Americans may not realize for many years just how lucky they were that Lonnie G. Bunch III led the Smithsonian Institution from 2019 to 2026. Bunch has announced that he will step down at the end of this year. He insists that the timing is his own, and we should do him the honor of believing him—notwithstanding the immense pressure the administration has applied to the Smithsonian generally and Bunch personally since Donald Trump returned to office last year.
Bunch, 73, would likely have chosen to retire earlier if not for his sense of duty—his conviction (which few dispute) that he was the best person to guide the Smithsonian through a turbulent period. The Smithsonian is the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex. It’s also “part of the glue,” as Bunch himself said shortly after taking office, “that holds the country together.”
Since his appointment as the Smithsonian’s top official—its 14th secretary and the first historian and Black man to hold the position—in June 2019, Bunch has been the glue holding the Smithsonian together. Through a combination of principled stances and deft political skills, he has kept the sprawling institution on mission and aligned with its public. Chief Justice John Roberts, who serves as the Smithsonian’s chancellor, said in a statement that Bunch has “pursued excellence in the telling of our nation’s story” and that the Smithsonian has “benefited greatly from his wisdom, vision, and leadership.”
Bunch is a fighter, but a smart one. He has often struck me as a master of institutional jiu-jitsu—a leader who knows instinctively when to hold the line, when to yield, and how to convert yielding to the advantage of the institution he has done so much to advance and protect. “When you’re Black in America,” he told The New York Times earlier this year, “you’ve got to figure out how to get through, right? You’ve got to figure out how to build allies, when to stand firm, when to bang the table. So in some ways, all of that prepared me for this moment.”
Bunch has worked at the Smithsonian since 1978, interrupted by stints at the California African American Museum in the 1980s and the Chicago Historical Society in the early 2000s. His tenure as secretary included the upheavals of 2020 and 2021, when—after the killing of George Floyd and amid the coronavirus pandemic—activists on the left were accusing museums across the country, including the Smithsonian, of being bastions of white privilege, colonialism, and cultural theft. Bunch remained calm and compassionate in the face of these critiques, compromising when appropriate, but never giving in to bullying.
It surely helped that his greatest achievement prior to becoming the Smithsonian’s top official was planning, raising funds for, and launching the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The museum, which opened to great fanfare in 2016, has been hugely popular. Under Bunch’s leadership, the museum balanced a forthright, profoundly moving description of slavery and its long aftereffects with exhibits that bear witness to the extraordinary flowering of African American culture, celebrating a panoply of achievements by Black Americans across many fields of human endeavor.
[Read: How a museum reckons with Black pain]
The Smithsonian was founded by an act of Congress in 1846. During the Civil War, it created a controversy by refusing to host a lecture series presented by abolitionists. The institution’s leadership eventually relented, but Frederick Douglass, the most prominent abolitionist of the day, was still not permitted to speak. At the 2019 ceremony installing him as secretary, Bunch referred back to those days: “Today we are here speaking in a place as an African American, where Frederick Douglass could not speak, but we are a different institution.”
Bunch’s leadership, and the Smithsonian’s resilience, has been severely tested since Trump’s return to power. Efforts by the institution to tell what Kim Sajet, the former director of the National Portrait Gallery, described as “a fuller, more American story” and “one that fosters connection, reflection and understanding” came into conflict with White House officials who felt that the “fuller story” being told was overly focused on moral failure, hypocrisy, and oppression.
The new administration was quick to target the Smithsonian. Some of what gave Bunch moral authority during the Biden years now threatened to work against him.
In March 2025, an executive order noted that the United States had witnessed “a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history.” The Smithsonian, it stated, had, “in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” Trump announced that he was firing Sajet. The Smithsonian regents asserted that only Bunch had authority over such personnel decisions, but she resigned anyway.
More recently, the administration has ramped up pressure on the Smithsonian, demanding an overhaul of its presentations to rid them of perceived liberal bias and attempting to force its hand with explicit threats, such as pulling funding and erecting warning signs in front of the National Museum of American History. (Although it is independent, the biggest share of the institution’s budget comes from the federal government.)
Bunch has had to figure out how to handle these various assaults without allowing the Smithsonian’s mission to be compromised. He has said plenty on the public record—all of it sage and diplomatic, yet consistently firm on questions of principle. I can only imagine what private conversations he has been having on a daily basis.
Thanks to the double whammy of COVID and activist pressures, few leaders of any prominent organization have had a fun time since 2020. But Bunch has been the leader of an enormous—and enormously important—institution that’s explicitly in the business of (among other things) telling the American story at a time when the question of how to tell that story has become so fraught and divisive.
What to do in such circumstances? Perhaps Americans could all begin by just agreeing that the pandas in the National Zoo (which is part of the Smithsonian) are very, very cute. And then, perhaps, that the Apollo 11 command module in the National Air and Space Museum—the one that carried Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin to the moon and back—is really cool. If so, perhaps they can next agree that Bunch, during his tenure at the helm of the Smithsonian, has been the exact combination of resolute leader and compassionate and good-humored public servant that America needed him to be.
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