Faithful to final breath
THEY met at a Christmas dance. She was 17. He was 18. Two years later they were married. The couple stayed together for 73 years, becoming the longestmarried couple in presidential history.
“George Bush knows how I feel,” Barbara Bush had said. “He is the hero.… He is my hero.”
Former first lady Barbara Bush died yesterday at the age of 92. The couple’s relationship was a true love story, which granddaughter Jenna Bush Hager described as “remarkable”.
The former president “still says, ‘ I love you Barbie’ every night,” Hager said on NBC’s Today, where she works.
They had six children, including Hager’s father, former president George W. Bush, making Barbara Bush one of only two first ladies to also be a presidential mother.
The other was Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, the nation’s second president, and mother of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president.
George H. W. Bush, 93, had described the mother of their six children as “the mainstay, of course, the parent who was always there to help solve the daily problems and emergencies of teen and preteen life”.
In her 1994 memoir, Barbara Bush described her and her husband as “the two luckiest people in the world, and when all the dust is settled and all the crowds are gone, the things that matter are faith, family and friends. We have been inordinately blessed, and we know that.”
The former president was a naval aviator in training when they met.
“I’m not much at recalling what people wear, but that particular occasion stands out in my memory,” he said in his autobiography.
The band was playing Glenn Miller tunes and he asked a friend from Rye, New York, if he knew the girl across the room in the green and red holiday dress.
The friend introduced him to Barbara Pierce, a publisher’s daughter from Rye who was going to school in South Carolina.
Within eight months, they’d met each other’s families, were engaged in August 1943 and married on January 6, 1945, four months after Bush was shot down over the Pacific.
He’d been the navy’s youngest aviator when he got his wings and carried the name “Barbara” on his Grumman Avenger torpedo bomber.
After the war, he attended Yale and they moved to Texas.
Her husband made his mark in the oil business as the couple grew their family and turned to politics, a journey that would take them around the world and into the White House.
“You have given me joy that few men know,” George Bush wrote to her, according to a collection of letters published in 1999.
“I have climbed perhaps the highest mountain in the world, but even that cannot hold a candle to being Barbara’s husband,” he also said.