The U.S. cowboys in chief

FOR better or worse, George W. Bush is our presidential cowboy du jour. Google his name and the word "cowboy," and 128,000 entries pop up. Many contain media musings over the president's taste for cowboy gear -- such as the $1,000 cowboy hat he sports at his ranch in Crawford, Texas -- and his tendency to pepper his speech with Western references, such as his comment that he would "smoke out" terrorists hiding in Pakistan and Afghanistan's mountainous border region.

Whether Bush's identification with cowboys is good or bad tends to be in the eye of the beholder. What's certain, though, is that the Texan is far from the first president to curry the cowboy image -- perhaps the quintessential symbol of American independence, strength and manliness -- for its political capital.

The Autry National Center examines ways in which presidents have defined themselves as cowboys -- or at least, quasi cowboys -- since Teddy Roosevelt in the new exhibition "Cowboys and Presidents," which runs through Sept. 7 before traveling to Austin, Texas.

The show surveys a century of photos, newsreels and newspaper stories; film, TV and radio clips; artworks; and presidential memorabilia culled from private lenders and collections belonging to the Autry as well as presidential and university libraries.

Highlights include the iconic, such as LBJ's much-photographed Stetson hat; the sentimental -- drawings inspired by the film "High Noon," which Bill Clinton made as a child; the metaphorical -- the intricately carved Saddle of Independence dedicated to 9/11, which was a gift from the Black Hills Stock Show Foundation to George W. Bush; and the curious -- Calvin Coolidge's electric exercise horse (which resembled a mechanical bull). "The rumor is he rode it in the White House in his underwear and a cowboy hat," says Garron Maloney, the assistant curator for Ranch Life and the New West who organized the show with lead curator B. Byron Price, director of the University of Oklahoma's Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West, and Jeffrey Richardson, the current Autry-University of Nevada Las Vegas fellow. Maloney says the exhibition, five years in the making, and upcoming book by Price constitute the first scholarly work on the subject.

Before Teddy Roosevelt's time, cowboys had a nasty reputation, thanks to Billy the Kid and other violent outlaws who ran roughshod over the frontier. Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows and late-19th century dime novels combined to recast the cowboy's image as an Anglo-Saxon hero and heir to the Arthurian Knights of the Round Table.