This morning, Think Progress visited the National Archives, where a small selection of President Bush’s presidential gifts were unveiled before the press. The collection included Head of State and domestic gifts that will eventually be stored in the Bush library at Southern Methodist University. An archive will be available online starting January 21.

Among the gifts that President Bush received:

– A baseball bat signed by every living member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame (top left image)
– A pair of handcrafted boots emblazoned with the name and likeness of Bush’s beloved dog, Barney (bottom images)
– An intricately carved rifle from Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek (not pictured)

Among the gifts that Laura Bush received:

– A purse from Queen Sirikit of Thailand (top center image)
– An original collage from Eric Carle’s highly popular children’s book The Very Hungry Caterpillar (top right image)
– A first-edition copy of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (not pictured)

Other gifts previously received by the Bushes include a diamond and sapphire jewelry set, valued at $95,500, from Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz and “an $11,000 Cartier Santos Dumont watch with an 18K white gold case” from Thailand’s Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra.

Strict ethics laws dictate that a President must purchase gifts worth more than $335, which is why any particularly valuable items aren’t likely to end up on display at Bush’s new home in Dallas.

(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.)

- Emily Aden, Matt Finkelstein, and Michael Wilson

President Bush has repeatedly insisted that his think tank, or “Freedom Institute,” “won’t be used to promote a whitewashed perspective on his presidency.” Original plan, in fact, had his library and Freedom Institute as two separate buildings at Southern Methodist University. However, today the Dallas Morning News reports that they will actually be housed in the same building:

But in a White House interview this week, Laura Bush said the library design committee she chairs has moved away from its original plan.

She said the lone building will probably have separate wings and design elements to make the functions “distinct from each other.” [...]

“It will be cool-looking,” President Bush said.

This announcement reinforces concerns that the Freedom Institute will “celebrate” Bush, rather than promote “dispassionate inquiry.”

(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.)

Yesterday, President Bush sat down with the Dallas Morning News for a 75-minute exit interview in which the paper described Bush as “sounding both wistful and a bit relieved that soon, the burdens will fall to the next president.” According to the Morning News, Bush said he is “eager for a more carefree life in Dallas.”

As part of that carefree life, Bush will be focused on his presidential library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, which will be accompanied by a think tank, or “Freedom Institute,” that will be independent of academic governance from SMU. Despite that lack of oversight, Bush assured the Morning News that the institute “won’t be used to promote a whitewashed perspective on his presidency”:

“This is not going to be a ‘George Bush is a Wonderful Person Center,’ or the ‘Center for Republican Party Campaign Tactics,’” Bush said. “It’s going to be a place of debate, thought, writing, lecturing.” [...]

But at the institute, “it shouldn’t be debate about me. It ought to be debate about big ideas” – immigration policy, or how to save Social Security, a challenge that has eluded presidents of both parties for years.

The institute may not celebrate Bush “the person,” but it will “celebrate” Bush “the president” and “sponsor research and programs designed to promote” his vision. One professor and expert on presidential libraries has explained why academics should be “concerned“:

[T]he model agreed to at SMU was ‘totally different” from the approaches at other universities with presidential libraries. [...] Clearly this goes against the idea of dispassionate inquiry, of looking at things on the basis of fact and merit. If it’s ideological, that’s opposed to the mission of a university.”

A number of SMU professors are also concerned. Methodist ministers launched a PR campaign highlighting the partisanship of the institute and even tried (but ultimately failed) to get SMU to reject housing the library because of it.

Nevertheless, the library is scheduled to be completed by 2013 and Bush’s library foundation has only raised $3 million of the $300 million needed for completion. Bush claimed he is “not concerned about the pace of fund-raising.” Indeed, he has declined to make donors’ names public, arguing that “once you’re an ex-president, I can’t imagine what kind of policies you would influence that would pay somebody off for a gift.”

(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.)

The London Sunday Times suggests today that the cost of President Bush’s library may exceed its usefulness, writing that the library is “in danger of becoming a white elephant.” The Times notes that while the National Archive uses taxpayer dollars to pay presidential library staffers to maintain presidential papers, an executive order Bush signed in 2001 will allow him to withhold any documents he chooses from the library’s collection. The order threatens the traditional usefulness of presidential libraries that generally “show the president ‘warts and all.’”

(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.)

In an article today on the George W. Bush presidential library, McClatchy notes that “[t]he present hasn’t worked out so well” for Bush. “So now he’s banking on a kinder and gentler future.” Bush library foundation president Mark Langdale says he is “confident that people will come to change their mind about the president and some of the decisions he made.” How will the Bush library accomplish this task? Spin. And Langdale has already begun, calling the debacle surrounding Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina “the limitations of government assistance”:

Langdale says the Bush museum will not avoid the most divisive episodes of the president’s eight years in office, such as the administration’s much-criticised humanitarian response to Hurricane Katrina. [...]

“There’s an interesting lesson about Katrina and the limitations of government assistance to respond to big natural disasters,” Langdale said. “They are acts of God, and they are tough. It’s definitely a story line I would not shy away from addressing somehow in the museum.”

Indeed, this doesn’t seem to be Langdale’s first act of Bush celebration. Pictured behind him in a photo accompanying a separate article on the library last week was a photo of Bush superimposed over Martin Luther King Jr.

(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.)

The Dallas Morning News reports that George W. Bush Library foundation president Mark Langdale downplayed suggestions that Bush political guru Karl Rove is heading up Bush’s “legacy project.” However, Langdale noted that Rove will continue to provide advice for the library’s attached “policy institute” — which has received criticism from Methodist ministers and SMU faculty because its research projects will reportedly “celebrate” Bush’s presidency rather than maintain academic integrity. And it seems that Langdale may have already begun the celebration. Pictured behind him in the photo provided along with the Morning News article is a photo of Bush superimposed over Martin Luther King, Jr.:

During an interview on Thursday with NBC News’s John Yang, President Bush talked about his life after the presidency, namely, putting together his presidential library at Southern Methodist University. A “think tank” will accompany Bush’s library there, and during the interview, Bush claimed the institute won’t attempt to burnish his legacy:

BUSH: The klieg lights will be off as far as I’m concerned and the new president will have his chance to serve in this great job. And I’ll be occupied with some interesting things to do. We’re going to build a freedom institute at Southern Methodist, a policy center that’s going to not be a place where we herald George Bush or [the] Republican Party.

Watch it:

But the institute Bush is referring to will be completely independent from the academic governance of the university. It will reportedly “sponsor research and programs designed to promote the vision of the president” and “celebrate” Bush’s presidency. One university professor said that “[a]cademics everywhere should be concerned about this” and that it “goes against the idea of dispassionate inquiry.”

In fact, Bush’s chief political operative Karl Rove — who is orchestrating the “Bush Legacy project” — will serve as a “critical resource” for the institute. Moreover, the library “will rely chiefly” on a design firm, rather than historians, to showcase Bush’s policies.

A number of SMU professors have expressed outrage that the library will trade academic scholarship for partisan praise of Bush. And after the United Methodist Church referred a petition to reject the library to its local jurisdiction that owns the university property, Methodist ministers launched a PR campaign highlighting the institute’s partisan nature. While the petition ultimately failed, a church committee offered a resolution urging the Bush library to protect the academic “integrity” of SMU.

Indeed, Bush has already begun promoting his tenure in the White House and he seems happy enough to rewrite history to do it.

Earlier this month, Stephen Payne, one President Bush’s Homeland Security aides, was caught offering high-level access to Bush administration officials for donations to the Bush presidential library which is set to be housed at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. This morning, the Dallas Morning News, citing Payne’s story, called on Bush to reveal the names of those who donate to his library:

Even so, [Payne's] willingness to peddle influence is another example of why transparency needs to be an integral ingredient of the library, particularly in regard to who supports it so questions of quid pro quo don’t surround the work.

For reasons we still don’t understand, the president hasn’t taken this approach and remains opposed to legislation that would require presidential libraries to reveal their donors.

In February, Bush said of his donors, “There’s some people who like to give and don’t particularly want their names disclosed.”

On Thursday, the United Methodist Church’s South Central Jurisdiction voted to dismiss petitions that would have blocked Southern Methodist University from housing the George W. Bush presidential library and an attached partisan institute. In response, opponents of the planned library “made a long-shot appeal” to “the church’s highest lawmaking body“:

Jeannie Trevino-Teddlie asked the judicial council to examine SMU’s leasing of the land below market value for the public policy institute, which is part of the presidential library complex.

She questioned whether the action met SMU and church rules, which require campus buildings to be used for educational or religious purposes. She said the lease “would subsidize a specific political and ideological point of view.”

Last May at the United Methodist Church’s (UMC) Quadrennial General Conference, the UMC’s governing body, voted overwhelmingly — 844 to 20 — to refer a petition to its South Central Jurisdiction. The petition urged the rejection of a partisan “think tank” at George W. Bush’s presidential library, which is set to be housed at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

The think tank has received significant criticism from SMU faculty, Methodist ministers, and the public because it will sponsor programs designed to “promote the vision of the president” and “celebrate” Bush’s presidency.

Despite a recent public relations campaign launched by some Methodist ministers to highlight the partisan nature of the library, the South Central Jurisdiction voted yesterday to dismiss the petition that would block the library from coming to SMU. Though committee members said legal agreements to house the institute at SMU “tied” their hands, they offered a resolution instead that is interpreted as a rebuke to the Bush institute:

Instead, [the committee] approved a resolution saying it expects the institute to protect SMU’s “integrity,” signaling that committee members don’t want the institute’s work to affect SMU’s academic independence.

That resolution will be presented to the full conference today.

Members of the committee said their hands were mostly tied because SMU has signed a detailed legal agreement with the foundation committing itself to the three-part complex, which also includes a library and a museum.

Even though some supporters of the Bush library had predicted the committee vote, ministers had said they “will not give up“:

But the opponents, who have raised $10,000 for the public relations campaign so far, are urging Methodists to keep fighting and send donations for the campaign to Rev. Bob Weathers, a former Fort Worth district superintendent. […]

“This is really about the partisan institute, which will do the most damage over time,” [Rev. Andrew J.] Weaver said. “And it’s not just an issue in Texas. Methodists have pride in their name.”

Committee member Andrew Hernandez agreed, saying “the resolution was the best we could do,” but added, “it’s not the end of it.”