I've Been Provoked: Pushing against the Bush Library

George W. Bush may be the worst U.S. president in history. Southern Methodist University (SMU) began bidding to be the site of his presidential library shortly after he took office because there are institutional connections (among others, Laura Bush is an alumna and trustee) and at that time our university administration thought it would bring prestige, research activity, and money to the university and Dallas. Some people around here still think this is on balance a good thing, in spite of how bad things have gotten; some find it tolerable, with possible benefits; some are opposed to it in any form. As of this writing we are in what appears to be the final stage of negotiations. So why over the past year did I, as someone whose last performance piece was "Dreaming America: In the Bunker with George" (an anti-Bush pastiche done in October 2004) and president of our faculty senate this past year, not do everything I could to keep the evil Bush Library Center-comprised of library, museum, and institute-away from SMU, but rather worked for the faculty with the university president and board of trustees, who in the main strongly want the Center, toward defining the right relationship between the two institutions?

I did a lot of research. I've no doubt the package will bring money, scholarship, and prestige-though not so much the latter in the circles in which I travel. The institute, a private entity of the Bush Foundation, could be a real problem-Gary Trudeau's "belief tank-like a think tank, but without the doubt," from a January 2007 Doonesbury, is the possible nightmare scenario. Our university administration has negotiated assiduously to ensure protections and benefits, and there are myriad possible configurations of the relationship between institutes and universities; Stanford has survived its affiliation with the Hoover Institution and Emory with the Carter Center. The library and museum will be federal entities under the National Archives and Research Administration (NARA). Museums tend to be hagiographic halls of glory in the years following an administration; the "spin" tends to soften over time. The library is what could make the affiliation worth it; the archive will be crucial for assessing what the hell happened in Bush's eight years. Still, there are serious issues concerning access to materials, which can sometimes take decades (currently due in no small part to underfunding of NARA for cataloging, as well as legal stipulations regarding the timing of documents' release). Bush's Executive Order 13233 of 2001 must be rescinded; in contrast to the Presidential Records Act of 1978, passed in the aftermath of Watergate and Nixon's resignation, which in principle declared presidential papers to be the property of the American people, this order recreates the presumption that presidential documents shouldn't be made public by, among other things, requiring requests for documents to be approved by both the current and former president, expanding the definition of "sensitive documents," extending executive privilege to include the vice president, and extending control of release of documents to designees such as heirs following a president's death. I like to think our faculty senate is playing a part in Congress's current legislative moves toward the rescission. We have raised the profile of the issue in the national press and written to U.S. Senators. The House of Representatives passed legislation this spring calling for the rescission with an overwhelmingly positive bipartisan vote, and legislation should be moved in the Senate sometime this summer.

Often, after an initial period of protest by resisters and praise by supporters of a given library, things calm down; the Johnson Library at University of Texas-Austin was greatly resisted when first planned, but now great research is being done and documents continue to be released. A big problem with the Bush Center, of course, is that Bush has no Civil Rights Act to balance Iraq-his Vietnam-much less all of his other disasters. But it could be really interesting to have a major site-present but separate, powerful but deeply flawed-against which to...