Jon Fasman
speaker
573 appearances
15 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 17 Jul
Jon Fasman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 15 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 7.
Appearances
The Obama presidential center towers over Chicago's south side like a brutalist ziggurat.
John Fazman is a
The main building is eight stories high, it's concrete covered in granite.
Widing around the top of the main structure is a long quote from a speech Barack Obama made marking the fiftieth anniversary of the civil rights march from Selba to Montgomery, Alabama.
The Obama Presidential Center, which opens to the public today, is the latest entrant in a uniquely American institution of public memory, the Presidential Museum and Library.
These entities let their namesakes do what they have doubtless wanted to do ever since taking office.
Present their achievements and justifications without quibbles from opposition politicians, pesky journalists, or protesting civilians.
Now, individually, each one is designed to enhance public understanding of a president, which is a perfectly laudable goal.
But collectively, they also reveal the extent to which America has invested its presidents with a quasi imperial aura.
This institution as it exists today dates back to the waning days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration.
Before then, presidential papers were seen as the property of the presidents themselves.
By tradition, presidents donated them to the Library of Congress, but they certainly didn't have to.
The Presidential Libraries Act of nineteen fifty-five authorized the federal government to accept for preservation presidential papers and to accept gifts or bequests of money for maintaining them.
The Presidential Records Act of nineteen seventy eight made president's papers property of the United States rather than the office holder personally, and while Donald Trump's Office of Legal Counsel has opined that act was unconstitutional, no court has yet agreed with them.
But these libraries also have a private component.
The presidential foundations pay for most of the construction and land acquisition costs.
The federal government, meanwhile, controls the president's papers and most maintenance costs, which currently are around $100 million a year for all the museums.
The Obama Presidential Center is an exception, except for the archives oversight of his papers off-site.
His foundation funds the entire complex.
This was done, the CEO of the foundation told me to preserve its independence.
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