As President George W Bush eyes his legacy, his presidential library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, threatens to be a white elephant.
Bush has bought a $3m house in a Republican enclave 10 minutes away from his proposed library and hopes to play an active role in the policy institute that will be established there. With his approval ratings at a record low of 20%, according to a CBS poll, he is keenly interested in shaping the verdict of history.
“I’d like to be . . . known as somebody who liberated 50m people and helped achieve peace,” Bush said in a recent interview.
So far, fundraising has been “very modest”, according to Dan Bartlett, a former senior White House aide and spokesman for the library.
Bruce Bartlett, a former Republican treasury official who was ostracized for writing a critique of Bush in his book Impostor in 2006, was quoted in the Timesonline article: “Bush is going to go down as one of the worst presidents in history. A lot of conservatives kept their mouths shut at the time because they didn’t want to be crucified like me. I thought Bush would have to go a long way to beat Richard Nixon and Herbert Hoover but, at the last minute, he pushed the ball across the line and brought on the new Great Depression.”
The Times went on to suggest that the cost of President Bush’s library may exceed its usefulness, writing that the library is “in danger of becoming a white elephant.” While the National Archive uses taxpayer dollars to pay presidential library staffers to maintain presidential papers, an executive order Bush signed in 2001 will allow him to withhold any documents he chooses from the library’s collection. The order threatens the traditional usefulness of presidential libraries that generally “show the president ‘warts and all.’”
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