The political dynasty of Bush
Late US president led family of history-makers
WASHINGTON: He was president for only four years, but George H.W. Bush shaped the United States history for decades, taking on tough jobs from Beijing to the CIA, ousting Iraqi forces from Kuwait, sealing a breakthrough budget deal that cost him an election and fathering a future president.
The 41st US president was a foreign policy realist who navigated the turbulent but largely peaceful fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 and assembled an unprecedented coalition to defeat Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein two years later.
But the decorated war pilot and former Central Intelligence Agency chief suffered the ignominy of being a one-term president, denied a second term over a weak economy when he lost the 1992 election to upstart Democrat Bill Clinton.
Bush presided over economic malaise at home and infuriated his fellow Republicans during a budget battle with rival Democrats by famously breaking his vow: “Read my lips: No new taxes.”
But he was the respected patriarch of a blue blood political dynasty – his son George spent eight years in the White House and another son, Jeb, served as governor of Florida.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, yesterday hailed the late George H.W. Bush’s role in helping end the Cold War and an arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev, 87, was speaking after reports conforming the death of the former US president.
Bush held talks with Gorbachev before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and signed a landmark arm control agreement with him that significantly cut both countries’ nuclear arsenals.
“Many of my memories are linked to him. We happened to work together in years of great changes. It was a dramatic time demanding huge responsibility from everyone. The result was the end of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race,” Russia’s Interfax news agency cited Gorbachev as saying.
“I pay tribute to Bush’s contribution towards this historic achievement. He was a genuine partner.”
Bush’s passing comes just months after the death in April of his wife and revered first lady Barbara Bush, to whom he was married for 73 years.
George Herbert Walker Bush was born on June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts, into a wealthy New England political dynasty – the son of Prescott Bush, a successful banker and US senator for Connecticut.
Bush had a pampered upbringing and attended the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, but delayed his acceptance to Yale University to enlist in the US Navy on his 18th birthday and head off to war.
He flew 58 combat missions during World War II before marryingBar- bara Pierce in January 1945 shortly before the war ended, and the couple went on to have six children.
Instead of joining his father in banking upon graduation from Yale, Bush headed to bleak west Texas to break into the rough-and-tumble oil business. He surprised many with his success and by 1958, he had settled in Houston as president of an offshore drilling company.
In the 1960s, Bush, now independently wealthy, turned to politics.
He was a local Republican Party chairman and in 1966, he won a seat in the US House of Representatives. He served there until 1970, when he lost a bid for the Senate.
Over the next decade, he held high-level posts that took him and Barbara around the world: head of the Republican National Committee, US ambassador to the United Nations, envoy to China and director of the CIA, where he was praised for restoring morale after revelations of widespread illegal activity.
He served as vice-president to Ronald Reagan after losing to him
in the 1980 Republican primary, an eight-year period of hands-on training for the top post he would go on to win by a solid margin in 1988, as the Cold War was coming to an end.
In a major test of the post-Cold War order, Saddam’s million-man army invaded Kuwait in 1990 and looked set to roll into Saudi Arabia, which would have given the Iraqi strongman over 40% of the world’s oil reserves.
Bush assembled a coalition of 32 nations to drive Iraqi forces out in a matter of weeks with a lightning air and ground assault.
Some 425,000 US troops backed by 118,000 allied soldiers took part in Operation Desert Storm, decimating Saddam’s military machine without ousting him from power – a task that would be accomplished 12 years later by Bush’s son.
After retiring from public life, Bush fulfilled a wartime pledge to one day jump out of a plane for fun and famously went skydiving on his 75th, 80th, 85th and 90th birthdays. — Agencies