History of the Proposal

The idea for a Bush presidential library on the Baylor campus was generated while George W. Bush was governor of Texas. There was talk that he would likely be the nominee for the Republican party. Then Baylor president, Robert Sloan, called the governor and told him that if he became the next president of the United States, that Baylor would love to host his presidential library.

Immediately after George W. Bush was certified as the President, Dr. Sloan hired as library consultant the most knowledgeable men in America when it comes to presidential libraries. Don Wilson was the head archivist of the US at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for eight years and John Fawcett was the director of presidential libraries at NARA for many years. These two men were instrumental in the library project for the beginning. Terry Sullivan was later added to the team. His specialty is online archiving of presidential material. After these two men were hired, four on-campus committees were established by Dr. Sloan. The Museum Committee was chaired by Tommye Lou Davis (Associate Professor in the Classics Department and master Teacher), who would later become the over-all director of the project. The Library (and educational outreach) Committee was chair by Leah Jackson, Associate Dean of the Law School. The Bush School Committee was chaired by Dr. Jim Curry, who was at the time the chair of the Political Science Department. An on-campus Steering Committee was established chaired by Dr. Tom Charlton, who also served as the first chair of the library project. Overall there were approximately one hundred faculty and staff who served on the various committees that began the work on the library project. These committees were established in the year 2000.

The first several years the committees researched presidential libraries and were given direction by the consultants. Various fragments of texts began to be written. Presentations by Tom Charlton were also made to Baylor constituencies to education the Baylor family regarding what was involved and what a presidential library would mean to Baylor. An interim report was sent to the White House which was a brief synopsis of the Baylor proposal.

In 2003 the project was moved to the president's office and Tommye Lou Davis, who had become Dr. Sloan's chief of staff, assumed the directorship of the project. Tommye Lou worked closely with Larry Brumley as they began to pull together all of the pieces of text written by the various committee members. Additions and deletions were added and subtracted from the text. In 2005 a senior editor, Jane Cook, who had worked on the White House website was hired to edit and help with wording of the document. Tommye Lou Davis and Larry Brumley worked closely with Jane Cook as well as the library consultants during the final crafting of the document. Tommye Lou made hundreds of presentations to interested groups of Baylorites and central Texas groups during this period informing them of the process with tidbits related to the proposal.

In July of 2005 Baylor was invited by the White House to submit a proposal. When we got the call, we were ready. We had finished the proposal about six months before we received the invitation to submit but we updated and re-read/proofed the document on a regular basis while we waited. We submitted fifteen copies of the proposal to the White House on September 14, 2005. Soon after the proposals were submitted a number of submissions were eliminated by the White House team. Those that were left, which were SMU, Texas Tech, University of Dallas and Baylor, were asked to come to Washington and make oral presentations. The presentation was made by Tommye Lou Davis on November 15, 2005. The Baylor delegation consisted of: Bill Underwood, interim president, Chancellor Robert Sloan, Will Davis, chair of the Board of Regents, Larry Brumley, interim VP for Communications and Marketing, Don Wilson, library consultant and David Jones of Dini Partners, fundraising consultant. The White House team present consisted of: Don Evans, chair of the GWB presidential library advisory committee, Marvin Bush, brother of President Bush, Craig Stapleton, Ambassador to France, Karl Rove, presidential adviser, Andrew Card, chief of staff to President Bush and Harriet Miers, White House Counsel. The presentation lasted for one hour and was tightly scripted accompanied by power point slides to drive home each selling point for Baylor.

We received word on December 21, 2006, that the White House would go into exclusive discussions with SMU regarding the library. The final decision and announcement was made in January, 2008.