Over 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.
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