At Bush Library, Presidents Abound

Five years ago they weren’t quite such good friends.

George Bush called Bill Clinton and his running mate a pair of buffoons, as in, “My dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos.”

Bill Clinton accused George Bush of being kinder and gentler to foreign despots, as in, “Our nation has a higher purpose than to coddle dictators and stand aside from the global movement toward democracy.”

But on Thursday, a brisk autumn day in this quarter of Texas, a friendship of mutual appreciation--not unlike those struck by agents of the CIA and KGB--blossomed under an expansive, cloudless sky. The president of the United States and the predecessor he had defeated presided side by side over the opening of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum.

Clinton had sent word Wednesday evening through an aide, rather than in a president-to-president telephone call, that he would have to make a hasty exit the next day instead of staying for lunch with the Bush family. The business of the presidency beckoned. He had to return to Washington to press Congress for approval of expanded trade-negotiating authority.

Bush fully understood, the White House said, and made an unscheduled trip to the nearby College Station airport to give Clinton a personal welcome when he arrived.

“In George Bush’s America,” explained former President Gerald R. Ford, “there are no political enemies, merely adversaries, who may disagree with you on one day and yet be with you on the next roll call.”

On a broader plane, though, Thursday was a day not so much about presidents as about the presidency itself--a day in which the current president and his immediate predecessor were joined by two of the three living members of their select fraternity, Ford and Jimmy Carter, and a parade of first ladies: 84-year-old Lady Bird Johnson, walking haltingly aided by a cane and the arm of a white-uniformed miliary aide; Betty Ford; Rosalyn Carter; Nancy Reagan; Barbara Bush; and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

They were joined on the dais by Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, along with David Eisenhower and Julie Nixon Eisenhower.

The presidents, first ladies and presidential offspring have been part of such public events before. With little partisanship, they celebrate the continuation of leadership and the traditions of the office and they honor the bearing of its burdens.

Each such event reflects the man being honored:

* When Jimmy Carter attended the opening of the John F. Kennedy library in 1979 on the shore of Boston harbor, an ocean breeze carried with it a reminder of the spirit of generational transition--and familial love of the New England seashore--that the young president brought to the nation 18 years earlier.

* Bush’s visit to Simi Valley to help dedicate Ronald Reagan’s library six years ago was a sentimental celebration of the popular president’s last hurrah, a gathering of the conservative tribe that he introduced to the nation.

And Thursday was no different: a salute to Bush’s aversion--except in campaign time--to strident partisanship and to his unabashed patriotism.

Bush expanded the traditional reach of such celebrations, inviting foreign leaders with whom he had shared the international stage. Half a dozen showed up, now all of them former leaders: Lech Walesa of Poland, John Major of Britain, Brian Mulroney of Canada, Toshiki Kaifu of Japan, Ruud Lubbers of the Netherlands and John Swan of Bermuda.

“I’m very grateful to President Clinton who, fair and square, saw to it that I have a wonderful private life,” Bush said.

And Carter, observing that any presidential candidate must be adequately endowed with both ambition and ego, said the elections of 1976 (when he defeated Ford), 1980 (when Ronald Reagan defeated him), and 1992 (when Clinton defeated Bush) more than sufficiently addressed the question of ego.

But self-deprecating humor aside, the presidents saluted their own.

Although their relationship “began under somewhat unusual circumstances,” Clinton said, over the last four and a half years when he has called on Bush, “he was always there with wise counsel and, when he agreed, with public support.”

“It’s hard to express to someone who hasn’t experienced it what it means in a moment of difficulty to be able to call someone who, first of all, knows exactly what you’re up against, and secondly will tell you the truth,” Clinton said of Bush. “And he has done that time and time again. I am persuaded that the country is better off because of it.”

For Bush, the privately funded construction of the library--and, even more, the museum chronicling his life from his first halting steps as a toddler in 1925 in Kennebunkport, Me., to his loss of the presidency in 1992--has been an exercise in just the sort of ego gratification that horrified his late mother.

So, he said, “there is one thing left for me to do--apologize to my mother,” who cautioned him and his siblings against being “what she called a ‘braggadocio’ ” And, he added, “I’m afraid that some of these exhibits here today might violate her ‘no-bragging’ rule.”

Indeed, they would: The library is likely to be used mostly by scholars chasing through its 40 million documents as they address the history of the early post-Cold War years. But the museum presents the history of the man: his days in the Texas oil business, his resume-expanding jobs in government service, from Beijing to the United Nations to the Langley, Va., headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It is all housed in an $83-million, 69,500-square-foot building of Texas limestone and granite.

Bush concluded his remarks by echoing the farewell his childhood hero, an ill Lou Gehrig, delivered at Yankee Stadium: “Today, I feel like the luckiest person in the world.”