What Lonnie Bunch Told Me

Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, was already slipping into the past tense when we walked together through the National Museum of American History in February.

Occasionally, as we stood before an exhibit, he’d discuss his role leading the largest museum system in the world as though he had already stepped away.

Even then, there wasn’t a question of if he would retire soon, but how soon .

He spoke longingly of a future life in which he took fewer flights, slept in fewer hotels, spent more time with his grandchildren.

He desperately wanted more time to write.

He told me he still has more books in him.

Now he will get the time.

Bunch announced on Tuesday that he will retire at the end of the year.

“I am extraordinarily proud of what we have accomplished together,” he wrote in a statement.

“I leave with pride and sadness, gratitude and joy, and with enormous confidence in the people who will carry this remarkable institution forward.” Bunch said that pressure from the Trump administration played no role in his decision.

That may well be true, but Donald Trump’s second term has played a disproportionate role in shaping Bunch’s final few years in charge.

The 18 months that Bunch spent holding off the White House’s efforts to influence the Smithsonian reinvigorated his commitment to the institution.

But it seemed to me that he was exhausted.

He did not seem to relish writing memos assuring his staff and the broader public (while reminding the president) that the Smithsonian was nonpartisan and singularly guided by scholarship; he did not want to go to work under the constant threat of the federal government pulling funding; he did not want to have lunch with the president while waiting for “the sword of Damocles to come take my head off,” as he admitted during a talk at UCLA last year.