80,000 Reagan Artefacts Missing From Museum

The elephant figurine? Gone. The Western-style embossed belt buckle? Gone. The crocheted version of the Stars and Stripes? Also gone. A government audit of the Ronald Reagan presidential library and museum has failed to account for thousands of items of White House memorabilia.

The missing artefacts - amounting to as many as 80,000 pieces in the collection of 100,000 - were reported by the Los Angeles Times yesterday. The disappearance has raised doubts about the management of the facility dedicated to the preservation of Reagan's legacy, as well as the entire system of presidential libraries.

The museum complex, in Simi Valley, north-west of Los Angeles, was built as a repository for 50m pages of official papers from Reagan's eight years in the White House as well as his stint as governor of California, in addition to more personal mementoes.

Government auditors, called in six months ago to investigate suspected pilfering of the Reagans' collection of gifts from visiting foreign dignitaries, stumbled on what they called the "near universal" breakdown of security.

So chaotic were inventory records at the library that it is difficult to say for certain which items were stolen and which were misplaced. The library had suspected a former archivist of raiding the collection.

The auditors' report said the full scale of the theft may never be known because of the lack of methodical record-keeping. "We have been told by sources that a person who had access capability removed holdings," the National Archives inspector general, Paul Brachfeld, told the Times. "But we can't lock in as to what those may be."

The Reagan family would not comment yesterday.

The cavalier approach to the collection of a man who, three years after his death in 2004, remains one of the most popular US presidents, was breathtaking.

The Simi Valley complex, which includes Air Force One, is the largest of America's 12 presidential libraries, although Bill Clinton's facility, in Little Rock, claims to have more papers. Simi Valley is also the most visited presidential library.

The disarray is hardly alone among presidential libraries, which struggle for funding and staff to catalogue huge storehouses of gifts and records. However, the Reagan library appears to have suffered the most serious lapses. Its security systems offered few obstacles to would-be thieves. Computerised record-keeping was only introduced in August, and the system of tracing which items were on display and which were in storage was lax.

The investigators found artefacts in boxes that had yet to be unpacked. Even so, the auditors noted nine of 26 items that were supposed to have been in two such boxes were missing.