George W. Bush Presidential Center

Based on Wikipedia: George W. Bush Presidential Center

The Great Texas Library Wars

In the years after a president leaves office, a peculiar competition unfolds across America. Universities, cities, and civic boosters engage in what amounts to a bidding war for the right to house that president's legacy. These aren't ordinary libraries filled with novels and periodicals. Presidential libraries are monuments—part museum, part archive, part temple to executive power—and landing one can transform a community's identity and economy for generations.

When George W. Bush's second term began winding down, this competition played out entirely within the borders of Texas. And what a competition it was.

Six universities and one city threw their hats into the ring, each believing they had the winning combination of land, location, and loyalty to bring the forty-third president's legacy to their doorstep. The eventual winner, Southern Methodist University in Dallas, would go on to build the second-largest presidential library in the nation—a quarter-billion-dollar complex that earned the highest possible environmental certification and drew all five living presidents to its dedication ceremony.

But getting there required years of backroom negotiations, a land acquisition strategy that bordered on cloak-and-dagger, at least one lawsuit, and no small amount of institutional hand-wringing about what it means to permanently tie a university's name to a controversial political figure.

How Presidential Libraries Actually Work

Before diving into the Texas scramble, it helps to understand what these institutions actually are. Presidential libraries aren't really libraries in the traditional sense. You can't browse the stacks or check out a book about fly fishing.

Instead, they're archives—repositories for the millions of documents, photographs, recordings, and artifacts generated during a presidency. The National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency responsible for preserving America's most important records, administers these collections. But here's where it gets interesting: the buildings themselves are typically funded by private donations and built on land donated by universities or local governments.

This creates an unusual public-private hybrid. The archives belong to the American people, but the edifice housing them reflects the tastes, priorities, and fundraising prowess of the former president and his supporters. The museum component—the part tourists actually visit—tells the story of that presidency through exhibits, artifacts, and increasingly, interactive experiences designed to make visitors feel like they're sitting in the Oval Office making momentous decisions.

Presidential libraries have grown steadily more elaborate since Franklin Roosevelt established the first one in 1941. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, sprawls across 207,000 square feet and includes actual Air Force One aircraft. The George W. Bush Presidential Center would come close to matching that scale, covering 207,000 square feet of its own.

The Early Frontrunners

Before Bush had even secured a second term, officials at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, were already working on their pitch. Their logic seemed sound: Baylor sat within a hundred miles of Dallas, Austin, and College Station, and more importantly, it was close to the Bush family ranch in Crawford, where the president had famously spent long stretches of his time in office clearing brush and hosting foreign leaders in a conspicuously casual setting.

Baylor had land to offer—substantial acreage on the banks of the Brazos River. The setting would have been bucolic, even pastoral. But therein lay the problem. Waco, despite its centrality on a Texas map, is not a major metropolitan area. Presidential libraries thrive on tourism, and tourism requires accessibility. A library in Waco would likely attract a fraction of the visitors that the same facility would draw in Dallas.

Southern Methodist University began its campaign not long after Bush's first inauguration. SMU had obvious advantages: it sat in the heart of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, America's fourth-largest metropolitan area. The university had a strong national reputation and, crucially, long-standing ties to the Bush family. Laura Bush, the First Lady, was a graduate.

But SMU also had an obvious problem: space. The campus was essentially landlocked in University Park, one of Dallas's wealthiest enclaves. Where exactly would they put a 200,000-square-foot complex?

The Full Field Assembles

The White House refused to discuss the library location until after the 2004 election. Once Bush had secured a second term, the selection process moved into a more formal phase. In late 2005, the administration invited six institutions and one city to submit formal proposals.

The University of Texas System threw together an ambitious but unwieldy bid. UT Austin was already home to the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, giving the system experience in managing such facilities. But the UT proposal called for splitting the library across multiple campuses around the state—a "virtual" library that would theoretically benefit more Texans but struck many observers as impractical.

The UT system also offered two other options: a downtown Dallas property near the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, where President Kennedy was assassinated, and the UT Dallas campus in Richardson. The downtown option had real appeal—proximity to existing tourist infrastructure and a location that could help revitalize an area losing businesses to northern suburbs. But the idea of the UT system itself running the museum proved unpopular, and internal conflicts over land use at UT Dallas eventually led the system to withdraw entirely.

Texas Tech University in Lubbock teamed up with Midland College to form a "West Texas Coalition," proposing to build the main library in Lubbock while creating a Laura Bush reading center in Midland, where the First Lady had grown up. The coalition had enthusiastic faculty and student support, plus abundant land. But Lubbock, like Waco, sat far from the state's population centers.

The city of Arlington submitted what might have been the most intriguing proposal. Arlington offered land near the stadiums for the Dallas Cowboys and Texas Rangers, smack in the middle of a region that already drew millions of tourists annually. The downside was obvious: no university partner. The University of Texas at Arlington helped craft the bid, but the lack of deep academic involvement weakened the proposal.

Then there was the University of Dallas, a small private Catholic school in Irving. Most Americans had never heard of it, but UD had something valuable: hundreds of acres of undeveloped land near major highways and a planned light rail station. The university's proposal was ambitious enough to require additional land from the City of Dallas, prompting then-Mayor Laura Miller to endorse UD's bid over SMU's.

SMU's Shadowy Land Grab

Southern Methodist University's campaign remained shrouded in mystery, particularly regarding the fundamental question of where the university would actually put the thing.

Over months of quiet maneuvering, SMU began buying up properties adjacent to campus—dozens of homes and businesses. The university also acquired a condominium complex called University Gardens, a transaction that prompted at least one unit owner to file a lawsuit over how the acquisition was handled. SMU insisted the condo land wouldn't actually be needed for the library, but suspicions persisted.

Meanwhile, residents of University Park grew increasingly anxious about what thousands of annual visitors and tour buses might do to their neighborhood. This was not a community accustomed to tourist traffic. The median home price in University Park exceeds a million dollars. Streets are lined with mature trees and manicured lawns. The prospect of becoming a waypoint on bus tour itineraries did not sit well with everyone.

Still, the University Park town council agreed to put before voters a plan to sell parkland to SMU for the library. The community would have a say, but SMU was clearly maneuvering to make its bid work.

The Field Narrows

By late 2005, the White House announced that four finalists would present their cases to a selection committee in Washington. That committee was chaired by Donald Evans, the former Secretary of Commerce and one of Bush's oldest friends from their Midland oil business days. The finalists were SMU, Baylor, the University of Dallas, and Texas Tech.

A few weeks after the presentations, Texas Tech was eliminated, leaving just three contenders.

In December 2006, a judge ruled in SMU's favor in the University Gardens lawsuit, removing one obstacle. The next day, university officials and selection committee members announced that SMU had entered "the next phase of deliberations"—language that suggested the outcome was increasingly foreordained.

The University of Dallas withdrew in January 2007, publicly revealing for the first time the ambitious vision it had prepared: not just a library and museum, but a large park with jogging trails, waterfalls, and convenient access to light rail. It was an appealing vision that would never come to pass.

Baylor, meanwhile, published portions of its proposal online but withheld the complete document, saying it would release everything only after the final decision was announced. The gesture seemed to acknowledge what everyone in Texas higher education circles already knew: this was SMU's prize to lose.

The Opposition Mounts

Not everyone at Southern Methodist University was celebrating the impending announcement. Within the Perkins School of Theology—the university's divinity school—several faculty members wrote a letter to the board of trustees calling the policies of the Bush administration "ethically egregious." They expressed concern that the associated policy institute would function as "a conservative think tank and policy institute that engages in legacy polishing and grooms young conservatives for public office."

This was an unusually pointed critique from faculty members at an institution on the verge of landing a major coup. Other faculty complained about the lack of consultation in the decision-making process. University administrators insisted the opposition was not widespread, but the dissent was real and public enough to attract national attention.

A broader petition campaign organized by Methodists opposed to the project gathered over twelve thousand signatures. The concern was straightforward: Should a university bearing the name of the Methodist church permanently align itself with a presidency that many in that denomination found troubling?

These objections ultimately did not derail the project. In February 2008, SMU and the Bush Foundation announced they had finalized their agreement. The George W. Bush Presidential Library would be built in University Park.

Building a Monument

The nonprofit George W. Bush Foundation set out to raise three hundred million dollars for construction and endowment. The architectural commission went to Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the architecture school at Yale University and a winner of the prestigious Driehaus Prize, which honors excellence in classical and traditional architecture. Stern's firm had designed buildings across America, from suburban homes to major institutional structures, and his selection signaled that the Bush library would prioritize a certain timeless gravitas over architectural experimentation.

Ground was broken on November 16, 2010, the same day Bush's memoir "Decision Points" was published—a coordinated media moment that gave the former president two reasons to be in the news simultaneously. At the groundbreaking ceremony, former Vice President Dick Cheney offered a characteristically dry joke about the moment. "This may be the only shovel-ready project in America," he said, needling the phrase that President Barack Obama had used to describe infrastructure investments in his 2009 stimulus package.

The construction firm chosen was Manhattan Construction Company, which had also built the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station. There's something fitting about a single company building monuments to both a father and son who served as president.

The project ultimately cost approximately two hundred fifty million dollars. More remarkably, the building earned a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Platinum certification—the highest level of green building recognition available. This was not merely a prestige badge. The campus incorporated over ninety native Texas plant species, nine hundred native trees, and more than three hundred fifty thousand individual plant plugs. The site used soil from its own excavation rather than trucking in fill from elsewhere. A bioswale—essentially a landscaped drainage system—manages stormwater naturally rather than routing it into municipal systems.

The lawn alone achieves a biomass density index sixty-two percent higher than a conventional lawn and uses seventy-five percent less potable water for irrigation. For a library honoring a president often criticized by environmentalists, the building itself makes an unexpectedly strong ecological statement.

Five Presidents in One Place

The dedication ceremony on April 25, 2013, achieved something rare in American public life: it brought together all five living presidents. Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama stood together on a stage in Dallas, a tableau of American power spanning four decades and both political parties.

The previous time all five had been in the same room was January 2009, at the White House, just days before Obama's first inauguration. Such gatherings are inherently complex to arrange—security protocols for a single president are elaborate; for five, they become exponentially more so. And former presidents, like anyone else, have schedules, health considerations, and occasionally the simple desire to avoid spending extended time with political rivals.

Yet these five men came to Dallas, accompanied by over ten thousand invited guests, including diplomats and ambassadors from approximately fifty countries. The guest list read like a roster of the Bush administration's foreign policy relationships: Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia; former prime ministers from Britain, Australia, Israel, Italy, and Spain; former presidents from Georgia, South Korea, Ghana, and El Salvador.

Tony Blair was there with his wife Cherie. John Howard came from Australia. Ehud Olmert from Israel. Silvio Berlusconi from Italy. José María Aznar from Spain. The gathering was, in effect, a reunion of the "coalition of the willing"—the alliance that had supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq—along with other foreign leaders who had worked closely with the Bush administration.

What Visitors Actually See

At 207,000 square feet, the George W. Bush Presidential Center ranks as the second-largest presidential library in America, trailing only Reagan's facility in California. Like most presidential libraries, it features a full-scale replica of the Oval Office, complete with a reproduction of the Resolute Desk—the famous desk built from the timbers of a British Arctic exploration ship, used by presidents since Rutherford B. Hayes. Visitors can sit at the desk and have their photograph taken, briefly occupying the physical space of presidential power.

The museum devotes substantial attention to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and their aftermath. This is unsurprising: the attacks occurred just eight months into Bush's presidency and defined nearly everything that followed. Artifacts from that day are displayed, and the exhibits trace the administration's response, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A section called "Decision Points"—borrowing the title of Bush's memoir—presents interactive exhibits inviting visitors to engage with key moments of the presidency. These are designed not merely to inform but to immerse: to give visitors a sense of the pressures and uncertainties that shaped decisions at the time, rather than presenting those decisions through the lens of hindsight.

Other exhibits address Hurricane Katrina, the devastating 2005 storm that killed nearly two thousand people and became a symbol of government failure in the public imagination. The 2008 financial crisis also receives treatment—the collapse of Lehman Brothers and subsequent bank bailouts that ended the Bush presidency amid economic turmoil.

A collection highlighting first ladies of the United States acknowledges Laura Bush's role while connecting her to the broader history of presidential spouses. A fourteen-acre native garden adjacent to the main building is dedicated to her specifically, reflecting her longtime interest in literacy and education through its design. A farm-to-table restaurant called Café 43 offers visitors food sourced from local producers—a nod to contemporary interest in sustainable dining.

George W. Bush's post-presidential hobby of painting is also represented. After leaving office, Bush took up painting with surprising dedication, producing portraits of world leaders, veterans, and landscapes. Critics who had dismissed him as intellectually shallow found themselves reconsidering a man capable of patient artistic practice. The paintings are displayed in the museum, an unexpected epilogue to a political career.

The Policy Institute

Presidential libraries typically include more than archives and museums. They often house policy institutes or foundations that continue work aligned with the former president's priorities. The George W. Bush Institute, housed within the Presidential Center, describes itself as an "action-oriented think tank"—a phrase that distinguishes it from purely academic research institutions.

James K. Glassman, a former State Department official, served as the institute's founding executive director from 2009 to 2013. Under his leadership and his successors, the institute has focused on four areas that defined aspects of Bush's presidency: human freedom, global health, economic growth, and education reform. Laura Bush leads a women's initiative addressing issues facing women and girls worldwide. A military service initiative supports American veterans.

At the 2010 groundbreaking, Bush articulated the philosophy behind the institute: "The decisions of governing are on another president's desk, and he deserves to make them without criticism from me. But staying out of current affairs and politics does not mean staying out of policy." It's a careful distinction. The former president would not publicly second-guess his successor's choices, but he would continue advocating for approaches he believed in.

In 2012, the institute published a collection of essays called "The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs." The book featured contributions from five Nobel Prize winners in economics and covered immigration, Social Security, tax policy, and energy policy. Its central argument was that with the right policies, America could achieve four percent annual growth in gross domestic product—an ambitious target that would roughly double historical averages.

When President Donald Trump proposed withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 2017, Matthew Rooney, the director of the economic growth initiative at the Bush Institute, publicly defended the trade deal. This represented a rare moment of tension between the Republican establishment represented by the Bush Institute and the populist nationalism of the Trump administration.

A Question of Control

In November 2022, the National Archives and Records Administration announced a significant change: it would transfer museum operations to the George W. Bush Foundation effective January 1, 2023. The archives themselves—the documents, recordings, and official records—would remain under NARA control. But the museum, the part tourists interact with, would be run by the foundation.

This arrangement had been agreed to in April 2022 but was paused over concerns about what archivists delicately call "whitewashing"—the softening or omission of controversial aspects of a president's record. This concern was not theoretical. The Richard Nixon Presidential Library, operated for years by the Nixon Foundation rather than NARA, had long been criticized for minimizing the Watergate scandal that ended Nixon's presidency.

To address these concerns, the agreement between NARA and the Bush Foundation includes specific provisions: the foundation must obtain input from NARA and historians on exhibit content; foundation-operated and NARA-operated spaces must be clearly distinguished; and NARA retains ownership of all presidential artifacts, which are considered on loan to the foundation for display purposes.

It's a delicate balance. Foundations naturally want to present their benefactors in the best possible light. Archives exist to preserve the historical record, including the uncomfortable parts. The Bush Presidential Center will test whether these competing imperatives can coexist.

A Final Resting Place

Presidential libraries serve one more function that's easy to overlook: many become the burial sites of the presidents they commemorate. George Washington was buried at Mount Vernon. Lincoln rests in Springfield, Illinois. Kennedy lies in Arlington National Cemetery.

The George W. Bush Presidential Center has been designated as the eventual burial site for both George W. Bush and Laura Bush. When that day comes, the complex on the SMU campus will transition from monument to memorial, joining the long tradition of presidential gravesites that become pilgrimage destinations for tourists, historians, and citizens seeking connection with the American past.

For now, the forty-third president remains very much alive, painting in his Dallas studio, appearing occasionally at public events, and watching as the institution built to house his legacy settles into its role as both archive and attraction. The competition that consumed Texas higher education for the better part of a decade produced a building that is, by any measure, impressive: environmentally advanced, architecturally dignified, and substantial enough to rank among the largest such facilities in the nation.

Whether history judges the presidency it commemorates kindly or harshly, the George W. Bush Presidential Center will stand as the place where that judgment is rendered—one visitor at a time, walking through exhibits that try to capture what it felt like to make decisions when the consequences were unknowable and the stakes were as high as they get.