For Bush, Happy Trails to Crawford

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 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.

"Anytime 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. Even the name is a John Wayne or Gary Cooper movie: Crawford with the hay bales. It became this manipulative backdrop."

The message of the ranch, said Vincent J. 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."

Asked what the place has meant to Bush, Johndroe said Tuesday: "The ranch has been a place where the president and Mrs. Bush have been able to relax, have friends over and get away from the spotlight of the White House some. . . . It has been a place where he could take some time off."

But Bush will not spend the rest of his life there, contrary to the plans he laid out in 2001. Instead, 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. "I like Crawford," he said. "Unfortunately, after eight years of asking her to sacrifice, I'm now no longer the decision-maker. She'll be deciding."

Cannato thought Bush was likely to hold on to the property anyway, as Reagan did with his California ranch after leaving the White House.

"If he sells the place in 2010, and he and Laura live it up on the social circuit in Dallas, okay. Then he's a big faker," Cannato said. "But I can't see how. He likes being out there."

Bush's time at the ranch ebbed with his popularity, which nosedived in August 2005 in conjunction with two events that took place while he was in Crawford: the demonstration of Sheehan and the debacle of responding to Hurricane Katrina.

Sheehan staged a protest Aug. 6 outside the ranch, joined by about 50 protesters, and pledged to stay until she could meet with the president. Her crusade, and Bush's refusal to meet with her, became a national story in a quiet August and, within three weeks, 8,500 demonstrators on both sides of the raging war debate swarmed into Crawford.

As that debate reached a fever pitch, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29. Bush continued his trip until two days after floodwaters swamped much of New Orleans, stranding thousands.