Barbara Bush remembered as friendly, approachable by Bush library visitors
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Former President George W. Bush says his mother, Barbara Bush, did not fear death because she believed in an afterlife and that she would be “wonderfully received in the arms of a loving God.” (April 18)
AP
COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Dolly Dominy and her mother waited outside the George Bush Presidential Library on the campus of Texas AM University 10 minutes before it opened Wednesday morning.
Inside, the library staff was putting the final touches on the hastily arranged tribute exhibit to former first lady Barbara Bush, who died Tuesday night at 92.
“We just came to pay our respects to Mrs. Bush,” said Dominy, who also came from the East Texas town of Kirbyville with her seventh-grade daughter and the girl’s friend. “I just think she was a classy, witty woman. She was very admired. She’s what a first lady is supposed to be.”
The library, which opened in November 1997 and recently celebrated its 3 millionth visitor, was a favorite place for the Bush family, said David Anaya, the facility’s communications director.
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It was a place where, up until just a couple of years ago, the couple would come to visit. Sometimes planned, sometimes unannounced, Anaya said.
“Often she would be seen reading to school children, talking with them, interacting with them,” he said. “She was very approachable.”
The library’s entrance is dominated by large two-story rotunda illuminated by hexagon-paneled skylight. Around the rotunda, suspended by nearly invisible wires, were oversized photos from the various phases of Barbara Bush’s long life. One shows a smiling young woman with soft curls in her hair. A necklace of pearls, which later in life would become a trademark, draped just above her white sweater.
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The exhibit will remain on display for about a month.
Bill Minutaglio, a Bush family scholar and the author of First Son, a biography of George W. Bush, said in an interview from Austin that the former first lady not only played an out-sized role in the life of her family, she also played one in the life of the nation.
“She was very much a political player in her own right,” said Minutaglio, who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. “She was at the table at the strategy sessions. She knew which states could be won (in presidential elections) and which ones couldn’t be.”
Minutaglio said Barbara Bush, who was born into family of privilege where its members were expected to be influential, and George were a power couple before the term was coined.
“That’s the way she raised her own children,” he said of only the second woman in American history be married to one president and the mother of another.
“I think it’s fair to say that, without her influence, no one in the family would have succeeded politically.”
Follow John C. Moritz on Twitter: @JohnnieMo
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