Planning.

Bush's Post-Presidency to Include More Than a Library By Dan EggenWashington Post Staff Writer Sunday, January 18, 2009
Many former presidents rise to a second act. Jimmy Carter founded a human rights center and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Bill Clinton established a charity and traveled the world making speeches. Even the disgraced Richard Nixon opened a foreign-policy think tank shortly before his death.
Now it's George W. Bush's turn.
After handing over the White House to President-elect Barack Obama on Tuesday, Bush, 62, will return to Texas to begin his own post-presidency, including plans to build a library, museum and public-policy center in Dallas, that is far more ambitious than those of most other former commanders in chief.
In addition to the cost -- $300 million for the building and as much as $200 million for an endowment -- Bush's plans stand out as an effort to defend his tumultuous White House years and to continue the debate over his most controversial domestic and foreign policies. The George W. Bush Presidential Center will include a "Freedom Institute" focused on a broad portfolio of topics, including the expansion of democracy abroad and education reforms of the kind Bush implemented during his presidency, according to organizers.
"The president's vision is for it to become an incubator of ideas, discussion and debate about the issues that were front and center during his presidency, including the controversy," said Dan Bartlett, a former counselor to Bush who is acting as a spokesman for the project. "The idea here is to have a place where that debate can continue."
Bush's post-White House life begins Tuesday with a welcome-home rally in his home town of Midland, Tex., followed by a return to the family's Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Tex.
By next month, the Bushes are expected to move into a newly purchased $2.1 million house in the exclusive Preston Hollow neighborhood of Dallas, a short drive from the planned library complex on the campus of Southern Methodist University. The General Services Administration, which provides office space for former presidents, has also leased 8,000 square feet of space for Bush in a nearby high-rise.
Bush, who has said he will likely pen a memoir and eventually hit the lecture circuit, has talked glowingly about his hopes for the policy center, and insists that his vision for it extends far beyond his own presidency. "This is not going to be a 'George Bush Is a Wonderful Person Center,' or 'The Center for Republican Party Campaign Tactics,' " Bush said during one of his last media interviews as president. "It's going to be a place of debate, thought, writing, lecturing."
But the project has prompted skepticism among many academics, who argue that Bush appears set on using the center to rewrite his legacy as a president who led the nation into an unpopular war and an economic crisis. Many SMU faculty members and students also oppose the project, arguing that it would not conduct the kind of unbiased research a university should encourage.
Bruce Buchanan, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, said the center must welcome dissent and criticism of the Bush presidency if it is to be taken seriously. But Buchanan and others also said they expect that part of the aim of the project is to shore up Bush's reputation.
"I think he is stung by the reaction to him," Buchanan said, referring to Bush's deep unpopularity in his second term. "Nobody else is going to make the case for him right now, so he wants to make it."
According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, Bush is wrapping up his tenure with a 66 percent disapproval rating, matching Nixon's when he resigned in August 1974. Bush's job approval rating finishes at 33 percent, with 68 percent of Republicans, 34 percent of independents and 6 percent of Democrats giving him good marks. More than half of all Americans blame Bush "a great deal" or "a good amount" for the country's economic problems, and nearly six in 10 estimate that he will go down in history as a below-average president -- nearly five times as many as said so of his father, George H.W. Bush, when he left the White House in 1993.

Bush's father, the 41st president, has a library and museum at Texas A&M University, as well as a graduate school named in his honor there. But the closest historical analogy to Bush's post-presidential plans may be unfortunate, given the current economic climate: Herbert Hoover founded a war library at Stanford University before he became president that eventually became the Hoover Institution, a major center for conservative and libertarian thinking.
David Greenberg, a presidential historian at Rutgers University, says a better comparison may be Nixon, who spent many of his post-White House years attempting to rehabilitate his image and reputation as a statesman after the shame of the Watergate scandal. He also founded the Nixon Center think tank several months before his death in 1994.
Bush's plans for his own think tank, Greenberg said, "seems to be in keeping with the spirit of the Bush administration, which has always felt itself embattled by ideological critics."
Supporters dismiss such assessments as guesswork, and say that Bush has no intention of building a shrine to himself. Mark Langdale, president of the George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation, said the policy institute will be built around several key themes, including "freedom, compassion, opportunity and individual responsibility."
"It's really a place where you're trying to advance effective policy solutions above a partisan level," Langdale said. "He's made clear that history will be a judge of his legacy. The purpose of the institute is to be more forward-looking."
Margaret Spellings, Bush's education secretary and longtime friend, said in an interview last week that she expects the policy center to focus on "game-changing" initiatives such as the schools testing program called No Child Left Behind. "There will be a dimension of trying to keep these policies current and in context with whatever is happening at the time," she said.
The presidential center building is being designed by Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, and is not likely to be completed until 2012, according to Langdale and others. The National Archives will take control of Bush's papers and the operation of the library once construction is completed, while Bush's foundation will run the policy institute.
In the meantime, the foundation plans to begin holding seminars and other events as soon as possible to begin making a name for itself, organizers said. Bartlett said fundraising has been purposely modest so far, but will pick up dramatically with Bush's departure from Washington.
Bush has already invited many of his closest foreign friends to participate once the center is up and running, including former British prime minister Tony Blair, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. First lady Laura Bush, who has already inked a deal with publishing house Scribner to write a memoir, will also play a pivotal role in the center, focusing on women's rights, literacy and other issues that occupied her attention in the White House, she and others have said. "This is a place of debate and discussion, a place to herald freedom, a place to continue some of the initiatives that we've started," George W. Bush said recently, adding: "The policy center and the museum are going to take a lot of time."
Polling director Jon Cohen contributed to this report.