By the time you read this, George W. Bush may already be a private citizen on his way back to Texas, where overseeing construction of his presidential library at Southern Methodist University is one of the few things known to be on his to-do list. So far, no plans for the facility have been released, either by the Bush family or by Robert A.M. Stern Architects, the firm the Bushes selected to design the library, but Laura Bush recently let an interesting detail slip.
In an interview with The Dallas Morning News, Mrs. Bush said the design no longer called for housing the presidential library and Mr. Bush’s planned public-policy institute in separate buildings. Instead, she said, the 145,000-square-foot library-museum and the 40,000-square-foot policy institute would probably be in separate sections of one building.
Who cares? The federal government, for one, because the National Archives will oversee — and foot the bill to operate — the library and museum, while the policy institute will be owned and operated by the George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation. Putting them under one roof could, presumably, blur the boundary between them, but Mrs. Bush said the design would make it clear that the two parts were “distinct from each other.” The Bushes are expected to raise in the neighborhood of $300-million to pay for construction of both wings, plus an endowment for the institute.
The part operated by the National Archives will house Mr. Bush’s presidential papers and include exhibit space. As for the policy institute, Dan Bartlett, who served as counselor to Mr. Bush from 2002 to 2007, told The Washington Post last week that Mr. Bush hopes the institute will “become an incubator of ideas, discussion, and debate about the issues that were front and center during his presidency, including the controversy.”
Margaret Spellings, Mr. Bush’s secretary of education, told the Post that she thought the institute would focus on what she said were Mr. Bush’s “game-changing” policy undertakings, including the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. “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 policy institute will be run by Mark Langdale, president of the George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation and formerly Mr. Bush’s ambassador to Costa Rica. The director of the library was named Monday — Alan C. Lowe, a former National Archives official who has been executive director of the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville since 2003.
Follow Buildings & Grounds through your favorite RSS reader: