Exhibits
The permanent exhibition is the heart of the Library. It tells Roosevelt's story the way he lived it — in order, from a boy at a bedroom window to a former president on the world stage — across eight chapters, from a New York City childhood to the Badlands, Cuba, the White House, the Amazon, and home again to Oyster Bay.
Within those chapters you move between two kinds of spaces that work together: Narrative Galleries that carry the story forward, and interactive environments that hand it to you to pick up yourself.
Consider this your call to adventure.
Most museums ask you to stand back and read. This one hands you a key and asks you to use it — to make choices, take sides, and decide what you would have done. Theodore Roosevelt's life runs through eight chapters here, in the order he lived it, and you don't watch it from behind a rope. You walk it.
Plan on about three and a half hours in the exhibition, and give yourself another hour outside on the Boardwalk. Roosevelt didn't become himself in a building. He became himself out in this country, and the Library is built so you can stand in it.
Planning your route? The exhibit map lays out the galleries, and the campus map covers the grounds outside.
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Photographs by David Hume Kennerly · Oct 3, 2026 – Jan 10, 2027
In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt stood on a granite ledge at Yosemite next to John Muir and let a photographer make the picture. He knew exactly what he was doing. Roosevelt was among the first American presidents to understand that a photograph could carry an idea further than a speech — and he was photographed more than any president before him: on horseback in the Badlands, in the field with a rifle, on the stump, at his desk, surrounded by his children.
David Hume Kennerly picked up that thread and carried it for sixty years.
He was in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel when Robert Kennedy was shot. He photographed the war in Vietnam, and won the Pulitzer Prize for it. At twenty-nine he became Chief Official White House Photographer for President Gerald R. Ford, with the run of the building and instructions to document everything. He has been photographing presidents ever since — through resignations, summits, campaigns, recounts, and the morning the Pentagon burned.
This special exhibition draws on In the Room: 60 Years on the Front Lines of History, Kennerly's new book from Rizzoli. The photographs are not about any one administration. They are about what the job looks like at close range — the waiting, the arguing, the exhaustion, the moment before the decision — and about a country watching itself change.