In a welcome instance of congressional oversight, a House Appropriations subcommittee requested a management review of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The review, recommending reforms, was published last week. After last year's brouhaha surrounding Yasser Arafat's invitation, disinvitation, and reinvitation to visit the museum -- an overture initiated by a Clinton administration official and pursued against the better judgment of the museum's director -- the recommendations deserve close attention.
In the end, of course, Arafat never showed for his misbegotten photo op (the cameras turned out to be busy that day -- January 22, 1998 -- with the breaking Lewinsky scandal). But the particulars of that fiasco aren't finally the issue. A danger of politicization will always hang about an institution devoted to such a subject. The Holocaust is a perpetually vexed matter, witness the existence of professional deniers that it ever happened. The national museum dedicated to its memory and study should be painstakingly insulated from politics.
To that end, the review by the National Academy of Public Administration urges strengthening the role of the professional director of the museum and keeping the board -- the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, 55 of whose 65 voting members are appointed by the president -- out of day-to-day operations. The review also underlines the inappropriateness of naming to the board State Department officials, with their obvious conflict of interest. At present, incredibly, both the State Department's chief Middle East negotiator and his deputy are members.
These findings vindicate Walter Reich, the museum director who resigned rather than lend himself to the Arafat caper. Congress should write into law institutional arrangements that put the museum where, as Reich notes, it always should have been: "off limits to any diplomatic manipulation."