A Visit to the George W. Bush Presidential Center

So much happened in his eight years in office, but why is his presidential center so vacuous? 

O ver the years I’ve reviewed FDR’s house and presidential center, Coolidge’s museum and site, Andrew Jackson’s house, the Hermitage, LBJ’s Library, and the Nixon library. I wrote about the Obama Pyramid, too, seen under construction. I’d never visited the George W. Bush Presidential Center, a museum and the library holding his archives, so I went. It’s on the beautiful campus of Southern Methodist University, another Texas institution I like a lot, and near Dallas’s wonderful Meadows Museum, whose superb show about Raimundo de Madrazo I’ll review in a couple of weeks.

The Bush Center is a dud, I’m sorry to say, a dud and a flop and the worst of the 20 or so presidential sites I’ve visited, considering the huge amount of money and scholarship available to it. It’s both lighthearted and leaden. At points, it seems not at all serious. At other points, visitors are buried with platitudes, clichés, and pregnant erasures. I voted for Bush — twice — but didn’t want to see hagiography. His era is history now, starting as it did more than a quarter century ago, so the center needs to educate. Our current era of bilious feeling started with hanging chads and ended with an economy in extremis, with plenty of poison in between. People now are hungry for facts about the Bush years and perspective. They want to go deep. Insofar as the museum is concerned, they’ll come hungry and leave hungry.

The museum starts well enough, with his and Laura Bush’s families, his illustrious, hers a part of the west Texas squirearchy, both with good family values and a commitment to neighborliness and citizenship. Set against a wall mural of an oak on the prairie is a line from Bush’s acceptance speech at the 2000 Republican convention. “My background leaves more than an accent,” he says. “It leaves an outlook.” Bush is skewered as the new century’s Mr. Malaprop, but he speaks with clarity and spartan dignity. He does one-word sentences well. His successor, the blighted Obama, did hundred-word sentences, and they’re a labyrinth in fog.

What outlook? “Optimistic.” He’s “impatient with pretense, confident that people can chart their own course.” He’s no WASP from Greenwich, as his father always was, and though he went to Andover, Yale, and Harvard Business School, there’s next to nothing about his pedigreed education. He’s Texan through and through, he says.

There’s an audio component in every gallery. “And I’m proud to have Dick Cheney by my side,” we hear. I cringe. He chaired Bush’s VP selection committee and recommended . . . drum roll . . . himself, and thus he became Bush’s prime minister. I remember Bush’s speech, watching it on TV, seeing them all there, some, like George and Laura Bush, now in their late 70s and many, like Cheney, dead. Once the here and now for me, it’s history today. It’s a weird feeling. Cheney turns my stomach these days and has since it became clear that no Iraqi would press flowers into the barrel of an Army grunt’s gun. They’d more likely detonate an IED by his feet.

But here we are. Bush is nominated, we’re reminded. There’s nothing on the campaign. He ran against Al Gore, Ozone Man, but also against Bill Clinton, by 2000 a sleaze who’d sullied the Oval Office by, well, we all remember the Blue Dress. Bush ran to restore dignity and as what he called a compassionate conservative. Nothing on that first debate. I listened to it on the radio, in a truck traveling from Washington to the Clark Art Institute with ten works by Degas. I was a curator then and doing courier duty. I thought Gore whupped Bush, but I heard the debate and didn’t watch it. Gore, I’m told, looked effete and like the condescending windbag that he was. Bush was the guy you’d join for a beer — and make it a Shiner Bock.

Aside from “restoring dignity,” we don’t learn about the issues of 2000, and certainly no one talked about invading Iraq. There’s a short reference to Bush’s “addiction” that surprised me since, aside from “drinking too much,” I’d never heard him or his mouthpieces, and a presidential center by nature is a mouthpiece, go that further step. It’s a missed opportunity to do something truly useful. How he fought the bottle and won, not in a passing reference but in some detail, might help those who need some presidential advice. Instead, we learn a ton about how much Bush loves baseball.

There’s quite a bit on the Florida vote count via a timeline, some video, and a case of artifacts like a test tube of chads, as if Florida democracy was a medical experiment gone wrong. The vote count — which consumed that November — is among the most fascinating moments in presidential history. On Election Day, most of us expected Bush to win. As the votes came it, I watched Barbara Bush on TV, anxiously twirling her pearl necklace.

There’s a Palm Beach County butterfly ballot on view. The thing is a design abortion. It’s clear how easy it was for a voter wishing to pick Gore to accidentally punch the wrong box, a horror of horrors for Jewish old ladies smitten with Gore’s running mate, Joe Lieberman, the first Jew on a major-party ticket. If they left their spectacles at home, they’d probably have voted for Pat Buchanan, running as an independent and said then to be antisemitic. Bush won, courtesy of the Supreme Court, by 537 votes of 6 million cast. A legacy-media consortium did its own recount a few months later, finding that Bush won Florida by just short of 2,000 votes.

Leaving the introductory gallery, we go into Bush’s first months and the 2001 tax cuts. It’s very odd to see a mammoth case filled with baseballs and tales of “Tee Ball on the South Lawn.” Given what follows, it’s flippant.

There’s a big wall on the No Child Left Behind Act. He’s proud of that and certainly meant well. There’s a wall on the 2001 tax cuts. I remember Bush’s first few months as a business-as-usual transition. Aside from the dot-com bust, the economy was in decent shape. There were two or three presidential trips abroad. Bush’s speech in August 2001 about embryonic-cell research seemed serious. He was praised as capable of thinking deep thoughts, explaining them, and grappling with them to make policy. There’s nothing on it. Having reviewed the very rich, microscopic LBJ Center in September and the Nixon Library a couple of years ago, also deep in the weeds, I realized we were getting a look from a few thousand feet, at best.

Then there’s September 11. The galleries on that horrible day and the days that followed aren’t bad. There’s a blasted, twisted steel column rising 40 feet, introducing us. There’s a few rows of seating in front of a movie-screen-sized wall of a video and text montage that gives a day-by-day account of the ten days or so after the attacks. We’re in the moment.

There’s a clip of Bush getting the news and a timeline on his Air Force One scramble to get back to the White House. There’s the megaphone from his Ground Zero speech, with clips from his speech to firefighters, cops, debris haulers, the country, al-Qaeda, and the world. In a video clip, Laura Bush asks, “How we can reassure our children that they’re safe and in our love.” W tells us, “The people who did this are going to hear from us.” Thus the War on Terror was launched.

Bush’s speech to the country on the evening of September 11 is good; it deserved a video space and a run in its entirety. A terrorism timeline delivers the names and events that people forget. The shoe bomber, the PATRIOT Act, Daniel Pearl, Hamid Karzai, he of the garb of many colors, the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the Mission Accomplished banner, the Mumbai bombings, FISA, Gitmo, Bin Laden’s speeches, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a one-man job program for back-hair waxers.

There’s lots about “freedom” and “democracy,” acres about it, but it’s an expanse of clichés and dead ends. “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one,” he said. I squirmed when I first heard him say that, and I squirmed again when I saw it on a sweeping wall panel. “Encourage Democracy,” one section read, with a photo of Iraqi voters, their thumbs dipped in purple ink to show they’d voted. Problem was they voted for the bad guys. Nation-building in Stone Age Afghanistan? How naïve.

There’s very little on the second Iraq War and the Surge. Bush dodged a thrown shoe in 2008, his one success in that awful year. He’s very proud of the PEPFAR initiative, which sent $120 billion to Africa for AIDS relief. There’s a vast wall devoted to this. Hurricane Katrina gets a gallery that pretends to be a command center. Visitors sit in booths where we watch clips from the New Orleans press and disaster officials, federal officials, and the national press. Nothing about “Heck of a job, Brownie.” This exhibit asks us to rate who’s more believable. I couldn’t figure out how the technology worked, but, let’s face it, Katrina hit the worst-run city in the worst-run state, so it was bound to be a disaster. The feds did what they could.

Bush’s second term is presented on fast-forward. There’s no blow-by-blow on the 2004 campaign, which was more gripping than people think. Karl Rove, Bush’s Mark Hanna and Lee Atwater, engineered a good, precise win after the 2000 epic recount. Bush’s 2005 push to reform Social Security flopped because, after his bad Katrina press and the Iraq fiasco, he had no credibility. He said he’d “spend political capital” but had none. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Hoaxes hobbled his rule — Valerie Plame, Abu Ghraib, Enron, and Blackwater — as well as bungles, none more revelatory than the failed Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court. She was Bush’s White House counsel. Even in 2005, we were in circle-the-wagon days. Nothing about any of this sad, embarrassing tale. It’s no surprise his team got a whuppin’ in 2006.

And didn’t the economy collapse in 2008? You wouldn’t know it from the Bush Center’s small wall panel wedged between Katrina and a section on immigration. The financial crisis had many fathers, I know, but Bush and his people were among them. What went nuclear-kerflooey? Enquiring minds want to know.

After the galleries on September 11 and the War on Terror, we learn about the Bush family dogs, the White House décor, and Bush the comic. “He’s very funny,” one of the twins tells us, slapstick funny, and we get video hinting what would have happened had Lucy Ricardo been president. Since Bush’s failures delivered Barack Obama to us, I wasn’t in a yuk-it-up mood. There’s a small case with a couple of his portraits of maimed veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Their extraordinary bravery and sacrifice aside, Bush sent them on a fool’s errand. That he paints their portraits as therapy makes me sick.

I know that W, turning 80 in a few weeks, lives in Dallas, so there’s little at his presidential center to insult him. I hope that, over time, themes are sharpened and expanded so we get a fuller, deeper story. Mother Bush said the message from the voters when Jeb Bush flopped in the 2016 Republican primary was “no more Bushes.” She was one smart lady. W is in high gear rehabilitation mode. For now, this means the less said, the better. I loved the sections on Laura Bush, her dresses, and the White House décor. She’s very classy.

The presidential center building is designed by Robert A. M. Stern, so it’s dignified and deferential to the clients and the storyline. The front lawn is Texas wild grasses, so it looks like it needs to be mowed. Admission is $26 for adults. It should be free. There’s a photo op in the mock Oval Office where visitors can sit on the fake presidential chair by the fake Resolute Desk, but pics are $40, the stuff of racketeers. The temporary exhibition on view is Game Changer: United by Sports. It’s light as air and an embarrassment, since it’s the center’s America 250 show. Two of Jesse Owens’s gold medals from the 1936 Berlin Olympics are on view along with Jackie Robinson’s glove. It’s the rare museum exhibition where I learned nothing.

The Bush Institute, part of the center, promotes freedom and democracy. For America’s 250th, the Institute is publishing a booklet called “Democracy Is a Verb.” Forever syntactically flawed, Bush is. Visiting his museum, I think he would have been perfect for a time when nothing happened.