Bush honored
Mourners line up to pay tribute to former president George H.W. Bush.
WASHINGTON —One by one they came. Parents hoisting toddlers on their hips. Two women from St. Louis, in town for a neonatology conference. A doctor from Washington whose grandmother had worked in housekeeping in the White House complex. And Sully the service dog.
As the body of former President George H.W. Bush lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda on Tuesday, mourners from across the country poured into the Capitol to pay tribute to a man whose inaugural vision of a “kinder” and “gentler” Republicanism has become a relic of another era.
Some, like William Knox of Austin, Texas, came out of simple curiosity. He was in town for a wedding and decided to drop by. Others, like Sue Ameiss and Patricia Nash of St. Louis, who were attending the neonatology conference, considered it “an honor,” as Ameiss said, “to be able to come and pay our respects.”
And some, like Wyatt Glennon, a seventh-grader from northwest Washington, came because their parents thought they should. Accompanied by his mother, Wyatt left a note in the condolence book for the former president, thanking him for “taking this great nation to new heights.”
“I don’t know much about his individual acts,” he said in an interview, “but I know that he was president of the United States, and that’s enough for me.”
At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, former Bush aides were planning to have a memorial of their own Tuesday evening: At 6:41 p.m., they planned to gather at Lafayette Park across the street from the White House to shine electric candles or their cell phone flashlights into the night sky — a re-creation of the “thousand points of light” that Bush, the 41st president, spoke of as a way to promote volunteerism. (President Trump, who once mocked the initiative, paid his respects to Bush with a visit to the Rotunda on Monday night.)
Inside the Capitol Rotunda, it was quiet except for the clicking of shoes as the guards changed places and the rapidfire shutters of cameras when Sully was led into the hall with a group of wounded veterans and other disabled people around 11 a.m.
The yellow Labrador was paired with Bush this year, shortly after the death of his wife, Barbara, to help provide companionship and retrieve things for the former president, who had a form of Parkinson’s disease that required him to use a wheelchair or a scooter.
The dog’s appearance was intended to spotlight the president’s role in passing the Americans With Disabilities Act. The 1990 law bars discrimination against people with disabilities and required public buildings throughout the nation to become more accessible to them.