Less than a year into his new job as president and CEO of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, Shilo Brooks is operating on all cylinders.
The 43-year-old Texas Panhandle native, named after a Louis L’Amour Western character, landed back in his home state in July following a three-year stint at Princeton University.
“I’ve been really shocked by just how extraordinary Dallas is, and how it’s grown since I first came here as a kid from Lubbock,” Brooks said, in his first interview since officially taking over the reins in September. “It happened just in my lifetime.”
Brooks was named in May to succeed the highly regarded Ken Hersh, who led the center for nearly a decade of dynamic growth and increased community engagement.
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“Ken set up this organization so that a person like me could be here,” said Brooks, who still carries vestiges of his Lone Star lingo. “He left me a really, really healthy organization that’s ready to position itself for its next chapter. I’ve been handed the keys to a really fast car, and all I have to do is drive it wherever I want to go.”
Where exactly is that?
“A number of these institutions are mausoleums for the president,” Brooks said. “I’ve said this to President Bush: ‘We don’t want this to be a Graceland for you.’ And he said, ‘No, we don’t. That’s not what this is about. It’s about the future.’
“So we are an organization focused on the future but understands the principles that animated him, which are American principles. I want to make it clear that his legacy matters,” he added.
“The Bush Center at this particular inflection point in America, when things are so polarized, has a role to play as a preserver of American ideals in their most robust sense,” he said.
“I want to make clear that this place is about the best of what our country is. We want to be an educational institution that offers people a chance to reflect on that.”
But before Brooks began drawing his roadmap for the future, he spent several months settling his family into their Park Cities home, getting his 8-year-old daughter ready for elementary school ― and becoming more attuned to the ways of Dallas, and the 43rd president’s legacy domain.
By the way, he, his wife, Siobahn [shiv-AWN], and their daughter gladly endured North Texas’ mid-summer 100-degree heat index, in lieu of the freezing temps that dominated the East Coast this winter.
And they’re closer to his family.
“My brother [in Fort Worth] and my mother [in Lubbock] both came here for Thanksgiving and for Christmas,” he said. “It was really, really wonderful ― especially for my daughter who hadn’t spent the holidays with them in her conscious memory. So it was a real treat.”
Doubt that Shilo loves Texana?
His miniature Australian Shepherd is named Gus (as in Gus McCrae in the novel Lonesome Dove by one of his favorite writers, Larry McMurtry).
Pulling out paintbrushes
Brooks is tackling his ambitious to-do list with vigor and a pragmatic, systematic way.
He’s in the midst of a deep-dive brainstorm with his staff. “Let’s think outside the box. Let’s surprise people. Let’s do things we haven’t done before,” he’s told them.
Brooks calls this the “painting period” ― an ode to President Bush’s second act into the artistic world of oil portraits.
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“Nobody would have thought that he would have become a painter,” Brooks said. “But he did. And he’s a darn good one. He’s a man of intense creativity. We need to take a page from President Bush’s own book and try to think about new programs we can offer, new ways of presenting enduring principles and speaking to younger audiences.”
How’s that coming?
“It’s going really well,” Brooks said. “The creative energy is palpable.”
Some national museums have had their exhibits censored by the current administration. Is that a worry?
“No. We haven’t had any of that here,” Brooks said. “We’re a nonprofit foundation. The artifacts are owned by the National Archives — not by President Bush. We have to collaborate with them or we don’t have an exhibit. The work they do is extraordinary.”
George Bush and Laura Bush with Shilo Brooks at the announcement of Brooks’ appointment as president and CEO of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in May 2025. 05.19.25 GWBPC CEO Announcement
Grant Miller / Courtesy of the George W. Bush P
Once-in-a-lifetime gig
Brooks was seriously considering a fellowship at the University of Texas and Princeton and was fighting hard to keep him, when his unicorn opportunity showed up with a full-court press by the Bush Center board and both the exiting and entering presidents of Southern Methodist University ― R. Gerald Turner and Jay Hartzell.
Meeting President Bush sealed the deal.
“I’ve had a lot of good mentors in my life, and that’s why I’m where I am,” Brooks said. “But to have the mentorship of a living president is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I want to be around a person who’s felt the weight of the world on their shoulders, and at the same time, can make you smile. You can learn so much by just seeing how he talks and interacts with people.
“There is no question in my mind that he wants me to bring whatever talent and capacity I have to make this place an extraordinary institution. He’s been nothing but supportive.”
So how does the President feel Brooks is doing?
“You’ll have to ask him,” he said.
So I did.
“Laura and I were very impressed with Shilo’s leadership even before Day One. He stepped into big shoes heading up a well-established organization, and he’s doing a fantastic job,” the 43rd President told The News.
“He is an educator at heart, but he listens just as well as he teaches. He is already taking our work and our relationship with SMU to new heights.”
Shilo Brooks, president and CEO of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, moderates a conversation on stage at the center with filmmaker Ken Burns and Pulitzer Prize-winning author/historian Rick Atkinson on Feb. 11, 2026 about their upcoming PBS documentary series The American Revolution. 02.11.26 ENGAGE: A Nation Begins: A Conversation with Ken Burns and Rick Atkinson
chandler / Courtesy of the George W. Bush P
Reeling in SMU students
Brooks is in the early stages of building a strong collaborative relationship between the center and the Hilltop.
Hartzell’s sales pitch to Brooks on the phone a year ago had been highly personal, even though they’d never met: Come to SMU teach AND lead the Bush Center.
Under the arrangement, Brooks is a professor in practice in SMU’s political science department and expects to be teaching statesmanship on campus next spring semester.
“Jay thought we could do great things together,” Brooks said. “I was excited to start alongside him and [SMU Provost] Rachel [Davis Mersey] and believed they would do big things. Still do. They are.”
Brooks eventually envisions teaching students of his undergraduate courses at the Bush Center.
“My hope is to bring some of the 7,000 young people who are on our doorstep into our doors by offering the same kind of courses here at the center that I taught at Princeton on statesmanship and principal leadership,” Brooks said, sitting in his third-floor Bush Center office. “Things that mean a lot to me and mean a lot to President Bush.
“You walk in these doors, and you think, ‘This is a serious place. This is a hallowed place. I would love to teach and call those students to reflect on enduring questions of American statesmanship and leadership here within these walls. I think that’ll provide a magical experience. It’s not been done before.”
Beating bushes for Bush
When it comes to adding to the coffers, Brooks intends to keep the pedal to the metal.
“The Bush Center has been set up for success thanks to donors in every state in the U.S,” Brooks said. “And we’ve been embraced by the local community because of what we bring to this region. “But most importantly, we make it clear to our donors that the Bush Center will be here longer than any of us will.”
Total fundraising — the initial construction campaign, subsequent endowment drives, annual contributions and special gifts — are estimated at approximately $1 billion. Contributions to the Bush Center totaled $41 million in fiscal 2024 were up 52% from the previous year, but that included a one-time significant endowment pledge from a donor’s estate.
“We still need to raise $14 million each year,” Brooks said. “Our endowment helps a great deal, covering roughly half of our expenses, but it doesn’t cover everything. We still need people to give.”
Shilo Brooks, president and chief executive officer of the George W. Bush Presidential Center, speaks during the Moment of Remembrance on September 11th in front of the steel beams from the World Trade Center at the Bush Center in Dallas on Thursday, Sept. 11, 2025.
Juan Figueroa / Staff Photographer
A day in the life
Perhaps no one at the center has gotten to know Brooks better than his executive assistant, Elizabeth Uhl, who has been at the center for four years and has been his gatekeeper since September.
“Shilo is genuine, forward-thinking and personable,” Uhl said. “He is a leader with ideas for the future who is not going to settle for the status quo, and he is always authentic and approachable. He is a truly wonderful person to work for.”
Students call him Professor Brooks when he’s teaching. Otherwise, he’s pretty much a first-name guy. His voicemail: “Hey, this is Shilo and I’m not around, so leave a message.”
His day starts pre-dawn with intellectual reading, academic writing, podcasting and intensive workout with weights, a stationary bike and a rowing machine at home. That’s followed by breakfast with his wife and daughter.
He dresses for work ― usually a blue or gray suit with no tie ― and gets to the Bush Center as early as he can.
“I try to block my calendar for the first two hours of the workday with more reading and writing. I’m an academic writer and thinker at heart, and I need that. It makes my Bush Center work better by making me a better person.”
Around 10:30 or 11, he plows into his administrative duties ― talking to staff, meeting people, emails back and forth, lunches (often at the center’s Café 43,) and meetings usually through the late afternoon.
“I take that last hour to catch up on more email, and if I can, sneak in some writing or reading before I head home,” he said. “We eat dinner as a family every night, unless there’s an event here that I have to stay for.”
His daughter reads until her early bedtime. Brooks reads and writes. Siobhan reads and paints. “If there’s a good football or basketball game on TV in the evening, we enjoy that kind of stuff, too,” he said. “We’ve watched a lot of the Olympics.”
A highlight for Shilo was going to the SMU/University of Miami football game and seeing students storm the field after SMU’s big upset.
Siobhan works part-time in the Dallas office of HDR, the architecture and engineering firm that she worked for in New Jersey.
And yes, people constantly stumble on how to pronounce Siobhan. “But that’s not just a Texas problem,” Shilo said.
How does Siobahn feel about Dallas?
“She’s from San Diego but knew about Texas hospitality because my family are West Texans,” Brooks said. “But once we got to Dallas, so many people reached out to tell us about anything we needed: doctors, schools, good restaurants. She’s been completely won over by that.”
What’s on his reading list?
“I read a lot of memoirs,” he said. “I just finished the memoir of Al Pacino, the actor. It’s called Sunny Boy, and I really enjoyed it. I read another memoir by the screenwriter, Cameron Crowe, who was a journalist for Rolling Stone. It’s called The Uncool. And then I’ve been reading some Tocqueville.”
He also did a refresher read of Thomas Payne’s Common Sense over the holidays.
Mountain bikes, vets and Bush
There’s no set schedule for Brooks and President Bush to get together. They chat from time-to-time when Bush is around.
Brooks wouldn’t dream of calling the former president George or W.
“Absolutely not,” he said emphatically. “He is to me, and will always be, President Bush.”
Brooks rode a mountain bike for the first time when he participated in this year’s Warrior 100K hosted by Bush at his Crawford, Texas ranch on Veterans Day. The annual event brings together wounded post-9/11 veterans for a mountain biking weekend to honor their service.
“I got to hear the veterans’ extraordinary stories,” Brooks said. “We as ordinary citizens can’t begin to imagine the things that they’ve been through, the injuries they’ve sustained, the number of tours of duty that they’ve done, the friendships and bonds that they formed and the things that they’re doing now for our country now that they’ve left the service.
“I got to see that firsthand, which was really important to me.”
Brooks also got high on mountain biking.
“One wrong move and your arms are broken,” he said delightedly. “Everything that’s going on in your head has to stop, because you better be focusing on that rock, branch or whatever else is in front of you. One wrong thought and you’re toast. That’s a really wonderful state of mind.”
There was another take-home memory of his Saturday ride: The two-way deep respect, gratitude and admiration between the President and vets.
“It’s palpable, sincere, legitimate and from the heart,” Brooks said. “To see the real gratitude of the President on display and the emotions he evoked from the vets was moving.”
His walls speak volumes
Brooks’ love of great literature flourished at St. John’s College in Annapolis, known for its “Great Books” curriculum, where he immersed his mind in the works of William Shakespeare, Frederick Douglass and Friedrich Nietzsche, to name just a few.
He’d always dreamed of St. John’s educational paradise having learned about it from a teacher in high school who noticed that Shilo wasn’t much of a student except when it came to reading.
He bounced around at a couple of colleges before deciding that traditional higher-ed wasn’t for him and that St. John’s was out of his family’s financial reach.
“I wanted to read the greatest thoughts that had ever been thought and read the greatest books that had ever been written,” Brooks recalled. “When a man from my hometown learned that I couldn’t afford to go there, he paid my way and changed my life.”
The walls of his office are a testament to what has been transformative in Brooks’ life.
“Teddy is my favorite president, his autobiography is somewhere on that bookstand,” Brooks said. “I love Teddy because he was, of course, a great leader, but also a real intellectual. He was a conservationist; his collected writings take up 23 volumes. He wrote on everything from Oliver Cromwell to the winning of the West to the Rough Riders. He was a man full of wonder.”
Brooks interviews people about books that changed their lives and discusses why in his Free Press podcast Old School with Shilo Brooks.
So what book changed him?
“That one right there,” Brooks said, pointing to a poster cover of This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Most people have read The Great Gatsby, which is his most well-known work.”
“I lived on the West Texas Plains, having never thought about going to college or that people read good literature and have conversations late into the night about life’s big questions,” he said. “That was featured in that novel.
“Fitzgerald was a student at Princeton, where I never thought I would ever teach. That book opened up the world to me and that there’s a whole intellectual life out there that you can live and see, right?”
Last year, Brooks won Princeton’s highest teaching award.
“That was my dream come true. That’s why that book is by my door. I walk out of here every day, I look at it, and I think, ‘A book can set you on a path that you never thought was possible.’”
Meet Shilo Brooks
Titles: President and CEO, George W. Bush Presidential Center; political science professor of practice at Southern Methodist University.
Former position: Executive director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University
Age: 43
Born: Brownfield, Texas
Grew up: Lubbock
Education: Lubbock High School, 2000; Bachelor of Liberal Arts, St. John’s College, Annapolis 2006; Ph.D., political science, Boston College, 2013
Personal: Married to Siobhan for 13 years. They have an 8-year-old daughter.
Interests: Literature, writing, exercise, hanging out with his daughter.
Podcast Host: Old School with Shilo Brooks, The Free Press
SOURCE: Shilo Brooks
George W. Bush Presidential Center
Dedicated: April 25, 2013
Includes: The George W. Bush Presidential Library, operated by the National Archives and Records Administration; the George W. Bush Presidential Museum; the George W. Bush Institute; Café 43; the Bush Center Museum Store, and the Laura W. Bush Native Texas Park.
Ownership: George W. Bush Foundation (a 501(c)(3) nonprofit) on land owned by Southern Methodist University
Located: 2943 SMU Boulevard, Dallas
Net assets: Approximately $711 million
Total contributions: An estimated $1 billion for initial construction campaign, subsequent endowment drives, annual contributions and special gifts.
Attendance: More than two million visitors since opening.
Employees: 100
SOURCES: George W. Bush Presidential Center, Dallas News research