Barbara Bush Dies at 92
‘I had the best job in America’
• Barbara Bush was the snowy-haired first lady whose plainspoken manner and utter lack of pretence made her more popular at times than her husband, President George H.W. Bush
She died Tuesday at 92. Mrs. Bush brought a grandmotherly style to buttoned-down Washington, often appearing in her trademark fake pearl chokers and displaying no vanity about her white hair and wrinkles.
“What you see with me is what you get. I’m not running for president — George Bush is,” she said at the 1988 Republican National Convention, where her husband, then vice-president, was nominated to succeed Ronald Reagan.
The Bushes, who were married Jan. 6, 1945, had the longest marriage of any presidential couple in American history. And Mrs. Bush was one of only two first ladies who had a child who was elected president. The other was Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams and mother of John Quincy Adams.
“I had the best job in America,” she wrote in a 1994 memoir describing her time in the White House. “Every single day was interesting, rewarding, and sometimes just plain fun.”
She could be caustic in private, but her public image was that of a self-sacrificing, supportive spouse who referred to her husband as her “hero.”
Her uncoiffed, matronly appearance often provoked jokes that she looked more like the boyish president’s mother than his wife.
Eight years after leaving the nation’s capital, Mrs. Bush stood with her husband as their son George W. was sworn in as president. They returned four years later when he won a second term. Unlike Mrs. Bush, Abigail Adams did not live to see her son’s inauguration. She died in 1818, six years before John Quincy Adams was elected.
Mrs. Bush insisted she did not try to influence her husband’s politics.
“I don’t fool around with his office,” she said, “and he doesn’t fool around with my household.”
Daughter-in-law Laura Bush, wife of the 43rd president, said Mrs. Bush was “ferociously tart-tongued.”
“She’s never shied away from saying what she thinks. ... She’s managed to insult nearly all of my friends with one or another perfectly timed acerbic comment,” Laura Bush wrote in her 2010 book, Spoken from the Heart.
In her 1994 autobiography, Barbara Bush: A Memoir, Mrs. Bush said she did her best to keep her opinions from the public while her husband was in office. But she revealed that she disagreed with him on two issues: She supported legal abortion and opposed the sale of assault weapons.
She also disclosed a bout with depression in the mid1970s, saying she sometimes feared she would deliberately crash her car. She blamed hormonal changes and stress.
“Night after night, George held me weeping in his arms while I tried to explain my feelings,” she wrote. “I almost wonder why he didn’t leave me.”
She said she snapped out of it in a few months.
Mrs. Bush raised five children: George W., Jeb, Neil, Marvin and Dorothy. A sixth child, 3-year-old daughter Robin, died of leukemia in 1953.
In a speech in 1985, she recalled the stress of raising a family while married to a man whose ambitions carried him from the Texas oilfields to Congress and into influential political positions that included ambassador to the United Nations, GOP chairman and CIA director.
The 43rd president was not the only Bush son to seek office in the 1990s. In 1994, when George W. was elected governor of Texas, son Jeb narrowly lost to incumbent Lawton Chiles in Florida. Four years later, Jeb was victorious in his second try in Florida.
Sons Marvin and Neil both became businessmen. Neil achieved some notoriety in the 1980s as a director of a savings and loan that crashed. Daughter Dorothy, or Doro, has preferred to stay out of the spotlight. She married lobbyist Robert Koch, a Democrat, in 1992.
Mrs. Bush was born Barbara Pierce in Rye, N.Y. Her father was the publisher of McCall’s and Redbook magazines. After attending Smith College for two years, she married young naval aviator George Herbert Walker Bush. She was 19.
After Second World War, the Bushes moved to the Texas oilpatch to seek their fortune and raise a family. It was there that Bush began his political career, representing Houston for two terms in Congress in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In a collection of letters published in 1999, George H.W. Bush included a note he gave to his wife in early 1994.
“You have given me joy that few men know,” he wrote. “You have made our boys into men by bawling them out and then, right away, by loving them. You have helped Doro to be the sweetest, greatest daughter in the whole wide world. I have climbed perhaps the highest mountain in the world, but even that cannot hold a candle to being Barbara’s husband.”
EVERY SINGLE DAY WAS INTERESTING, REWARDING AND SOMETIMES JUST PLAIN FUN.