Former US president George HW Bush dead at 94
WASHINGTON: Former US president George HW Bush, who guided America through the end of the Cold War and launched the international campaign to drive Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait, died Friday at his home in Houston. He was 94.
Tributes quickly poured in for the 41st US president — a decorated World War II pilot, skilled diplomat and onetime CIA chief who also saw his son George follow in his footsteps to the Oval Office.
Bush’s passing comes just months after the death in April of his wife Barbara — his “most beloved woman in the world” — to whom he was married for 73 years.
“Jeb, Neil, Marvin, Doro and I are saddened to announce that after 94 remarkable years, our dear Dad has died,” former president George W Bush said in a statement. “George HW Bush was a man of the highest character and the best dad a son or daughter could ask for,” he said.
Bush is survived by his five living children — a sixth child, daughter Robin, died of leukemia before her fourth birthday — and 17 grandchildren. He died “at home in Houston surrounded by family and close friends,” family spokesman Jim McGrath told AFP. Bush suffered from Parkinson’s disease and had used a wheelchair for several years.
He had been in and out of hospital in recent months, including right after Barbara’s death. Funeral arrangements will be announced in due course, McGrath said.
The former president, a Republican, is expected to lie in state in the US Capitol and then be buried at his presidential library in Texas, where students held a candlelight vigil early Saturday, local media reported.
President Donald Trump, who was in Argentina attending a G20 summit of world leaders, hailed Bush’s “sound judgment, common sense, and unflappable leadership.”
WASHINGTON: History takes awhile to render judgements, but the arc already is being kind to George Herbert Walker Bush. Particularly in foreign policy, the achievements of the 41st American president, nicknamed Bush 41 to distinguish him from his son, George W Bush, No. 43, are widely recognised today.
What will preclude him from being considered one of the foremost US presidents is his failure to win re-election. One-term presidents tend to suffer in rankings by reputable historians.
Bush, a Republican, is celebrated by Democrats and Republicans for his personal charm and integrity. He was an inclusive man and had little time for haters. This helps explain why there’s no mutual respect between the Bush family and President Donald Trump.
The Bushes, led by the late president’s son, George W Bush, will minimise any role Trump plays at his funeral, while adhering to a protocol that makes it impossible to exclude an ex-president.
With time, a greater appreciation has developed of accomplishments than seemed less apparent when he left the White House in 1993. He and his secretary of state, James Baker, managed the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold war with skill.
He gets high marks for the first Gulf War, fought in 1991 after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Massive American might was mobilised and a global coalition formed. Saddam Hussein was forced out of Kuwait and weakened. Then the US largely left. It’s impossible not to draw the contrast to the debacle created by his son a dozen years later, when the US toppled Saddam and then occupied Iraq.
His foreign policy team of Baker, Defence Secretary Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft was the best functioning in modern history. This was a culmination of decades of preparation by Bush to become a foreign policy president, starting when he was a naval pilot in World War 2.
His domestic advisers, by contrast, left few footprints, and his inattention to domestic issues dogged his failed 1992 re-election campaign.
His defeat by Bill Clinton made him one of only two incumbents to be denied a second term since World War 2 and validated the famous dictum of Clinton campaign manager, James Carville: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’
Yet the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act, supported and signed by Bush, was the most important civilrights measure enacted in a quarter century.
Many economists argue that the prosperity of the Clinton era was facilitated when Bush agreed to a budget-deficit reduction package in 1990. It cut spending, raised taxes and infuriated Republican conservatives. It may also have cost him a second term, though in 2014 it won him a John F Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.
Only two years before, in his acceptance speech to the 1988 Republican National Convention, he had vowed that he would never raise taxes. ‘Read my lips, no new taxes,’ he told cheering delegates. But six months later, on the night before his inauguration, he found himself regretting his signature pledge as the deficit outlook worsened.
He never believed in the supply-side, tax-cut-centric economic theory adopted by his party; he’d labelled it ‘voodoo economics’ during the 1980 Republican presidential primaries. He could also separate governing, where his principles usually prevailed, from electoral politics.