National Post (National Edition)
TO THE ‘LAST GREAT SOLDIER STATESMAN’
EULOGIES PAINT GLOWING PORTRAIT OF BUSH IN FRONT OF A ROW OF HIS SUCCESSORS
It was his first NATO meeting in 1989, and as a parade of world leaders took turns at the podium, newly elected U.S. president George H.W. Bush was taking a lot of notes.
Brian Mulroney, Canada’s prime minister at the time, couldn’t help but notice — and ultimately couldn’t resist.
“It’s very flattering to have the president of the United States take notes as you speak,” Mulroney wryly observed during a moment of levity in his tribute to the life and foreignpolicy legacy of his close friend and confidant.
“Even someone as modest as me,” he said, pausing for a cascade of knowing laughter, “threw in a few more adjectives here and there, to extend the pleasure of the experience.”
Nearly 30 years later, Mulroney again spared few superlatives Wednesday during a solemn and reverential state funeral at Washington’s National Cathedral, predicting that the 41st president would go down in history as the strongest, bravest and
most distinguished commanderin-chief the United States has ever known.
“Many men of differing talents and skills have served as president and many more will do so as the decades unfold, bringing new strength and glory to these United States of America,” Mulroney said, with the current one — Donald Trump — sitting directly in front of him.
“And 50 or 100 years from now, as historians review the accomplishments and the context of all who have served as president, I believe it will be said ... that no occupant of the Oval Office was more courageous, more principled and more honourable than George Herbert Walker Bush.”
None of the president’s eulogizers — not Mulroney, nor presidential historian Jon Meacham, nor former Republican senator Alan Simpson, nor Bush’s own son and eventual successor in the White House, George W. Bush — made any overt comparisons to Trump.
But at virtually every turn, in every rhetorical flourish hailing the elder Bush as a paragon of leadership, virtue and character, the contrast and the tension were palpable.
Before the ceremony, the current president’s arrival alongside first lady Melania Trump marked a dramatic shift in mood. As they sat down, the couple exchanged brief pleasantries with their predecessors, Barack and Michelle Obama. Next to them were Bill and Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 campaign rival, who stared straight ahead.
Bush lived his life through a modest prism of principle, Meacham said: “Tell the truth, don’t blame people, be strong, do your best, try hard, forgive, stay the course.” He described the president’s famous rallying cry of “a thousand points of light” as evocative of Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature,” calling them “companion verses in America’s national hymn.”
The elder Bush was “the last great soldier-statesman,” Meacham said, “our shield” in dangerous times.
Trump, no fan of the Bush family, has mocked “points of light” at recent campaign rallies, preferring his own philosophy of “America first.”
Nor was Trump asked to speak during the funeral, as is tradition for sitting presidents. Ostensibly, that’s because the family already had a ready-made former president waiting in the wings: the fallen leader’s son, whose eulogy collapsed briefly into tears as he imagined his father reunited with his late wife Barbara and daughter Robin, lost to leukemia in 1953.
“Through our tears, let us know the blessings of knowing and loving you, a great and noble man, the best father a son or daughter could ask,” Bush said. “And in our grief, let us smile, knowing that Dad is hugging Robin and holding Mom’s hand again.”
Mulroney, too, struggled at one point to contain himself as he recounted Bush, a former navy pilot, showing him a plaque mounted at the family compound in Kennebunkport, Me. It was inscribed with the letters CAVU: “ceiling and visibility unlimited,” a description of perfect flying conditions.
The former prime minister lingered on his old friend’s foreign-policy and legislative resumé, hailing his ability to navigate some of the most momentous, fractious moments in history, including the collapse of the Soviet Union and the delicate challenge of reuniting Germany after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Mulroney hailed the first Gulf War — a “Bush initiative, from beginning to end” — as “one of the most spectacular and successful international initiatives ever undertaken in modern history.” And he cited the Americans with Disabilities Act, the acid-rain accord with Canada, and of course NAFTA, ushering in “the largest and richest free trade area in the history of the world.”
NAFTA, he acknowledged, has been “recently modernized and improved by new administrations,” a reference to both the Liberal government in Ottawa and Trump himself, who has famously denounced the trade pact.