“I’m a fighter,” Lonnie Bunch told The New York Times, explaining why he is leaving the Smithsonian. “It was really just saying, now’s the time.”
Bunch, 73, announced on Tuesday that he will step down as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution at the end of the year, after seven years in the job. The timing is awkward. President Donald Trump and his administration have spent months attacking the institution, but Bunch said the criticism had nothing to do with his decision.
Why he says he is going
He told The Washington Post he had been weighing retirement for about a year. “For, I don’t know, 45 years, work has taken precedence over family, and I just said at 73, enough’s enough,” he said. He wants as many years as possible with his family and grandchildren. He did admit the job wears on him. At a certain point, he said, “I’d like to wake up in the morning and not look at my cellphone.”
A historian, Bunch first joined the Smithsonian in 1978 and worked at the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of American History, among other posts. He also worked at the California African American Museum and served as president of the Chicago Historical Society. In 2005 he returned to the Smithsonian to build the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016. He later became the institution’s first Black leader.
The administration’s complaints
Trump has criticized the Smithsonian, and the National Museum of American History in particular, saying it shows “improper ideology” and “extreme political activism.” A report the administration released on July 4 accused the institution of anti-white bias. It faulted exhibits it said fail “to affirm the exceptional courage of the American people” and displays linking the Founding Fathers, many of them slave owners, with slavery. The report also claimed the museum endorses illegal immigration, advocates for transgender issues and treats Christianity as “an instrument of conquest, exclusion or cultural erasure.”
Later in July, Trump ordered the museum to post signs warning visitors about what he called “ideological” views on social justice and other topics. The administration has also threatened the institution’s funding.
Bunch says he will keep defending the Smithsonian’s independence for as long as he holds the post. “We’re at a time when people are challenging that independence, but I feel very strongly that it is as independent as we were before,” he told The Post.
Who picks the successor
The Board of Regents chooses the next secretary. It includes Vice President JD Vance, six members of Congress and nine private citizens appointed by Congress. Three of those citizen seats recently expired, and Congress has not yet named replacements.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who heads the board, said in a statement that Bunch had “pursued excellence in the telling of our nation’s story” and that the institution “benefited greatly from his wisdom, vision and leadership.”
