FAREWELL TO THE BEST FIRST LADY THE U.S. EVER HAD
As the world mourns Barbara Bush...
BARBARA Bush, in an interview five years ago, spoke about death. ‘I have no fear of death, which is a huge comfort because we’re getting darn close,’ she said of her husband and herself.
‘George and I pray every night, out loud, and sometimes we fight over whose turn it is. But I don’t fear death for my precious George or for myself, because I know that there is a great God, and I’m not worried.’
Her precious George, former president George HW Bush, now 93 and in frail health himself, spent the last hours of his wife’s life by her bedside and was holding her hand when she passed away.
Married for 73 years and together for 77, theirs was an extraordinary love story, and so Barbara Bush’s life was often viewed only in that context – as the devoted wife of an American president and, of course, with the added distinction of also being the mother of another.
But Barbara Bush was so much more than a presidential appendage. In his expression of condolence yesterday Bill Clinton referred to her ‘grit and grace’. And grit was certainly something that helped define her.
In a CBS interview when Donald Trump was running for the White House, she didn’t disguise her feelings about the Republican candidate, referring to him disparagingly as being like ‘a comedian… a showman’.
And it was she, not the interviewer, who raised the issue of Trump’s attitude towards women, saying that she couldn’t understand how women could vote for someone like him.
When you watch the actual footage, the expression on her 90-yearold face is one of utter bewilderment that such a thing could even be possible.
She never shrank from saying – and doing – what she believed to be right, and what she believed to be important, not for herself, but for the greater good.
YES, she made a few gaffes in her time – by underestimating the impact on the lives of those left destitute after Hurricane Katrina, and by being somewhat dismissive about the potential repercussions of the war in Iraq on which her son, President George W Bush, was leading the charge.
But she was, nonetheless, a woman of substance and a first lady who was simply much more likeable than the ones who came immediately before and after her.
There wasn’t much to like, after all, in the preening, vain and selfserving Nancy Reagan who preceded her. And when Bill Clinton swept the Democrats to office, thereby denying George HW Bush a second term in the White House in 1993, there was Hillary – cold, calculating and self-satisfied right from day one.
Barbara Bush was a no-nonsense type of woman. When she was asked, after she became first lady, if she had been given any guidelines as to how to behave and how to dress, she acknowledged that occasionally she took advice on what to wear. ‘But, for the most part,’ she added, ‘I just depended on the manners my mother taught me.’
Did she make a difference to people’s lives?
Yes, she did. Her deep commitment to improving literacy standards throughout America was a cause that she took up back in the 1980s and saw through to the end of her life by way of the Barbara Bush Foundation. But she didn’t just throw money at it, leaving others to do all the work; she actually got involved, talking to groups about the importance of both adult and child literacy and contributing to a regular radio programme, Mrs Bush’s Story Time, where she encouraged parents to read aloud to their children.
She wasn’t a typical Republican wife, either. In favour of gun control, she agreed to differ with her husband on that matter, and she also voiced liberal sentiments on abortion (as did her husband in his early political days), saying at one point that she believed that it was ‘a private matter’.
And her commitment to equal rights for African Americans was also strong, with her views apparently influential in the appointment of the first African American, Louis Sullivan, to her husband’s presidential cabinet.
While there is much to admire, therefore, about Barbara Bush – her famous grit, her humour (on former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin: ‘I think she’s very happy in Alaska, and I hope she’ll stay there’), her commitment to public service, and her open-mindedness – there is one thing above all other that defined her: dedication to family.
Not just to the man she fell in love with when she was only 16 and he a mere year older, and not just to her children. Rather, Barbara Bush’s commitment was to all that family stands for, and she never wavered in her belief that that was the most important thing in life. ‘Fathers and mothers,’ she once said, addressing a gathering while she was first lady, ‘if you have children, they must come first. You must read to your children, you must hug your children, and you must love your children. Your success as a family, our success as a society, depends not on what happens in the White House, but on what happens inside your house.’
AND yet she had known great tragedy inside her own house when, in 1953, her third-born and, at that time, her only daughter, died from leukaemia when she was only three years old.
Robin Bush was diagnosed out of the blue, and although her parents were given no hope and told that Robin’s death was imminent, they battled for their daughter, upping sticks and moving to New York so that George HW Bush’s uncle, a doctor in Sloan Kettering, the specialist cancer hospital, could look after their little girl.
For seven months, the child stayed in hospital, her parents hoping beyond hope that she would survive. But it wasn’t to be. ‘For one last time I combed her hair and we held our precious little girl,’ Barbara Bush wrote in her autobiography. ‘One minute she was there and the next she was gone… I truly felt her soul go out of that precious little body.’
And yet, rather than split two grieving parents apart, as is often the case in such tragedies, the loss of Robin cemented the Bush marriage.
And so Mrs Bush thrived, her own resilience and her commitment to her remaining family gradually pulling her out of the abyss of grief. And she did what she continued to do all her life – she got on with things.
And now she’s gone, that snowyhaired grandmother with the signature pearl necklace and earrings. A woman who wasn’t a politician, yet managed to reach across political lines in the interest of the greater good. A woman who spoke her mind, who never lost her sense of humour. A wife and mother who put her children first and who adored her husband for almost eight decades.
‘I married the first man I ever kissed,’ she once said.
And wasn’t that – even for, at a time, the most powerful man in the world – the best thing that ever happened to George HW Bush.