“To coin a phrase, he’s no Harry Truman,” said Robert Dallek, a presidential historian.
And a flawed effort to build a library to make Bush look good is seen by many as an effort to shore up Bush's failures.
This is why the planned Bush Library slated to go to Southern Methodist University will be an ideological center. As Benjamin Hufbauer, author of Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory (University Press of Kansas) has observed:
“So it’s a center run by Bush and his associates without regulation — an ideological center to burnish a president’s reputation — does that fit with the academic mission of SMU?”
