate then-President-elect Roosevelt in 1933.

Earlier presidents typically received a monument — and only decades after they had died. Many presidential records were lost. Roosevelt sold the idea of a library to the U.S. Congress and to the public, saying in part that his records would be saved for future generations and available to historians as soon as possible, says Benjamin Hufbauer, a professor at the University of Louisville and author of “Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory.”

Roosevelt donated his documents. The Presidential Records Act of 1978 made it law that records detailing presidential constitutional, statutory and ceremonial duties belong to the U.S. government.

A private foundation typically raises the funds to build the library. Then, in most cases, it is run and staffed by the federal National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Only a tiny portion of the visitors to presidential libraries are researchers. The rest entails the general public coming to see the museums, which include exhibits featuring everything from George W. Bush’s interactive “Decision Points Theater” to President Bill Clinton’s tenor saxophone to the actual Air Force One (Boeing 707) in which President Ronald Reagan flew. A top draw at several presidential libraries is a full-scale replica of the Oval Office. Obama’s museum will also have one.

Given the public interest, it is vital that museums limit the spin, argues Anthony Clark, one of the more vocal critics of presidential libraries and author of “The Last Campaign: How Presidents Rewrite History, Run for Posterity and Enshrine Their Legacies.”

“The National Archives and the presidential libraries in total are probably the single greatest source of historical records of the last 100 years in American politics. So how they put things — whether it’s how they describe something in an exhibit or whether they withhold or delay records that might be inconvenient — they have a great influence,” Clark said.

And Clark, who spent a month at each library doing research for his book, said it is problematic that while presidential boosters decide what goes into those exhibits and often have a big say in who runs the library, it is the federal government that has spent hundreds of millions in maintenance costs and upgrades.

“As a private citizen, I would prefer that any organization, private or public, tell the truth. But from a taxpayer perspective, all I really care about is whether the government is helping to fund and support and give approval to rewritten history,” Clark said.

Mark Updegrove, chairman and CEO of the private foundation supporting President Lyndon Johnson’s library and museum, cautioned against generalizing about the institutions; each is different, he said.

The Johnson library doesn’t shy away from showing that the Vietnam War under Johnson’s leadership was a “quagmire.”

“It was a failure, a major failure,” Updegrove said.

“There is a value in offering civics education through these institutions through stirring interest in not only the presidency, but in our history writ large,” he added. “We suffer today from people not knowing enough about our system of government and about our history as a people.”

When a presidential library first opens, they all display a layer of gloss that may not be deserved — because as several historians pointed out, the original fundraisers are typically the president’s own family, members of his administration and other supporters.

And what of a president’s well-publicized lapses in judgment — say, Clinton’s affair with then-intern Monica Lewinsky and her infamous blue dress? You’ll find an exhibit in Clinton’s library in Little Rock, Arkansas, dedicated to his impeachment. It is framed, though, as “The Fight for Power.”

Clark said that while he was researching his book about presidential libraries, if he asked the head of a Republican library foundation about a historical inaccuracy in one of their exhibits, they’d often respond, “Well, why doesn’t Clinton’s [library] have the blue dress?”

Over time, some museums evolve to offer a more clear-eyed view of a president’s time in office.

“But it’s often about 40 to 50 years after a president leaves office before that happens, and there are no guarantees even then,” Hufbauer wrote in a 2015 piece in Politico titled “Turning Presidents Into Pharaohs.”

President Richard Nixon’s library originally whitewashed the Watergate scandal that toppled his presidency. At the time, the library and museum were privately run in Yorba Linda, California, Nixon’s birthplace. In the early 2000s, Nixon’s family decided they wanted the federal government to take over running the museum and library. As part of the changeover, American historian Timothy Naftali was recruited to be the new director.

“One of the litmus tests for determining the credibility of this new library was how it dealt with Watergate,” he said.

The Nixon loyalists fought Naftali’s proposed changes but ultimately lost.

“It was difficult,” Naftali recalled, adding, “The health of the political community of any society can be assessed by looking at how honest it is with itself about the hardest moments in its history.”

Clark said the library that gets closest to something “substantively negative” belongs to President Harry S. Truman.

The museum displays a letter from a father who lost his son in the Korean War and, highly critical of Truman, sent his dead son’s Purple Heart to the president. After Truman died, library staff found the letter and medal in the top drawer of the president’s desk.

“The interpretation is that it meant so much to [Truman] that he took the criticism seriously,” Clark said.

Even if what is inside a library might distort the truth, there’s a kind of honesty in how presidents house their materials.

Johnson’s Brutalist library might make a fitting setting for George Orwell’s ironically named Ministry of Truth in the novel “1984.”

“It’s this massive building. The minute you’re standing in front of it, it’s almost overwhelming, which is like [Johnson],” Zelizer said. “You can imagine him standing over you, lobbying you.”

President Jimmy Carter’s library in Atlanta is “really modest, bare bones … Inside, it’s the same way. It reflects him. He was modest. He didn’t believe in the imperial presidential palace,” Zelizer added.

One problem all of the museums face over time is a struggle to bring in visitors. In the 1970s, annual attendance at the Truman library approached 500,000. In 2024, according to the National Archives, 56,000 people visited.

“Eventually, even with remade, better exhibits, Truman becomes so distant. For people born today, he’s almost as old as George Washington,” Hufbauer said.

Put another way: However inflated a president’s sense of self, in time, the public loses interest.

“Even the temples of the pharaohs eventually got abandoned,” Hufbauer said.