A LIFE OF SERVICE
From his early days as a Navy pilot through later years, when he became a champion for humanitarian causes, the former president spent a lifetime as a public servant.
Tributes from around the world poured in Saturday following the death of George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president of the United States who died in Houston late Friday after decades as a public servant that set in motion an enduring family legacy. He was 94.
“The legacy of George H.W. Bush will be forever etched in the history of America and the world. It is a lifelong record of selfless patriotic service to our nation,” former Secretary of State James Baker said in a statement.
“He was the youngest Navy pilot in World War II, a Texas congressman, UN ambassador, America’s first envoy to China, CIA director, vice president and president,” he said. “In each and every one of these positions, he led with strength, integrity, compassion and humility — characteristics that define a truly great man and effective leader.”
Bush died peacefully at his Houston home with Baker and several members of his extended family at his side. Other family members were on a speakerphone, talking to Bush in his final moments.
His last words, Baker said, were “I love you, too,” spoken to his son, former President George W. Bush.
Baker and other world leaders past and present on Saturday saluted Bush, the last president to have served in the military during World War II and the last whose worldview had been shaped by the imperative to contain Communist expansionism. His experience in international diplomacy served him well as
he dealt with the unraveling of the Soviet Union as an oppressive superpower and later the rise of China as a commercial behemoth and potential partner.
As cautious and restrained as he was in foreign matters, Bush had an inclination for personal risk-taking that showed up early in his life, when he became a carrier pilot in the war — one of the most dangerous jobs in the military — and then struck out on his own at war’s end, eschewing a comfortable job in New York to become an oilman in Texas.
Likewise, when his interest turned to politics a decade or so later, he was more than willing to give up his executive suite for a chance at public office.
Steeped in noblesse oblige and the importance of public service, Bush always felt the lure of political life. It finally snared him in 1962 when he was chosen to head Houston’s fledgling GOP. He spent the next three decades in the political limelight, enjoying a roller-coaster career that saw more defeats than victories yet improbably landed him in the White House.
Bush was elected president in 1988 as the successor to Ronald Reagan, a conservative icon whom he ran against and then served as vice president. Unlike Reagan, he was a pragmatic leader guided by moderation, consensus building and a sense for problem-solving shorn of partisan rhetoric. Like his father, who served in the U.S. Senate, he swore no allegiance to orthodox tenets. That put him at odds with a take-no-prisoners attitude of a new breed of Republicans and helped do in his re-election bid, sending him home to Houston in forced retirement.
Most of Bush’s political career was spent in appointed jobs, where he demonstrated loyalty and a quick-study competence, rarely making headlines. Expectations were modest when he became president. Many in his party hoped he would simply follow in Reagan’s footsteps. Instead, he quickly distinguished himself as the postwar order began to undergo dramatic changes.
Bush was put to the test shortly after taking office. Surging movements in Eastern Europe saw opportunity to free themselves from the Soviet yoke, thanks in part to the liberalizing influence of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Bush’s measured response allowed events to unfold, including the destruction of the Berlin Wall, without triggering potentially catastrophic responses from Soviet hard-liners.
Bush again displayed his diplomatic skills in the summer of 1990 when he coordinated a multinational response to the military invasion of tiny Middle East nation Kuwait by neighboring Iraq and its dictator, Saddam Hussein. The victorious Operation Desert Storm brought high approval ratings that appeared to guarantee a second term.
Domestic matters proved a different sort of challenge. Plagued by inherited budget deficits and a Congress under the control of Democrats, Bush was pushed into a tax increase that belied his explicit promise to allow none. He agreed to it because he recognized it was in the country’s best interest, but the political damage was severe. His re-election bid fell short, a failing that haunted him for years. Uncharacteristically, it even caused him to wonder whether history would regard him as a failed president. It has not. “I think over the years he fares well,” said presidential historian Henry Brands, the author of seven presidential biographies and a professor at the University of Texas. “If voters have a referendum and they vote you down, that automatically puts you down a rung. It’s unfair. Bush always was rated very highly by historians more than he was by the public. I think that is changing.”
Bush was born into privilege and reared in the cradle of America’s economic aristocracy, yet from an early age, he refused to ride the coattails of entitlement. Approaching his graduation from Yale University in 1948, he was offered a job at his family’s Wall Street investment firm, close to his native Connecticut. He turned it down. Whatever his destiny, he vowed that it would be fully earned.
So began a remarkable journey that would lead him from the elegant estates of New England to the dusty plains of West Texas, to the leafy precincts of Houston’s nicest neighborhoods, to foreign capitals and back to America’s own, into political campaigns at the humblest level and one that ultimately netted him the White House.
Bush’s long life encompassed the full arc of the 20th century, beginning in an era of steamships and a new ideology called communism and ending as American spaceships explored distant planets and the hammer-and-sickle was mostly a fading emblem on old flags. He was to be the last president of his generation, which came of age during the Great Depression, participated in a cataclysmic world war, and ushered in unprecedented American power and prosperity.
Turning away from the preordained comfortable life, Bush struck out for Texas and found success, first as an independent oilman and later as a young congressman from Houston. The misfortune of bad timing hurt him at times in his pursuit of higher office, yet a string of high-profile appointed positions reflected the faith others had in his ability and kept alive his dream of fulfilling his father’s prediction that someday he would become president.
“The world was fortunate to have his background and instincts at a turning point,” said Robert Gates, who served as Bush’s CIA director and deputy national security adviser. “The collapse and end of the Cold War look sort of preordained in hindsight, but for those who were there, it was not clear how it would happen.”
Gates, who served in eight presidential administrations, suggested that Bush never received the credit he deserved for quietly “greasing the skids” that saw communists slide from power in the Soviet Union.
“There is no precedent in all of history for the collapse of a heavily armed empire without a major war,” Gates said. “He was a figure of enormous historical importance.”
Though Bush came to be widely respected by foreign leaders and diplomats, his political profile at home was different. He had long been dogged by assertions that he was a bland and hazy character, aloof and dilettantish. The image baffled him and many who knew him. He was chided for a lack of apparent vision, yet it was not his nature to view himself as a visionary.
“What’s wrong with trying to help people?” he once asked. “What’s wrong with trying to bring peace? What’s wrong with trying to make the world a little better?”
To some, Bush paled in comparison to his strong-willed predecessor in the White House, but he was simply a different breed of politician: a traditional Republican whose belief in limited government was in no way at odds with his view that public service was a calling.
Reagan’s famous maxim that government was not the solution to a problem but the problem itself was not Bush’s view, which might explain why his single term arguably resulted in more significant legislative achievements than Reagan’s two, among them the Americans with Disabilities Act, a bolstered Clean Air Act and an increased minimum wage.
Bush’s career from start to finish, especially as president, was largely free of scandal or great controversy, with one troubling exception — his role as vice president in the Iran-Contra scandal.
His ethical standards rarely were questioned. His judgment was the product of studied deliberation and ample give-and-take with advisers. He regularly entertained Democratic leaders at the White House and made a great effort to develop personal relationships over drinks and a game of horseshoes, just as he had in the diplomatic world over many years.
“President Bush was inclined to forgive and forget past slights, defeats and even outrages,” said longtime aide Chase Untermeyer. “Thus did he offer rides to Maine for Senator George Mitchell, make the daughter of Senator Sam Nunn the head of the Points of Light Foundation, and — to clinch the case — become buddies with Bill Clinton.”
Bush was by nature a practical manager. He believed his job was to get something done, taking incremental steps when big ones were unobtainable. He had no use for those who would sacrifice progress on the altar of philosophical purity, nor did he regard opponents as enemies.
He was defeated in an unusual three-way contest with Democrat Clinton and Texas billionaire Ross Perot — a sour coda to a stellar career. Though he had been ambivalent about even running for reelection, the loss would gnaw on him. He believed that he left the job he signed up for unfinished.
Even years later, Bush recalled the sick feeling he carried inside for having let down the people who believed in him.
“That was the sad part for me,” he told an interviewer, “and I felt very strongly about that. I still do.”
Bush was born on June 12, 1924, in Milton, Mass., to Prescott and Dorothy Bush, the second of five children, four of them boys. His was an idyllic childhood spent among the nation’s economically privileged, with numerous trips to family estates in Maine and South Carolina.
Although the hardships of the Great Depression did not severely affect the Bushes, his parents tried to stress that good fortune should not be taken for granted, insisting on modesty at all times, along with concern for those going through hard times. Work mattered. Life, they insisted, was no country club affair.
Bush attended Phillips Academy, a famous boarding school in Andover, Mass., where he excelled academically and athletically. He was a favorite of his classmates, often chosen to captain the teams he was on and known to call out bullies who bedeviled the less popular students.
As he grew to adulthood, he slowly soaked up the history of generations of Walkers and Bushes and began to understand the expectations for those of his class and background — a demand for service to the public good largely divorced from personal gain. It made a deep impression on him.
“Bush was a figure of an older, fading order of American power,” wrote Bush biographer Jon Meacham in “Dynasty and Power,” a 2015 authorized biography. “When his family and … friends looked at him, they saw a man who could have spent his life making and spending money, but who had chosen to obey the biblical injunction, drilled into him by his parents, that to whom much is given much is expected.”
Bush’s first great test came as his days at Andover were ending, graduating in the face of a world succumbing to a widening war. He might have been able to use connections for a service academy appointment or a plum job that did not place him in harm’s way. Like many of his friends and others of his class, including Joseph and John Kennedy, he chose the opposite path.
Bush enlisted in the U.S. Navy upon finishing high school in 1942 and hoped to become a pilot. He earned his wings and was commissioned an ensign before his 19th birthday. His wartime duty was spent in the Pacific flying a three-man Avenger torpedo bomber.
Bush piloted 58 combat missions from the carrier USS San Jacinto, but one stood out. During a Sept. 2, 1944, attack on Japanese positions on Chichi-Jima, one of the Bonin Islands, his Avenger was badly hit by flak. He was able to complete the bombing run but ordered the other two crewmen to “hit the silk” as the plane headed toward the water. He did likewise and was able to haul himself into a life raft after popping up from the sea, dazed and out of breath. His crewmates were never found.
Bush was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross yet never considered himself a war hero despite the efforts of later political advertising.
“They wrote it up as heroism,” Bush said late in his life of the paperwork leading to the decoration, “but it wasn’t — it was just doing your job.”
In January 1945, while on leave, Bush wed his pre-war fiancée, Barbara Pierce. The two had met at a dance when he was at Phillips and she at a tony boarding school in South Carolina. Her family, like his, came from old money, and among her ancestors were early New England settlers. A distant relative, Franklin Pierce, was the 14th American president.
After the war, Bush and his new wife moved to New Haven, Conn., where he would begin his college education at Yale, the alma mater of his father and four other relatives.
He graduated in under three years because of an accelerated program offered to veterans eager to make up for lost time. He again excelled at sports and captained the baseball team, for which he played first base. He was just as adept in the classroom, gaining Phi Beta Kappa distinction and an economics degree. Yet, as he acknowledged, what should have been idyllic college years had been altered by the war. The class of 1948 were serious men intent on getting out and getting going.
As graduation approached, Bush balked at an offer to join a prominent investment bank started by his maternal grandfather. To a friend, he wrote that it bothered him to take advantage of “the benefits of my social position.”
A close family friend encouraged him to think of the oil business, which would take him to Texas. Oil drilling was as foreign to him as tightrope walking or fashion design, but it appealed to his taste for risk and held the promise of great wealth.
In the summer of 1948, Bush loaded up his new Studebaker, a graduation gift, and pointed it southwest, ending up in Odessa several days later. Barbara and their new baby, George, flew down after he had found lodging in a weathered duplex, their first Texas home. Their new life began. The family friend had provided an entry-level sales position with an oil field tool company, the bottom rung on the ladder. It should be noted this was no ordinary friend — Neil Mallon was the head of Dresser Industries, a leading oil field equipment company.
By 1950, he, Barbara, and their two young children were living in
“He was a figure of enormous historical importance.” Robert Gates, Bush’s CIA director and deputy national security adviser
Midland, where he had formed an oil company with a neighbor, John Overbey. Financial backing came from Bush’s father and some of his father’s friends and business contacts.
With no geologic or engineering background, Bush learned the business from the ground up, “walking fields, talking to people and trying to make deals,” Overbey later recalled in an interview. Three years later, he and Overbey joined up with two brothers, Hugh and William Liedtke, to form Zapata Petroleum. An offshore subsidiary was formed a year later.
Zapata raised more money and gambled on an interest in a field in Coke County that skeptics claimed was played out. One of the brothers, Bill Liedtke, said years later that the young company drilled 130 wells and never had a dry hole. As for politics, there wasn’t much time for it, though Bush did later mention his modest role as a Republican precinct worker. In one particular primary, he later recalled, perhaps apocryphally, only three GOP voters showed up: he, his wife, and a drunken Democrat who wandered into the wrong polling station.
Bush enjoyed his time in Midland, learning a business, tending to a growing family and making friends who would prove important later.
The closeness of the city’s business community was evident when the Bush family’s life was interrupted by tragedy. The second of the children, daughter Robin, was diagnosed with leukemia in 1953, before the disease became largely curable.
His fledgling business career was all but put on hold for more than six months as he, Barbara and Robin made repeated trips to Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Barbara tried to approach their new circumstances with stoic resolve, to the point of booting visitors out of Robin’s hospital room if they cried. Her husband became increasingly emotional and often was the one who had to leave the room. Robin died later in 1953.
“I hadn’t cried at all when Robin was alive, but after she died, I felt I could cry forever,” Barbara recalled in a 1988 interview with Texas Monthly. “George had a much harder time when she was sick. He was just killing himself, while I was very strong. That’s the way a good marriage works. Had I cried a lot, he wouldn’t have. But then things reversed after she died. George seemed to accept it better.”
The Bushes lived in Midland for almost a decade. It was where he made his first real money — his own money — and where he established his image as a true, if transplanted, Texan, one who could down a bowl of chili at lunch and a chicken-fried steak at dinner, snacking in between on pork rinds. Everyone in town knew George Bush — “Poppy,” his childhood nickname, had been jettisoned along with the Brooks Brothers suits — but isolated West Texas was not where he needed to be.
A disagreement over the direction of the company led Bush to buy out the other investors in Zapata Offshore in 1959, and he soon moved the company to Houston.
During the early 1960s, Bush began to feel the political itch, or to be more precise, respond to an itch that had been there for years, and waded into a successful race for Harris County GOP chairman to make sure it did not fall into the hands of perceived extremists in the party’s right wing, many of whom were members of the conspiracy-hawking John Birch Society.
Perhaps because his father had just left the U.S. Senate, Bush then brashly decided to take on incumbent U.S. Sen. Ralph Yarborough in 1964.
Though little known outside of Houston and Midland, Bush campaigned vigorously as a different sort of Republican, less in step with the northeastern wing of his father and closer to the politics of Barry Goldwater and George Wallace. He went full-tilt conservative, opposing, among other socially progressive initiatives, the pending Civil Rights Act.
Yarborough portrayed Bush as an extremist and won easily, gaining 56 percent of the vote as Lyndon Johnson swamped Goldwater in the presidential race.
After his defeat, Bush struggled to reconcile his moderate views with an election that had seen him embrace, however tentatively, an anti-progressive tone and a segregationist posture.
“This mean, humorless philosophy which says everybody should agree on absolutely everything is not good for the Republican Party or our state,” Bush wrote to a friend after the loss. “When the word moderate becomes a dirty word, we have some soul-searching to do.”
In November 1966, Bush ran for Congress and won, becoming the first Republican from Houston and the star of the growing Texas GOP. He ended up with a plum appointment to the Ways and Means Committee — a party nod to the importance of Texas. His voting record was predictably conservative, though not as hard right as his previous rhetoric suggested, and he ended up voting for the Civil Rights Act, as a result receiving stacks of hate mail and some death threats.
“Out of a clear blue sky, the phone rang. I thought we were done, out of it, just gone.” George H.W. Bush, on getting the call from Ronald Reagan to be his running mate in 1980
“I want (the party’s) conservatism to be sensitive and dynamic, not scared and reactionary,” Bush told the Wall Street Journal at the time.
Bush was in his second term when President Richard Nixon asked him to take on Yarborough again. Bush was more than willing, and his instinct told him that Yarborough’s time was at an end.
He was right. But a former Texas congressman named Lloyd Bentsen had the same idea. When Bentsen knocked off the liberal incumbent, Bush found himself in a race he had not anticipated, running against a candidate who looked much like himself: smart, centrist, attractive to a new generation.
Bush lost again, and after two terms in Congress, he was out of a job.
Since Nixon had pushed him toward the Senate bid, he responded by appointing Bush to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. What followed over the rest of the decade was a series of appointed posts, each of which gave him useful experience. Nixon named him chairman of the Republican National Committee, his tenure coinciding with investigations into the Watergate affair, which resulted in Nixon’s resignation. Although Bush survived untainted, new President Gerald Ford knew it was time for a change and appointed him “envoy” to China — the two nations did not yet have full diplomatic relations, so Bush could not be called an ambassador.
In Ford’s final year in office, Bush was appointed director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was in disarray after years of scandalous revelations. Though he was there only a year, he was credited with restoring the agency’s morale, and he was well thought of by longtime hands. The main building at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va., was renamed in his honor in 1999.
When Ford was defeated by Jimmy Carter in 1976, Bush found himself unemployed again. Returning to Houston, he served on the executive committee of a local bank, taught courses at Rice University and was made director of the Council on Foreign Relations, the prestigious national foreign policy organization. But it wasn’t enough.
“I’ve been tense as a coiled spring,” Bush wrote to a friend not long after coming home. “There is a missing of stimulating talk. I just get bored silly.”
As the decade was closing, Bush saw an opening to run for the office to which he had long aspired — president. Carter’s hold on the office was not strong. Bush’s knowledge of Washington and of the demands of geopolitics were immensely greater than his opponents as campaigns ramped up ahead of the 1980 election. Yet once more, he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
His chief opponent for the Republican nomination was Reagan, the rising power in the party. Bush claimed an early win in Iowa, and he scored big primary wins in a handful of important states. Reagan remained in front, however, and as the campaign approached the later months he had to win California, and that seemed unlikely. Longtime friend and campaign manager James Baker finally convinced him the numbers would not add up, and Bush dropped out.
Bush dutifully showed up at the 1980 Republican National Convention skeptical that Reagan, who was decidedly cool toward Bush, would offer him the vice presidency. As the convention dragged on, no obvious choice for running mate emerged. Each prospect had limitations. But no contact left Bush convinced his political career was about to end.
Just before midnight, as the convention’s final day loomed, Baker picked up the phone in Bush’s hotel suite, then handed over the receiver. He had his reprieve.
“Out of a clear blue sky, the phone rang,” Bush later recalled for biographer Jon Meacham. “I thought we were done, out of it, just gone.”
Over the next eight years, the relationship between Reagan and Bush grew increasingly warm and cordial. Bush would prove a loyal second to Reagan, never pursuing his own agenda or separating himself from White House policy. He was relied on to carry out key assignments. One involved secretly selling arms to Iran, which was contrary to American policy.
Unknown to most in the administration, the proceeds from the sale were being diverted to the contra “freedom fighters” who were attacking the leftist government in Nicaragua, in violation of American law. When the so-called Iran-Contra scandal became public, Bush claimed that he had been “out of the loop” with respect to the details.
Investigations failed to establish any clear wrongdoing on Bush’s part, though suspicions would linger for years. Both Reagan and Bush were adamant they had no knowledge that a key U.S. operative, Col. Oliver North, had used the money to pay the contras, or of any role the CIA may have played. Ultimately, Reagan accepted responsibility for the entire operation.
There was little doubt after Reagan’s re-election in 1984 that Bush would follow with another campaign of his own. Planning and preparations began early. Bush’s biggest challenger turned out to be Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, whose campaign fizzled early.
As the GOP moved toward a defiant brand of ultra-conservatism, Bush and his Ivy League background, as well as his strong roots in the establishment, moderate middle of the party, had become a tougher sell. Most of the new movement conservatives who had backed Reagan never trusted or believed in him. Then again, they had no strong candidate of their own. And he was by any measure preferable to the candidate who emerged from the Democratic primaries: Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.
Even if most of Bush’s political experience came via appointed positions, the battle of the résumés clearly gave him the nod. All he had to do was sell it.
Trying to convince middle Americans that he was on their side, he agreed to utter the words that would come back to dog him every day years down the road, words at odds with the sort of political leader he was — words he should have been smart enough to avoid.
“Read my lips: No new taxes.”
The election was a decisive victory. Bush carried 40 states and claimed more than 53 percent of the vote. And so a day that he had long imagined, and which had seemed less likely with each passing defeat, had dawned.
Bush was neither awed by the position nor inspired by great acts he hoped to push into law. How others would measure him someday never was a concern. He continually batted away any questions about legacy, even years after he had left office. Such matters were the stuff of vanity.
“He was never a man interested in the past,” Untermeyer said. “He never was haunted by or stirred by things that had happened to him years earlier. He was focused on the present and the future.”
Bush had not been in the White House long when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a principal signal that the Soviet bloc was in its final days and that his administration would soon see its first big test. Displaying considerable judgment and self-control, Bush rejected suggestions of numerous American politicians and pundits and refused to dance on the rubble of the communist empire, lest he complicate the task of Kremlin leaders in managing their crumbling universe or the West German government in moving to reunify the nation at the heart of Europe.
Central to his desire to bolster a new relationship with the Soviet Union was his personal contact with its reformist leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. The two met formally in 1989 at the Malta Summit, where they announced a formal end to the Cold War.
Bush’s cautious posture as the Soviet Union was beginning to unravel was a highlight of his presidency. He made a point of measuring every response and statement. The last thing he wanted to see were tanks rolling out to meet protesters. Or worse.
“The way he avoided giving the hardliners in the Kremlin any pretext to launch a coup was crucial,” said Gates, who also served as secretary of defense for presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. “They finally did, but if they had launched it in 1989 instead of 1991, they might have been successful. Gorbachev’s reforms would not have had time to weaken their hold on power.”
The end of the Cold War did not mean an end to international trouble. When the Chinese government violently put down a dissident student movement, most notably in a 1989 confrontation at Tiananmen Square, Bush used his personal relationship with the premier to allay fears of American intrusion into Chinese matters. One of the few American figures trusted by Beijing, he was then able to dispatch a personal envoy to China to quietly discuss the issue.
In the summer of 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein decided to end a simmering dispute over ownership of a large oil field by invading Kuwait and hovering menacingly on the northern border of Saudi Arabia, which at the time was a major source of America’s crude oil.
Bush quickly declared that the occupation would “not stand.” With the grudging consent of Saudi leaders, he sent U.S. troops to the desert kingdom in what would become, to that point, the largest deployment of American military personnel since the Vietnam War. Bush also enlisted the support of more than two dozen nations, including eight Arab countries, and waited for an international consensus before moving forward.
The ability of Bush to craft the Gulf coalition, with Baker’s help, and prod the United Nations to fulfill one of its central purposes was a significant achievement. He skillfully managed to gain the support of China and Russia at the U.N. debate — Iraq had been a Soviet ally — and then coordinated a large joint military operation with longtime allies England and France. More than 40 nations contributed financially or in some way to the cause.
A five-week air assault that began Jan. 17, 1991, was followed by a 100-hour ground offensive. Facing the full onslaught of Desert Storm, Iraqi troops who were not killed quickly scattered or retreated northward. In one of the most controversial moves of his administration, Bush and his senior advisers decided not to send U.S. ground forces to pursue the fleeing units into Iraq, arguing that doing so would go beyond their U.N. mandate, fracture the coalition and dangerously destabilize Iraq. That set up a decadelong international stalemate and a decision by his son to mount a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 — a war based on the false premise of Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
In his own hemisphere, Bush’s presidential term saw negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (eventually to be ratified in November 1993) and the U.S.-led coup to overthrow Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who had been indicted in the United States on drug trafficking charges.
All that Bush accomplished internationally, however, was slowly overshadowed by a lingering economic malaise. The need for a dreaded tax increase loomed. He might have been able to finesse a few fee increases or small, and less obvious, tax hikes. This was more than that, and it hit him head on.
“It did destroy me,” Bush later told biographer Meacham. “It was a mistake (to make the pledge), but I meant it at the time, and I meant it all through my presidency. But when you’re faced with the reality, the practical reality of shutting down government or dealing with a hostile Congress, you get something done.”
Bush thought much had been gained through entitlement cuts and deficit reduction, even if he had to give way on taxes. However, he did little to sell the benefits of the bargain to the American people. Management was his responsibility, he felt: Do the best you can and move on. The thing will speak for itself.
As his re-election campaign came closer, it seemed apparent that the polls showing trouble were accurate. Even worse, it was obvious that his candidacy lacked a theme or focus. He rejected suggestions that he announce something like a “Domestic Storm” (piggybacking on the military operation) as too hokey. But he had no real alternative.
Late in the campaign, Bush asked a downcast assembly of aides: “Am I the only SOB in the room who thinks I’m going to win?’’ That was just about the case.
His last campaign could have been an opportunity to reconnect with voters, to assure them the presidency was in the hands of an able captain, not a rookie with character issues. Yet it felt much more like an odious burden, lifeless and out of synch. “All in all,” he recorded in his diary one evening, “it’s a pain in the ass.”
Fitzwater said Bush never warmed to the need for a strong sales pitch.
“It just wasn’t there,” he said in an interview. “He had been taught so long by his parents and family about the artificiality of public relations and that sort of thing.”
Control of the White House has typically moved back and forth between the two parties, and the GOP had held it for 12 years. The Cold War was over, and Saddam Hussein had been turned back. As historians have argued, there was no overt reason for voters to embrace Bush and the status quo.
With the election loss came intense pain, physical and emotional, that he fully acknowledged. Some of it arose from the frustration he felt that the public did not understand him, and perhaps never had. Voters had heard the steady drumbeat of criticism, but they did not see the empathetic person who lay underneath a sometimes awkward exterior, a man not given to public displays of emotion but who would cry easily in private, who always was eager to help the fellow who had less.
In his final personal thoughts about his time in the Oval Office, Bush wrote that he had tried to serve with honor, to do nothing that “would tarnish and hurt the presidency.” He mused that no one seemed to care about that, especially the press, which was enamored with beautiful rhetoric and great public displays of passion but uninterested in competent day-to-day performance as a worthy end in itself.
Coming back to Houston, Bush felt a pervasive sadness. There was much more to do that would not get done, he said. Convincing voters had been his responsibility, and he had failed. He did stand for something, he was engaged — this he insisted was true. Yet people did not want to believe him. That hurt more than anyone could know, he said.
His spirits were buoyed in 2000 when son George was elected president. It was only the second time in American history that a father and son had served in the White House. The fatherly pride of Bush 41, as he came to be known, was tempered by his son’s second term, by the end of which he was pilloried for a long and costly war premised on bad information and for the coming of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.
Bush lived long enough to see the rise of China, whose potential he had seen as an envoy there, and the dangerous resurgence of Russia, which under Vladimir Putin began military efforts to reclaim territory lost with the Soviet Union’s collapse. He also looked on with sadness as the polarization that was beginning to cleave his party while he was president led to a Congress all but incapable of compromising on significant issues. The upshot of that failure was the election of Donald Trump, a more flamboyant and politically successful version of Perot. Son Jeb, a former governor of Florida, was one of the GOP candidates Trump knocked out of the race.
Unlike Clinton, whose wife entered politics as he left it, Bush was far from a ubiquitous figure in retirement. He did emerge for a different sort of campaign in 2004, joining his old rival to spearhead fundraising efforts for victims of a tsunami that hit 14 Asian countries. The odd couple hit it off and reprised the charity work for those displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Bush was occasionally seen at ballgames around Houston, at numerous charity events, and at funerals of old friends. He rarely gave interviews, though eventually he was convinced to cooperate on his biography. He made a final parachute jump after turning 90, but age and disease began to take a toll. When he lost the ability to walk, there were few public appearances.
In 2010, Obama awarded Bush the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an honor that Bush himself had bestowed on Reagan. In the East Room of the White House, Obama spoke words that would have meant everything to Bush’s parents and grandparents, who insisted that the advantages he enjoyed were not to be squandered.
“His life is a testament that public service is a noble calling,” Obama said. “His humility and decency reflects the very best of the American spirit.”