Published in the Dallas Morning News, Jan 23, 2007

To see how the think tank George W. Bush has in mind to accompany his library might work, it's useful to look at the model he wants to follow -- the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. As a media fellow there three times, most recently last spring, I can report that this is a respectable organization where the views you hear primarily are those of the Reagan wing of the Republican Party.

Indeed, Hoover now is a hangout for members of the Reagan administration including former Attorney General Ed Meese, economic advisor Martin Anderson and Secretary of State George Shultz. (You don't hear a lot about the first Bush from this crowd. One of them told me he felt the 41st president had given them pretty short shrift. He felt friendlier, however, toward President Bush 43 and worked in his first campaign.)

Have they been writing books favorable to Ronald Reagan? Inevitably, yes. This occurred in the course of their own memoirs -- Turmoil and Triumph by Mr. Shultz -- or in first-person accounts of the administration -- Revolution: The Reagan Legacy by Mr. Anderson. Then there are the collections of Reagan letters and radio commentaries compiled by Martin Anderson and his wife, Annelise, who was with the Office and Management and Budget under RR.

There is nothing objectionable in any of this work. Nor is there any reason to resist George W. Bush's adherents telling their own side of his story from a base at his institute.

We can be sure there will be plenty of other accounts of these past years. Some of them even may come, in time, from the Bush institution itself. Larry Diamond, a fellow at Hoover, spent three months in Baghdad in 2004 as a specialist in governance for the Coalition Provision Authority at the behest of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, then national security advisor and formerly provost at Stanford. He came home and wrote Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq.

Mr. Diamond is also a "professor by courtesy" of political science and sociology at Stanford. From what I know of his work and the conversations I've had with him, this seems entirely appropriate. However, members of the SMU faculty are not off-base in questioning how courtesy appointments to their ranks would be made. No doubt a way can be found to be sure they are satisfactory on all sides.

It is to be hoped that the Bush institute, in time, will attract people of high distinction as Hoover has done. Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman spent his later years on the Palo Alto campus, and Ed Lazear moved from Hoover and Stanford Business School to become President Bush's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors

The main area in which Hoover can be instructive to the Bush effort is in its emphasis. The fellows at Hoover pursue pure public policy such as school vouchers and the flat tax. There is no discussion there of religion or questions of private life, all of which have meaning but are better left to other venues.

While Hoover devotes a lot of itself to domestic matters, the Bush institute probably will deal in large part, at least at first, with foreign policy. Those who worry about a neoconservative invasion at SMU might consider this: the neocons are far better in theoretical settings than in the line of action.

I regret the entry of Methodist clergy into this debate. It's not a good precedent for the church to interfere in the governance of the university except when misconduct is the case. Those who recoil from the war in Iraq might try seeing it for what it is -- a profound tragedy for everyone involved, a tragedy that will be studied, like the plays of Sophocles, for years to come. Why shouldn't that study, a high and essential enterprise, take place at SMU? It will engage, after all, not just the fellows of the Bush institute, but scholars from all over the world.

The think tank, as it grows and evolves, has a chance to become a place of portance. Since it is likely it will operate on the Republican side of the spectrum, the university will need to be even-handed in choosing speakers who come to the campus (the Tate Lecture Series does an excellent job on this front); in granting honorary degrees (hooray for SMU for conferring one on Gloria Steinem) and in efforts such as the Tower Center, which is consistently wide-ranging. But, as SMU President Gerald Turner has made clear, this will continue to be the case

I have supported this library from the beginning and joined a group of letter writers who favored it. I support it still. Seventy-five years from now, the Bush institution will fit on the SMU campus as well as Hoover does now at Stanford with as little thought of the wars in the Middle East as there is currently of the Great Depression.