SMU to become a Texas Disneyland

It looks like Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas is in line to land the George W. Bush Presidential Library. For background see:

• The Dallas Morning News,
• The bush Library blog
  and
• The Economist.

Of course, The Bush Library will only be co located with the University. It will be run independently, with no control by the University. Quite a few of the SMU faculty have been extremely unhappy about the set of arrangements. They appear to be designed to adopt the academic reputation of SMU, yet be under the control of Bush apologists rather than responsible academics. The purpose of the Bush library will be to get out "The Bush Message" rather than being a source of good historical research. In the latter function it will be much like the approach the Nixon Library has taken to presenting the Watergate Scandal which knowledgeable historians consider to be a joke. Which brings up the LA Times article from July 8, 2007.

The LA Times offers a description of the sad Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda. California.

The Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace in Yorba Linda has long been the most kicked-around of presidential libraries, and nothing invited more ridicule than the dim, narrow room purporting to describe the scandal that drove its namesake from office.

Venturing into that room, visitors learned that Watergate, which provoked a constitutional crisis and became an enduring byword for abuses of executive power, was really a "coup" engineered by Nixon enemies. The exhibit accused Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein — without evidence — of "offering bribes" to further their famous coverage.

Most conspicuous was a heavily edited, innocent-seeming version of the "smoking gun" tape of June 23, 1972, the resignation-clinching piece of evidence in which Nixon and his top aide are heard conspiring to thwart the FBI probe of Watergate.

This was history as Nixon wanted it remembered, a monument to his decades-long campaign to refurbish his name. Nixon himself approved the exhibit before the library's 1990 opening.

"Everybody who visited it, who knew the first thing about history, thought it was a joke," one Nixon scholar, David Greenberg, said of the Watergate gallery. "You didn't know whether to laugh or cry."

Then the article goes on to describe the takeover of the previously privately owned and operated Nixon Library by the presidential library system of the National Archives, so there may be some hope for the Nixon Library in the future. The Bush apologists can be expected to fight any such intrusion by professional historians.

---

Comments on this LA Times article can be found at:

• The Left Coaster
  and at
• Digby