Bush?s library legacy most likely to resemble Hoover, Nixon.
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on January 19th, 2009 5:33 am by HL
Bush?s library legacy most likely to resemble Hoover, Nixon.
On Tuesday, President Bush will return to Texas to begin rebuilding his legacy, in the form of the George W. Bush Presidential Center and the accompanying “Freedom Institute” think tank. While Bush 41 has a library and museum at Texas A&M University, presidential historians believe Bush 43’s legacy plans actually most resemble those of […]
On Tuesday, President Bush will return to Texas to begin rebuilding his legacy, in the form of the George W. Bush Presidential Center and the accompanying “Freedom Institute” think tank. While Bush 41 has a library and museum at Texas A&M University, presidential historians believe Bush 43’s legacy plans actually most resemble those of Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon:
[T]he 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.
(ThinkProgress has been keeping a close eye on developments with the Bush library, and we will continue to do so. Read our related posts here.)
