George HW Bush
The United States’ 41st president, who served for only one term
George Herbert Walker Bush, 41st president of the United States. Born: 12 June 1924 in Milton, Massachusetts. Died: 30 November 2018 in Houston, Texas, aged 94.
George HW Bush, the 41st president of the United States and the father of the 43rd, who steered the nation through a tumultuous period in world affairs but was denied a second term after support collapsed in an economic downturn and his seeming inattention to domestic affairs, has died at his home in Houston. He was 94.
His death came less than eight months after that of his wife of 73 years, Barbara Bush.
Bush entered the White House with one of the most impressive résumés of any president. He had been a two-term congressman from Texas, ambassador to the UN, chairman of the Republican National Committee during Watergate, US envoy to China, director of the CIA and vice president under Ronald Reagan.
A son of wealth and a graduate of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and of Yale, Bush was schooled in the good manners and graciousness of New England privilege and civic responsibility. He liked to frame his public service as the call to duty.
Bush’s post-presidency brought talk of a political dynasty. Son of a senator, Bush saw two of his own sons forge political careers. George W Bush became the first son of a president since John Quincy Adams to follow his father to the White House. Another son, Jeb Bush, was twice elected governor of Florida and ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2016.
As the elder Bush watched troubles envelop the eightyear presidency of his son, what had been a source of pride, friends said, became a cause of distress. The contrast between the two President Bushes – 41 and 43, as they came to call each other – burnished the father’s reputation in later years. As the younger Bush’s popularity fell, the elder Bush’s public standing rose.
It was a subject he avoided discussing in public but one he finally addressed to Jon Meacham, his biographer, in a book released by Random House in 2015. Bush blamed men who had long been part
of his own life and who were later figures in his son’s orbit.
“I do worry about some of the rhetoric that was out there – some of it his, maybe, and some of it the people around him,” Bush said in Destiny and Power:theamericanodyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush.
In 2016, Bush and his sons did not attend the Republican National Convention that nominated Donald Trump, and he pointedly did not endorse Trump against Hillary Clinton.
After his loss in 1992 to Bill Clinton in an election in which independent candidate Ross Perot won almost a fifth of the vote – a loss that left him dispirited and humiliated – Bush and his wife repaired to their home in Houston and to their ocean-front compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. But he did not quite retire.
“George HW Bush was the best one-term president the country has ever had, and one of the most underrated presidents of all time,” James A. Baker III, the former secretary
of state said in 2013. “I think history is going to treat him very well.”
In his first year at the White House, Bush sent troops into Panama to oust strongman General Manuel Noriega. The rapid conclusion of the Gulf War of 1991 earned him a three-minute standing ovation when he addressed a joint session of Congress. Foreign policy successes were the hallmark of his presidency. Not so his domestic record.
By the midpoint of his term, leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties complained that, in the midst of the worst economy any US president had faced since the end of the Second World War, Bush had no domestic agenda.
His signal domestic decision was almost certainly the 1990 budget deal, which sought to address deepening deficits by raising taxes on the wealthy. If it helped put the nation back on solid financial footing, it nevertheless reversed one of the most explicit campaign pledges ever uttered by a major-party presidential candidate: “Read my lips: No new taxes.”
Bush was given to malapropisms, a trait he may have handed down to his son George. His speeches were delivered with a nasal voice and clipped cadence that invited parody. Comedian Dana Carvey made his Bush imitation a staple of Saturday Night Live. (“Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.”)
Rarely did Bush display
“The best oneterm president the country has ever had, and one of the most underrated presidents of all time”