USA TODAY International Edition
TART TONGUE, SWEET SPIRIT
She was integral to 2 presidents
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. “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 expected to be held at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, a few blocks from the home
“At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, winning one more verdict, or not closing one more deal.” Barbara Bush In 1990 graduation speech
she and George H.W. Bush built after he was defeated for re-election in 1992. Then 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 now 93 years old and struggling with a Parkinson’s-like disease that has confined him to 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 then a young Navy pilot in World War II. After the war had ended and he had graduated from Yale, she and their toddler son, Georgie, followed him from Connecticut to Texas, where he was determined to make his fortune in the booming oil business.
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.
Only Abigail Adams can also claim such close relationships with a pair of presidents. But the wife of John Adams, the nation’s second president, passed away six years before son John Quincy Adams was elected to the White House in 1824. She played an important part in her husband’s presidency but not that of her son.
Barbara Bush loomed as a force in both.
New England roots
Barbara Pierce was a distant cousin of yet another president, the forgettable 14th, Franklin Pierce, and she could trace her direct family lineage to the Mayflower. She was born on 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 who was said to favor Barbara’s striking older sister, Martha. Her mother’s 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 and 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 winning one for the House of Representatives.
President Richard Nixon named him U.N. ambassador, then picked him to chair the Republican National Committee during the Watergate scandal. President Gerald Ford appointed him as the U.S. envoy to China, then as director of the CIA. After two terms as vice president, he was elected president in 1988.
At each step, Barbara Bush was his indispensable partner — organized, disciplined, focused and flexible. She built sprawling networks of friends, sent out thousands of Christmas cards and easily socialized with strangers.
She became enormously popular — over time, scoring higher favorable ratings than her husband or her son. Americans embraced her as an approachable, no-nonsense matron who benefited from the contrast with her designer-clad predecessor, Nancy Reagan.
She is survived by 17 grandchildren, several of them involved in public service, and seven great-grandchildren.
Washington Bureau chief Susan Page’s biography of Barbara Bush, The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty, is being published by Twelve next spring.