George Herbert Walker Bush was the 41st President of the United States serving from 1989 to 1993. He also served as Vice-President under President Ronald Reagan from 1981-1989.
The George H.W. Bush Presidential Library Complex consists of ninety acres on the West Campus of Texas A&M University in College Station. The campus consists of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum shown here, the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Presidential Conference Center, and the Bush School of Government and Public Service.
Built at a cost of $43M dollars, the 69,000 sq. ft. Library and Museum was dedicated on November 6, 1997. Designed by the architectural firm of Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum (HOK). The library is one of 13 administered by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The textual archives contain more than 44 million pages of personal papers and official documents subject to the Presidential Records Act, as well as personal records from associates connected with President Bush's public career as Congressman, Ambassador to the United Nations, Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in China, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The museum has just under 17,000 square feet of permanent exhibit space and 3,000 square feet of temporary exhibit space. Permanent exhibits draw on the best of the museum collection to visually convey the essence of George Bush's life and public service career and to illustrate historical events of this period in American history.
President Bush died at the age of 94 on November 30, 2018, just three weeks after our visit to the museum. At the time of his death he was the longest-lived U.S. president, a distinction now held by Jimmy Carter. He is buried on the museum grounds along with his wife, Barbara, and daughter Robin.
Writing in the New York Times the day after President Bush passed, historian Jon Meacham, President Bush's official biographer, paid this tribute to our 41st president:
"The nation mourns him not least because we no longer have a president who knows that the story of the nation is not all about him. In the last years of his life, President Bush was asked how he’d like to be remembered. He didn’t pause — and he avoided, as ever, the first-person pronoun, what his mother used to call the “Great I Am” — and replied: “That we put the country first.” That such words seem so quaint is one of the many reasons we already miss him as much as we do."
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