A good man in life becomes great in death

The death of George H.W. Bush was announced to friends, family and associates by a one-word coded message flashed to their mobile devices. It was the signal to set in train elaborate arrangements for the mourning, funeral and burial of the 41st president of the United States.

This is the American way of death for its commanders-in-chief. I learned of the long-established protocol months ago from my friend and television colleague, Mary Kate Cary, who was a speech writer in Bush’s White House. She knew the drill. Death is not a surprise for someone at 94, though Bush’s passing (unlike that of his wife, Barbara, last spring) was not expected imminently.

The message sent the official apparatus into high gear. I had not even finished writing a note of condolence to Mary Kate — who revered Bush and remains close to his family — when, at 2 a.m., she suddenly appeared on CNN.

Mary Kate remembered Bush with sparkle and originality, as she does all things. She felt “joy” celebrating a life well-lived. The airwaves were soon filled with historians and biographers who have made the presidency a literary cottage industry.

All brought hoary perspective to Bush’s long, consequential life. They competed with the usual talking heads, former and current politicians and Bush contemporaries, one after another, speaking over stock film footage and the stark banner: George H.W. Bush dead.

And so, through the early hours of Saturday morning into afternoon and Sunday, the machinery of memory began to stamp out the posthumous image of George Herbert Walker Bush as leader — moderate, prudent, courageous, misunderstood, unappreciated, pivotal.

The lionization of the 41st president had begun. This is how a country founded in reaction to royalty turns its leaders, in their afterlife, into Yankee kings.

It will continue for days, the veneration of George H.W. Bush. It will culminate with his funeral Wednesday in Washington National Cathedral and end Thursday with his burial at his presidential library — another peculiarly American institution — in College Station, Texas.

These rites of mourning are reliably reverential, largely uncritical and unfailingly sentimental. It is good manners anywhere to speak no ill of the dead — or at least the newly dead, and particularly when the dead was your president.

The beauty of George H.W. Bush is that it is easy to speak well of him, as many have in recent days, without artifice or affectation. What comes through are his manners, his decency, his empathy, his humility, his loyalty and his capacity for friendship.

Less prominent is the critique: How he embraced the attack politics of Lee Atwater to destroy his opponent, the inept Michael Dukakis, which inaugurated our era of scorchedearth politics. How he nominated to the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas, a mediocrity tarnished by credible allegation of sexual misconduct. How he failed to respond meaningfully to the early 1990s recession and to articulate “the vision thing,” as he put it.

As a congressman, Bush opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a monumental mistake that puts him forever on the wrong side of history. His opposition was particularly unforgivable because it was his fellow Republicans, most of them from the Midwest, who assured passage of this landmark legislation.

Bush failed to win re-election to the presidency in 1992. In the United States, one-term presidents usually carry a badge of failure.

But not necessarily for all time. As Americans ennoble presidents on their death, they also reinvent them. Historically, they often look better. This is called revisionism.

Herbert Hoover, for example, is long seen as a callous and impassive in the face of the Depression. Kenneth Whyte, his gifted biographer, reminds us of his intelligence as an engineer and his humanitarianism, feeding a starving Europe after the First World War.

Other failed presidents of the 20th century — Gerald Ford, for example — are almost always viewed more favourably by history. It is American sentimentality, folksy and optimistic, and it is already at work today.

In life, George H.W. Bush was a good man. In death, he is a great man.