Making i-History: Who gets the last word on Steve Jobs?

By TRIPP MICKLE

NEW YORK: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis meticulously curated the memory of her husband after he was assassinated, reimagining President John F. Kennedy as a fallen King Arthur in a modern-day Camelot.

Now some historians wonder if Laurene Powell Jobs is also trying to frame the legacy of her late husband, Steve Jobs, a complicated and transformational figure who was shadowed by his flaws as a father and belligerence as a boss.

Last month, Powell Jobs introduced the Steve Jobs Archive. It aspires to reinvent the personal archive much as Jobs, in his years running Apple, remade music with the iPod and communication with the iPhone.

Rather than offering up a repository of personal correspondence, notes and items for public research and inquiry, as other influential figures have done, Powell Jobs, said at a conference last month that the Steve Jobs Archive would be devoted to “ideas.” Those ideas are primarily Jobs’s philosophies about life and work.

The result, for now, is more of a tribute website than an archive. More than a dozen archivists and scholars who spoke to The New York Times questioned even calling it an archive.

It has worried historians who fear it may inspire other wealthy and influential figures to curate the historical record about them just as ordinary people curate their lives on Instagram.

“One of the things that excites me about archives is the warts and all,” said Courtney Chartier, an archivist at Columbia University who has worked on Martin Luther King Jr.’s archive and the papers of Tony Kushner, the playwright.

“People are complicated, and that’s something we shouldn’t shy away from.” The Steve Jobs Archive deviates from the repositories of other famous business leaders who largely left their material to corporate or library archives.

About half of Harvard Business School’s 25 greatest business leaders of the 20th century left behind personal archives that are open to the public in libraries or museums, including Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Asa Candler, who built Coca-Cola.

Other iconic business founders such as Walt Disney, Sam Walton and Ray Kroc entrusted their papers to the companies they built, allowing those collections to become the cornerstone of corporate archives.

Much of that corporate archive material is closed to the public, but some companies, such as the Walt Disney Company, make personal correspondence, notes, speeches and other items available to authors for research. “We don’t censor,” said Becky Cline, director of the Walt Disney archives. “We just vet.”

The new Jobs archive debuted with a minimalist website containing eight pieces of video, audio and writing that express what the archive calls Jobs’s “driving motivations in his own words.” The items, three-quarters of which were already public, can be accessed by clicking through maxims made famous by Jobs, including “make something wonderful and put it out there” and “pursue different paths.”

During his life, Jobs admired and encouraged historians to preserve the history of his Silicon Valley predecessors such as Robert Noyce, who co-founded the chip maker Intel. But he put little value on his own history, and Apple has seldom commemorated product anniversaries, saying it focuses on the future, not the past.