Barbara Bush’s candor cut through Beltway balderdash

the second lady. Writing about Nancy and Raisa Gorbachev competing at a wives’ lunch, Bush said she wasn’t sure of Raisa’s age: “I don’t know how old, but I think the paper said 53 or 55. That’s funny, for we really don’t know if Nancy Reagan is 65 or 67 and she won’t tell.”

Even before the reality-TV star her husband labeled an “ass” got in the race, Barbara Bush nailed the anti-elitist mood. In 2013 she acknowledged, in essence, that W. had worn out the family’s welcome.

“There are other people out there that are very qualified,” she said, “and we’ve had enough Bushes.”

But when Jeb jumped in, she went on the trail at 90 to try to buoy his lame effort — even though the “ass” tweeted that Jeb “desperately needed mommy to help him.”

She was the ungainly insecure daughter of an austere beautiful mother who put her down. From the time she and Poppy met, when she was 16 and he was 17, she loved him wildly. She went into a depression when he was “head spook,” as he called it, at the CIA and she was less involved in his world.

Certainly, Poppy cherished his Silver Fox. He once wrote me a long parody of my columns about W. as a Boy King, in which he cast himself as “the Old King” and Bar as the “straighttalking Queen” and “Queen Barbara, his own bride of 56 years.”

Her hair had turned prematurely white when her 3-year-old daughter Robin died of leukemia, and she stopped coloring it in 1970 when a rinse called Fabulous Fawn began dripping in the heat, turning her neck brown. During her husband’s 1980 run for the White House, her sister-inlaw told her the family was asking, “What are we going to do about Bar?”

“They discussed how to make me look snappier — color my hair, change my style of dressing, and, I suspect, get me to lose some weight,” she wrote in her memoir. “I know it was meant to be helpful, but I wept quietly alone until George told me that was absolutely crazy.”

The Silver Fox outfoxed them all by creating an appealing authentic persona, dubbed “Greenwich granite” by Peggy Noonan. The patrician in the fake pearls wore $29 shoes that pinched at her husband’s inauguration. She made a point after the deafening silence of the Reagan years on AIDS to go hug babies with AIDS.

After the Bushes left the White House, I occasionally sent books to the champion of literacy. Some she loved and some she wasn’t so sure about.

“A very belated thank you for the strangest book I have ever read, M Train,” she wrote in 2016 on a note card engraved with W.’s paintings of her two dogs. “Interesting lady is Patti Smith!”

Bush was always “lovely” to me, to use one of her favorite words. I wrote a piece in The New York Times about my mom when she died in 2005. I got an email from Bush, who did not have such a nurturing mother: “Maureen, we loved the words about your lovely mother. She was certainly not only fine, but a great beauty. You should be comforted that you look exactly like her and will when you are 100. Lucky girl to have had her. Sincerely, Barbara Bush.”

Bush had a bourbon just before she died. So did my mom, with a morphine chaser.

Bar knew 10 ways to throw shade, but she knew 100 ways to shine light.