George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum

The permanent exhibit here closed in the spring of 2007 for a complete renovation. It reopened that November with a ceremony, and George H. W. Bush arrived by parachute jump. He was eighty-three years old that year, and the museum bears his name. Inside, the rebuilt exhibit includes a replica of the Oval Office. Most presidential libraries have one, and most keep visitors behind a rope. This one does not. You can walk in, sit behind the president's desk, and have a souvenir photo taken. The library sits on ninety acres on the west campus of Texas A&M. It holds more than two million photographs and more than forty-four million pages of paper, from Bush's years as a congressman, as ambassador to the United Nations, as chairman of the Republican National Committee, and as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The most sensitive material lives in a national security vault.