Bush found ‘kindred spirits’ at Texas A&M
He had a pedigree that aligned him with the New England elite: He grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, a wealthy enclave in a state represented in the Senate by his father, Prescott, and attended prep school at the prestigious Phillips Academy before going to Yale University, where he was captain of the baseball team.
But this week, President George H.W. Bush, who died Friday at 94, will be buried in a place that, in some ways, could not be farther from his East Coast roots: near a pond stocked with catfish on the campus of what had once been an agricultural and mechanical college, in a city sprouting from a spread of farm and ranch land in Central Texas.
He had few bonds with the school, Texas A&M University, when he picked it to be the home of his presidential library. Now its campus will be his final resting place.
It was quite an evolution from being a stranger to the university to deciding to anchor his legacy there. But it reflects a relationship forged over the years as, students and university officials said, he became a
visible presence on campus and an influential force behind the scenes. He was the rare person who could persuade world leaders — including, last year, the four living former presidents — to travel to College Station, Texas, where students gathered late Friday night, not long after his death was announced, for a candlelight vigil.
“It’s more than just a connection,” John Sharp, the chancellor of the Texas A&M University System, said. “It’s love. He fell in love with this place, and this place fell in love with him. The students absolutely worshiped him.”
Bush, who had deep ties to Texas and lived in Houston for years, chose Texas A&M in 1991 as the site of his presidential library and a graduate school of government and public service. University and local government officials made a hard sell to convince him, even renaming a major thoroughfare in College Station, which is about 100 miles northwest of Houston, as George Bush Drive.
He was ultimately persuaded by friends who were alumni — or “former students,” in the university’s parlance — including legendary wildcatter Michel T. Halbouty, who, like many Aggies, wore his treasured class ring long after graduating.
“He’s a Texan, ultimately,” Michael K. Young, the university’s president, said of Bush. “You can’t be in Texas long without interacting with a lot of Aggies.”
Texas A&M has morphed into a behemoth university and research institution, with more than 66,000 students. Still, many at the university have clung to its roots as a rural landgrant college that drew students from farms and small towns around Texas and sent them on to military service.
Much of the student body adheres to an elaborate — and, to some outsiders, peculiar — set of traditions that grew out of that era, with students calling out memorized “yells” during football games and taking off their caps before entering a student union dedicated to former students who died in military service.
A university where students crowd dance halls to hear Texas country music and occasionally go to class in boots and pearlsnap shirts might seem like an unlikely match for a politician known for his patrician sensibilities. But beyond any superficial differences in style, people who knew Bush, a decorated Navy pilot who spent 40 years in public service, said he identified with the university’s culture and the premium it placed on such service.
Students in the Corps of Cadets still click-clack across campus in their tan military-style uniforms and shined shoes, and many of them become commissioned military officers. Young said roughly 70 percent of Bush School graduates go into some form of public service.
“Pride and patriotism and faith and family are kind of silly things in a lot of places, but out here, they’re important,” said Gen. Mark A. Welsh III, the retired chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force and dean of the Bush School. “He believed in those things, and I think he found some kindred spirits.”
Before their health declined in recent years, Bush and his wife, Barbara, were regularly spotted on campus, where they kept an apartment. They attended football games and popped into classes at the Bush School. He jumped from a plane over the campus to celebrate the library’s 10th anniversary.
Bush’s body will be flown today from Texas to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland and then lie in state in the U.S. Capitol. A funeral will take place at the Washington National Cathedral on Wednesday and then his body will be flown to Houston to lie in repose at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church before a service Thursday, according to plans released by the military.
He will then be taken by motorcade to the Union Pacific Railroad Westfield Auto Facility in Spring, Texas, and then by train to the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, where he will be buried Thursday. He will be interred alongside his wife, who died in April at 92, and his daughter Robin, who was 3 years old when she died in 1953 of leukemia and whose remains were moved to the shared family plot.
At around midnight Friday, after flags had been lowered to half-staff, dozens of people, many of them students, gathered around a fountain outside the presidential library for a hastily arranged vigil.
“It’s a blessing to be here, and I’m sad that he’s gone,” one of them, Miranda Lindsey, a Bush School graduate student, told The Eagle, a newspaper that covers College Station. “I’m glad he’s reunited with Mrs. Bush. I think we’re all feeling that sentiment right now — grief, but also happiness for him to be home, finally.”