Days winding down at Bush ranch

Texas home helped bolster political image

President Bush waved before getting into his pickup truck as he left a news conference in 2005 at the ranch in Crawford. (Jason Reed/Reuters)

CRAWFORD, Texas - The sun is setting on this rural corner of President Bush's empire.

This week, the president is spending what are expected to be his final days at his family ranch, a craggy 1,583-acre estate here in the Texas heartland that is almost as prominent a symbol of his presidency as the White House itself.

It was here, set against a desiccated landscape and wide-open skies reminiscent of a frontier novel, where the CIA warned Bush of Al Qaeda's intentions in a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." Here the president made the decision to go to war against Iraq and learned about Hurricane Katrina drowning New Orleans. Here he made nice with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, kissed Saudi leader Abdullah, and married off his daughter Jenna. Here he refused to meet with Cindy Sheehan, who demanded to speak with him about the death of her son in Iraq.

The place dubbed Bush's "Western White House" has seen 18 visits by foreign leaders, scores of news conferences, and long bike rides in the 100-degree heat, as well as the commander in chief's seemingly ceaseless quest to clear brush. With the approaching handover of power to President-elect Barack Obama on Jan. 20, such moments are coming to a quiet end.

Public attention has now shifted to Hawaii and Obama's vacation activities, while little has been heard from Bush since he arrived in Texas aboard Air Force One. He has made no public appearances, and aides have provided few details about his schedule, other than to say that he is talking to advisers and foreign leaders about the violence in Gaza and Israel.

At the local middle school's gymnasium, eight miles from the ranch, a small press corps awaits presidential news. One quiet day, a tumbleweed blew past the front door, as if on cue.

Gordon Johndroe, a White House spokesman, gave a terse update Tuesday on Bush: "The president . . . had his intelligence briefing and met with his advisers for - I think it was over an hour or so, and then made his various phone calls. He's been working from the office and at home at the ranch. I expect he'll work on some trails at the ranch today. I think they've got some friends there as well."

Even Texans would have been hard pressed to find Crawford, a town of 751, on a map when Bush purchased the onetime hog farm in August 1999. But the property carried a particular appeal. For the just-announced presidential candidate, educated at Yale and scion of a well-connected East Coast family, Prairie Chapel Ranch was a symbol of rugged masculinity and attachment to down-home America.

"He thought he was going to be stealing a page from Ronald Reagan's ranch appeal," said Douglas Brinkley, a historian at Rice University. "The weird part of it is, it was going to work for a while."

Bush played his part by mocking journalists who griped about the spartan amenities and punishing summer heat of Central Texas and who wistfully recalled sojourns to Kennebunkport, Maine, and Martha's Vineyard to follow Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

"I know a lot of you wish you were in the East Coast, lounging on the beaches, sucking in the salt air," he told reporters in 2001. "But when you're from Texas - and love Texas - this is where you come home. It'll be the house where I live in for the rest of my life. I like my own home, and I don't mind the heat."

Whether or not the property was bought for political reasons, there is little doubt that Bush enjoyed visiting. He is on his 77th trip to the ranch, and if he leaves today, as planned, he will have spent 490 of his 2,922 days in office there, said Mark Knoller of CBS News, an unofficial record-keeper of the president's travels.

David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers University, suggested that the ranch offered Bush a place of stability in changing times, similar to Calvin Coolidge returning to his family homestead in Plymouth Notch, Vt., in the tumultuous 1920s.

"These attachments to place serve as an anchor against the current of modernity," Greenberg said. "The new adopted home has become sort of proof of stability and constant values."

Brinkley, the Rice historian, said that Bush's love of Texas may be real, grounded in his childhood days in Midland and Houston, but the ranch itself was pure theater.

"Any time you're president, you love to get away," he said. "I think it's really his touchstone place. But it got created out of the crucible of a need for image-making. . . . Don't have him as the Yalie cheerleader or the silver-spoon kid from a wealthy family. The image working around him became Crawford."

The message of the ranch, said Vincent Cannato, a historian at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, was this: "It's not Washington. It's in the middle of nowhere. It's not trendy. It's not hip. There's no Starbucks there. . . . It's more middle than Middle America."

But Bush will not spend the rest of his life there, contrary to the plans he laid out in 2001. He and his wife, Laura, will move to Dallas after he leaves office. At an off-the-record fundraiser in Houston in July, he said Laura had made the decision.