What we’ve lost
The 41st president set the standard for public service and decency
George H.W. Bush was not a made-for-TV president, especially alongside his predecessor, professional actor Ronald Reagan. He could seem stern, finger-wagging, tinny. So I was surprised when I first met him — as an Associated Press reporter on the tarmac boarding his campaign plane — that in person he was gregarious and approachable. Thoughtful, energetic and genial, he brimmed with the drive that had propelled him through numerous leadership roles, positioning him as day-one-ready for the White House.
Bush’s old-school civility and — to use one of his favorite words — decency bore no resemblance to today’s White House vitriol. During decades of fealty to other presidents and the GOP, he had built an impressive stable of friends worldwide: He arrived in the Oval Office trailing a lifetime of his trademark, handwritten notes — felttipped expressions of grace, sympathy, humor and emotion — like bread crumbs across the years.
Bush’s friendships bridged political divides, notably including his postpresidential pal Bill Clinton. “I can’t help it. I just like the guy,” Bush said of the Democrat who had vanquished him from the White House. And when his once bitter rival, Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., came to the White House to watch Bush sign the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act, Bush singled out his old nemesis who had lost use of an arm in World War II: “Bob Dole has inspired me,” Bush said simply.
Bush quickly eschewed Reagan’s more distant affect by bounding into the press briefing room early and often to field questions. It wasn’t his style to deride questioners, although he later revealed in his book “All the Best” that he tired of saying, “‘Thanks for that important question,’ when some bubble-headed reporter tried to stick it in my ear.”
He was less restrained when my friend Maureen Dowd of the New York Times and I visited him in Houston in 2011 and asked about the White House ruminations of a brash New Yorker — Donald Trump. “He’s an ass,” the former president said tartly.
And he had a testy, combative side, once memorably ripping into CBS’ Dan Rather who was persistently poking an Achilles’ heel — the extent of Bush’s knowledge about the Iran-Contra scandal during his vice presidency. He complained that the TV newsman had misled him about the interview focus.
Being uber-social, Bush enjoyed ferreting out personal tidbits about people in his orbit, once piercing the Soviet party-line patter of Raisa Gorbachev by prodding the Soviet leader’s wife at a dinner party with, “What are you really like? What are your interests?” he later recounted.
He learned that, like him, I was a runner; he’d occasionally invite me to run, typically with a couple of others. I wanted news scoops on these outings, but he preferred small talk and kidding, once pointing out a buff, shirtless runner near the Pentagon. “There’s a guy for you,” he joked — as if this were the kind of thing we’d ever remotely discussed.
Similarly, he learned that a couple of my AP and Reuters colleagues were into sailing, and he’d invite them to go boating when the White House and press entourage would encamp periodically to Kennebunkport, Maine.
When I introduced him to my nonpolitical dad at a White House Christmas party, Bush chatted with his fellow Greatest Generation veteran like an old buddy. But I nearly dropped through the floor, cringing, when I heard the president of the United States telling my enthralled father, “Well, we’re quite proud of Rita around here.” He knew my journalist’s role in no way could warrant the odd comment, but I then realized this was simply his way of relating dad-to-dad, knowing just what Ben Beamish would like to hear.
A former Yale baseball star, Bush reveled in athletic pursuits, and unshackled his goofy humor during recreation-filled trips to his Kennebunkport home. He’d invoke a mysterious, invisible “ranking committee” that ruled on everything from horseshoes to tennis with decisions only Bush himself could divine. He chewed up the golf links, with us reporters and “photo dogs,” as he called them, on hand for his patter at tee-off and the last hole. “We shoot for time,” the self-anointed “Mr. Smooth” laughed after one speed record around the Cape Arundel course.
When foreign leaders came to visit, Bush lured them, too, out to fish, or roar about in his speedboat, whack tennis balls or stride through the woods. A vigorous pace cleared the mind, he said. And he found those personal interactions useful in governing.
Bush understood government and governing. Unthinkable by today’s mores, he even collaborated with Democrats for policy progress, as on the milestone, regulation-expanding Clean Air Act amendments and the federal budget that expunged his “no new taxes” pledge. He banned imported semiautomatic weapons and blocked drilling off the coasts of much of California and Florida, no doubt factors contributing to his exclusion from the right wing’s embrace, despite his profile as a war hero, churchgoer, family man and statesman who navigated global nuance to wrap up the Cold War and prosecute the Persian Gulf War.
A tireless note writer, he wrote me — a member of the profession that a future president would brand dishonest enemies of the people — when my mom died in 1990. He said he’d hesitated to pick up his pen “because you are a thorough-going professional journalist — and I know you like to have a certain arm’s length . ... But heck with that right now.” He was sad just thinking of his own mother’s future death, he wrote. “But now you have the reality to cope with. Maybe in some small way it will help a little to know that we are thinking of you (your dad too).”
Classic George Herbert Walker Bush: an exemplar of decency, at a time when decency mattered.