George HW Bush
US President whose foreign policy triumphs could not save him from voters’ wrath over the economy
GEORGE H W BUSH, the 41st President of the United States, who has died aged 94, appeared a statesman of global stature after leading an international coalition to eject Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait in 1991; yet only a year later his bid for reelection was humiliatingly scotched by Bill Clinton.
Victory in the Gulf War was secured with a skill and decisiveness which silenced suggestions of wimpishness that had haunted his political past. His resolve stiffened by Margaret Thatcher (“Remember George, this is no time to go wobbly”), he responded to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on August 2 1990 by speedily obtaining a vote for sanctions in the UN.
With two-thirds of the world’s oil reserves threatened by Iraqi expansionism, Russia and China were persuaded to offer their support. Meanwhile, Bush convinced Saudi Arabia to accept the vanguard of American forces. He could not have foreseen that the move would foment hatred for America within al-qaeda, which passionately opposed the presence of American troops in Muslim holy lands, and thus contribute to wars that his son – George W Bush – would lead as America’s 43rd president.
Beyond Saudi Arabia, George HW Bush also kept in constant telephone contact with every Arab leader opposed to Iraq. Israel needed constant reassurance, too, as well as a hand restraining it from launching retaliation that might have shattered the Arab alliance within the American-led coalition.
In November 1990, even as Bush doubled the number of American troops in the Gulf, the United Nations set January 15 1991 as the date after which “all necessary means” might be used to drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
When the deadline passed, Bush immediately ordered Operation Desert Storm, under which the 34 allies began, on January 17, to bomb targets in Iraq. Brushing aside a peace plan concocted in Moscow on February 21, he ordered his ground forces to attack two days later.
The “100-hour war” proved to be a virtual walkover: on February 26 Saddam confirmed what was already apparent on the ground – the withdrawal of his forces from Kuwait. The next day Bush called off the offensive. Though the oilfields of Kuwait were set ablaze by retreating Iraqi forces, American euphoria knew no bounds. “Those who doubted George Bush’s nerve and geopolitical acumen owe him something of an apology,” wrote the New Republic. The President’s popularity ratings soared.
Though it was by far his biggest success, victory in the Arabian Desert was just one triumph on the foreign stage during a term in office that coincided with the end of the Cold War. And Bush, a former head of the CIA, had the experience and temperament to respond to the collapse of the Soviet Union and other potential entanglements abroad.
But foreign policy victories, even on the battlefield, count for nothing when set against domestic economic woes. Having wooed the Republican faithful in 1988 with the words “Read my lips: No new taxes”, he was forced to sign off on tax-raising measures as Reagan-era budget problems spiralled.
Approval ratings that had stood at 90 per cent at the end of the Gulf War were in freefall as election year got under way and Bush’s problems were compounded on January 8 1992, when he vomited and fainted at a state banquet in Japan in full view of the cameras. Images of the world’s most powerful man brought low had a similar effect on his ratings, which fell to below 30 per cent.
Aiming to hit back, he launched a spirited campaign in which he portrayed his rival for the White House as a draftdodging, marijuana-smoking sleazeball, badgered by a bossy, radical-feminist wife. However Clinton’s campaign mantra “It’s the economy, stupid,” and Bush’s failure to steady wobbling American finances ensured that he was fated to become one of only three post-war presidents, along with Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, to be denied four more years by the voters.
George Herbert Walker Bush was born at Milton, Massachusetts, on June 12 1924 into an East Coast establishment family. His father was Prescott Bush, a businessman and investment banker who served from 1962 to 1972 as a Republican senator. George was brought up with three brothers and a sister in the conservative atmosphere of the East Coast “Ivy League”.
The family lived in the prosperous Greenwich suburb of New York and Bush was educated at Phillips Academy in Andover, north of Boston, where he captained the basketball and football teams.
He graduated in 1942 but instead of going immediately to Yale he volunteered for the US Navy, enlisting on his 18th birthday and becoming its youngest pilot. Next year he joined the aircraft carrier San Jacinto as a member of its torpedo bomber squadron, and sailed into the Pacific. During a raid against a Japanese communications station the following year, Bush’s Avenger bomber was badly shot up and his two crew members killed. As his aircraft broke apart, Bush parachuted into the sea to be picked up by a US submarine just as Japanese patrol boats bore down on him.
Returning home a war hero, he married his childhood sweetheart, Barbara Pierce, daughter of the chairman of Mccall’s publishing group. The couple spent the rest of the war in Virginia Beach, where Bush trained pilots. Released from the Navy in September 1945, he resumed his studies at Yale where he took a degree in Economics and played in the baseball and soccer teams with such skill that for a time he considered becoming a professional baseball player.
The couple’s first baby, a son, also George, was born during Bush’s university career. They had five other children, but a girl, Robin, died of leukaemia in 1953 at the age of four.
When he left university in 1948, Bush started working for a Texan subsidiary of Dresser Industries, an oilfield supply firm, of which his father was a director. In 1950 he teamed up with an independent oil operator, John Overby, and formed a development company which bought and sold oil and gas properties. After three years the business was merged with Zapata Petroleum, which Bush had helped to found with two other businessmen. Then he created a Zapata subsidiary, which developed offshore drilling equipment, and became its president. The company grew into a multimillion-dollar enterprise with operations worldwide. Bush made a fortune.
Bush’s first foray into politics came in 1956 when he helped local Republicans in West Texas during the successful Eisenhower re-election campaign. In 1964 he ran for the Senate under the banner of Barry Goldwater, the hard-right Republican presidential candidate. He became a casualty of the LBJ landslide, but achieved the highest share of the vote ever chalked up by a Republican candidate in Texas.
Bush tried again in 1966, with his sights fixed on the House of Representatives seat for Texas’s Seventh Congressional District, which covered one of Houston’s richest suburbs. He duly defeated his Democrat opponent to become the first Republican to represent Houston in Congress.
By this time his views seemed to have moved in a more liberal direction. He supported the 1968 Gun Control Act and co-sponsored measures to expand domestic birth control programmes and support water pollution control measures.
In 1970 Bush tried again to win a seat in the Senate but, again, failed. By then, however, he had been noticed by President Nixon, who in March 1971 appointed him America’s ambassador to the UN. He made a favourable impression there, although he was compelled to preside over one of America’s biggest diplomatic defeats: the admission to the UN of Communist China and the expulsion of Taiwan in October 1971.
When he resigned from the UN in 1973, Bush was asked by Nixon to take over the chairmanship of the Republican Party’s National Committee. He accepted the task, but it became a bed of nails as the Watergate scandal unfolded. Bush had no involvement in Watergate and his work in keeping the party united during difficult times won him a huge following among Republicans in the field.
Gerald Ford, Nixon’s successor, appointed him head of the US Liaison Office in Peking, a diplomatic mission of 226 Americans. He plunged into his new job with enthusiasm, taking Mandarin lessons with his wife, bicycling all over the Chinese capital and getting to know as many government officials as possible. He stayed in the country until December 1975, when Ford offered him the job of heading the CIA – “a real shocker”, as Bush put it.
It was the worst moment in the agency’s history. Revelations of “dirty tricks” designed to topple foreign leaders, and allegations of spying on American citizens aroused criticism from all quarters. Yet the challenge excited Bush, who was soon drafting an executive order aimed at preventing further abuses of power and keeping the agency’s activities within the bounds of its mandate. He made a solid impression at the CIA, winning a reputation as a hard-working boss who would stand by his people. There was deep disappointment when Jimmy Carter won the 1976 elections and decided on a change at the top.
Bush returned to Texas intent on running for the presidency in the 1980 election. He announced his candidacy in May 1979 and launched a barnstorming election campaign. But Ronald Reagan’s bandwagon caught up in the primaries. Reagan’s victory in Texas left Bush “stunned” and led him to withdraw from the nomination race.
He brushed aside suggestions that he should make himself “available” as a vice-presidential candidate. Yet when Reagan’s first choice as running mate, Gerald Ford, withdrew, Reagan turned to his erstwhile rival. Bush accepted and proved the ideal partner, his relative youth balancing Reagan’s age and his foreign policy experience making up to some degree for Reagan’s skimpy knowledge of world affairs. In the November election the Reagan-bush ticket swept Carter and Mondale aside.
The two men established a friendly and efficient working relationship, and in early March 1981 Bush was offered the post of “crisis manager”, coordinating policy whenever domestic and foreign emergencies arose, a task sought by Gen Alexander Haig, the secretary of state, who was clearly irritated at being overlooked. Bush’s aptitude was put to the test almost immediately when, on March 30 1981, Reagan was shot and wounded by a gunman.
Bush was flying to Texas at the time. He returned immediately to Washington and took charge with quiet efficiency. Refusing to move into the Oval Office, he presided at cabinet meetings from his own chair, leaving Reagan’s respectfully vacant.
By the time Reagan returned to the White House, Bush’s status had grown perceptibly. He became the President’s most trusted emissary, criss-crossing the world to explain American defence strategy.
Bush remained staunchly loyal to Reagan even over economic policy, in spite of his earlier opposition to the president’s belief that the growing deficit could be checked by cutting taxes. He escaped more or less unscathed from the Iran-contra affair, when money was funnelled to rebels in Nicaragua, and watched Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev reach solid agreements on disarmament.
Bush hoped to inherit the fruits of the good working relationship with Moscow at the end of Reagan’s second term of office in 1988, when he aimed to follow his leader into the White House. The succession, however, was by no means assured. Though considered a front-runner for the Republican nomination, Bush came third in the crucial Iowa caucus, beaten by Senator Bob Dole and the runner up, Pat Robertson.
But defeat seemed to stir a killer instinct in Bush and, after a bruising campaign in which he unleashed television commercials that portrayed Dole as a tax raiser, he rebounded to win the nomination. Then he kept his head when, on the eve of the 1988 Republican National Convention, he was found to be trailing the Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, by 17 points.
A brilliant acceptance speech, in which he made his ill-fated tax pledge, and a well-managed convention, catapulted him ahead of Dukakis. He went on to demolish his opponent with a ferocious campaign of hardball attacks and television advertisements which depicted him as a liberal extremist “soft on crime”.
Having concentrated on domestic issues to win the White House, Bush chose to concentrate on foreign policy once inside. As the Iron Curtain fell, he evoked an optimistic “New World Order” of democratic states, an idea which received a further boost with the successful invasion of Panama that deposed General Noriega, America’s one-time ally, in December 1989.
His strategising reached its zenith with the liberation of Kuwait, but not even the success of the Gulf War was free from tarnish. As the smoke cleared it became clear that Saddam Hussein was still in power and capable, moreover, of turning his forces on minorities within his own country.
For after the victory of the international alliance, Bush had appeared to encourage Iraqis to rise up in revolt and topple Hussein. But when they did so he made it clear that he would not risk the life of a single American soldier in support of the aim. So the West looked on as the Kurds of North Iraq fled from the wrath of Saddam, while many from the Shia populations of Iraq’s south were herded up and killed.
It was only later, after the 2003 invasion of Iraq under Bush’s son, George W Bush, that such caution was seen to have been well-founded. He had not given the order to invade Iraq, Bush explained in 1998, because it would have “incurred incalculable human and political costs”.
After leaving office, Bush mostly retired from public life, spending much of his time participating in business ventures and enjoying fishing, golf and playing tennis. After his son George W was elected president in 2001, he kept a low profile.
A devout Episcopalian, Bush worshipped regularly and performed official duties in churches in Houston and Kennebunkport, Maine, where he always took his summer holidays. He embraced the role of elder statesman with aplomb, serving with Bill Clinton as an honorary member of the board rebuilding the World Trade Centre after the 2001 attacks. In 2005 the two men teamed up to lead a campaign to help victims of the Asian tsunami and, later that year, to coordinate private relief donations for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
The two became fast friends, and during the White House race of 2016 a solid rumour emerged that Bush’s preference was for Clinton’s wife Hillary over the Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Among numerous honours and awards Bush was appointed honorary KGCB by the Queen in 1993.
George HW Bush’s wife Barbara died in April this year; he is survived by four sons and a daughter.