Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch III announced Tuesday that he will retire at the end of the year, wrapping up a nearly eight-year tenure as the institution’s leader.
His departure comes as the Smithsonian faces mounting pressure from the Trump administration over how it tells American history. In an interview with The New York Times, Bunch said it was not the pressure from the White House that led to his departure, but that the back-and-forth did take a toll on him.
“I have to be honest, it has been stressful,” Bunch, who in 2019 became the 14th secretary of the Smithsonian and its first Black leader, told the Times. “And at a certain point, I’d like to wake up in the morning and not look at my cellphone.”
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His departure comes at a consequential moment for the Smithsonian. The Trump administration has spent more than a year criticizing the institutions’ exhibits and scholarship — pushing for a more patriotic telling of American history that focuses less on divisive issues.
Bunch has resisted that pressure, while arguing that the Smithsonian’s job is to present history in all its complexity.
“Every day, I have somebody talk to me about how important it is to have complexity and nuance,” Bunch said earlier this year. He said visitors often come away from Smithsonian exhibitions understanding something they had not known before.
Chief Justice John Roberts, the chancellor of the Smithsonian, said in a statement that Bunch had “pursued excellence in the telling of our nation’s story.”
But President Donald Trump and his top officials have struck a different tune. In March, the president released an executive order critiquing the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, among other institutions, for “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history.”
Last month, Trump also issued another order titled “Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian,” in which he says leadership of the institution “cannot be trusted to tell America’s story with honesty and gratitude.”
The executive order came after a White House report on the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History that argued the museum has shifted from presenting a balanced, patriotic account of U.S. history toward what the authors characterize as progressive political activism.
As evidence, they cited curators’ emphasis on racism, oppression and inequality while minimizing America’s founders and their achievements. The report called for the museum to return to a more “unifying” presentation of American history.
Bunch pushed back against the report, sending out a memo to Smithsonian staff in which he said that the report was not a fair representation of the museum’s work and the complexity of American history.
“While there will always be room for improvement, this report is not a fair characterization of the work and totality of the National Museum of American History,” Bunch said in the memo. “We remain focused on what grounds us: a steadfast commitment to scholarship, nonpartisanship, independence, accuracy, and integrity.”
Bunch was nominated to the storied institution’s top job after spending years with the organization, most notably as the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, overseeing the creation and opening of a new museum on the National Mall in 2016.
Bunch began his Smithsonian career in 1978 as an education specialist at the National Air and Space Museum. Then, in 1983, he became the curator of history and program manager at the California Afro-American Museum. He was recruited to rejoin the Smithsonian in 1989 as supervisory curator at the National Museum of American History.
Over his career, he focused primarily on how museums can tell a more complete American story by confronting both the country’s achievements and its failures.
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