Barbara Bush dies
Political family’s formidable matriarch gained popularity
Barbara Bush, the wife of one president and mother of another, dies at her Houston home at age 92.
Barbara Pierce Bush, the former first lady whose cloud of white hair and strands of fake pearls became her signature, died at her Houston home Tuesday after a long struggle with congestive heart failure and pulmonary disease.
The down-to-earth matriarch, who could trace her ancestry to the Mayflower and saw both her husband and son win the White House, was 92.
“I am still old and still in love with the man I married 72 years ago,” the former first lady wrote in a note published this month in Smith College’s alumnae magazine, still showing her characteristic humor. “I have had great medical care and more operations than you would believe. I’m not sure God will recognize me; I have so many new body parts!”
Her death was announced by Jim McGrath, spokesman for former president George H.W. Bush.
A memorial service is to be held at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, a few blocks from the home she and George H.W. Bush built after he was defeated for re-election in 1992. A processional is planned to carry her body to the George Bush Presidential Library Center in College Station, on the campus of Texas A&M, where she will be laid to rest near the grave of a daughter, Robin.
Her husband, the nation’s 41st president, is 93 years old and struggling with a Parkinson’s-like disease that put him in a wheelchair and made it difficult for him to speak. Son Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, is slated to deliver his mother’s eulogy.
She dropped out of Smith during her sophomore year to marry George Bush, the first boy she had ever kissed and a young Navy pilot in World War II. After the war ended and he graduated from Yale, she and their toddler son, Georgie, followed him from the comforts of Connecticut to the wilds of Texas, where he was determined to make his fortune in the booming oil business.
Over the years, she established more than two dozen homes in their peripatetic life, served as “the enforcer” rearing their five surviving children, and emerged as one of her husband’s most trusted advisers and biggest political assets. She had a sharp eye for phonies and a blunt-spoken willingness to speak her mind, including to her son, George W. Bush, when he became the nation’s 43rd president.
Barbara Pierce was born June 8, 1925, the third of four children, and grew up in the tony New York City bedroom community of Rye. Her father, Marvin, was a gifted college athlete who was trained as an engineer and rose to head the McCall publishing empire.
Her mother, Pauline, was an avid gardener. Her jibes about Barbara’s childhood chubbiness left her with a lifelong sensitivity about her weight. In her memoir, Barbara Bush recalled her mother’s dinner-time entreaties. “Eat up, Martha,” she would say. “Not you, Barbara.”
At a Christmas dance at the Greenwich Country Club in 1941, George Bush asked a mutual friend to introduce him to the pretty girl across the room.
Barbara was 16. He was 17 and ready to enlist in the Navy as soon as he graduated from Phillips Academy Andover. When they married, she was 19 and he was 20. Their union, stretching more than seven decades, is the longest of any presidential couple in U.S. history.
They had a large and boisterous family: George, Robin, Jeb, Neil, Marvin and Doro. Living in Odessa, then Midland, Bush made his money in the Texas oil business. He moved the family to Houston and launched a political career — first becoming Harris County Republican chairman, then losing a bid for the U.S. Senate and finally winning one for the House of Representatives.
He ran for president in 1980, losing the Republican nomination but being selected at the last minute by Ronald Reagan as his running mate. After two terms as vice president, Bush was elected president in 1988.
At each step, Barbara Bush was his indispensable partner — organized, disciplined, focused and flexible.