President navigated end of the Cold War
But economy, changing times in D.C. led to one-term presidency
George Herbert Walker Bush, the linchpin of an American political dynasty and 41st president of the United States, who rode foreign policy triumphs to high popularity at the end of the Cold War only to suffer a revolt in his own party and a painful defeat for re-election, died Friday night at his Houston home. He was 94.
During his single term in the White House, the Berlin Wall fell, newly democratic states sprang up across Central and Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union came to an end. And in the Middle East, the U.S. military launched its most successful offensive since World War II.
But the end of the Cold War also signaled the end of an era of American bipartisanship that the long conflict with the Soviets had fostered. Bush, the product of an earlier era, seemed out of phase with a younger, harder-edged generation of conservatives rising in his party. When he broke a pledge not to raise taxes, they turned against him. He would end up humbled, buffeted by economic decline, then defeated for re-election in 1992, receiving less support than any incumbent president in 80 years.
Bush’s casket will arrive at the U.S. Capitol Monday evening and will be on public display as he lies in state in the Rotunda until Wednesday morning, congressional leaders said. The casket is to arrive at Washington National Cathedral
at 11 a.m. Wednesday for a funeral service.
The chasm between Bush’s achievements and his standing with the American public is a paradox that defines but doesn’t fully explain the legacy of the 41st president of the United States.
That legacy would, however, live on in part through his son George W. Bush, who in 2000 would be elected president and go on to win the second term that had eluded his father. The son’s own trials — and key decisions in which he departed from his father’s course — resulted in a more generous reappraisal of the elder Bush’s tenure.
The two were the second father and son to share the presidency, after John and John Quincy Adams. In 2016, his second son, John Ellis, known as Jeb, sought the Republican presidential nomination but was beaten by the eventual winner, Donald Trump.
The elder Bush was the last in a remarkable line of eight American presidents, beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose lives had been shaped by World War II and the rivalry with the Soviets that followed. His tenure marked a dual transition — from presidencies dominated by the Cold War to a renewed focus on domestic affairs and from an America still largely run by the long-dominant white, Protestant establishment of which he was a product to a nation both more diverse and fractious.
His inability to master those transitions doomed a presidency to which he initially had appeared ideally suited by background and training.
Until his defeat in 1992 at the hands of Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush — as he became known after his son’s rise to power — had lived what many called a charmed life, one largely dedicated to government service. He had been a college athlete, a Navy pilot and war hero, a business success, a congressman, a diplomat, the director of the nation’s intelligence service, vice president and, finally, president.
But while he was adept at rising within the inner circles of business and government, he often seemed out of place when trying to communicate with voters. His tortured syntax and small gaffes — appearing surprised by a supermarket price scanner or glancing at his watch during a debate — fed an image of a man distant from the lives of average Americans. When recession gripped the nation in the early 1990s, his inability to connect with voters on kitchen-table issues proved his undoing.
“I couldn’t get through,” Bush would later say in an interview. “I’d say ‘Good news, the economy is recovering,’ and there would be all these people saying, ‘Bush is out of touch.’ ”
His pragmatic, mostly nonideological approach to government similarly marked Bush as a man from a rapidly passing era. He worked with the Democratic-controlled Congress, not only to reduce the budget deficit, but to pass historic legislation, including the Americans With Disabilities Act and a major strengthening of the Clean Air Act. But that brand of cooperation across party lines was already fading from the scene by the time he became president, and he had difficulty adapting to the harder-edged partisanship that came to dominate Washington.
He was innately secretive and believed in loyalty and trust above all, keeping about him a tight circle of confidants. Yet he entertained dissent in his Cabinet, recruiting advisers with disparate worldviews. His head of the Environmental Protection Agency warned of the dangers of global warming. His housing secretary was an advocate for urban issues. At the same time, Bush nominated to the Supreme Court the man who became its most conservative member in decades, Clarence Thomas.
His post-presidential life, too, defied simple categorization. While he raked in millions giving speeches and serving on corporate boards, he also re-emerged in the public eye for his humanitarian work after the tsunami that devastated southern Asia in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Through those efforts, he became close friends with Clinton, the Democrat who had vanquished him.
In 2011, President Barack Obama awarded Bush the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Barbara, his wife of 73 years, died on April 17, 2018. He is survived by their sons George, Jeb, Neil and Marvin; their daughter, Dorothy; 17 grandchildren, eight greatgrandchildren and two siblings, Nancy Ellis and William Bush. Another daughter, Robin, died of leukemia at age 3 in 1953.
George H.W. Bush was born in Milton, Mass., on June 12, 1924, to Prescott and Dorothy Bush and raised along with his sister and three brothers in Greenwich, Conn., a wealthy New York suburb.
His father was a leading light of the Eastern establishment and a U.S. senator representing Connecticut from 1953 to 1963. A moderate Republican, he would ultimately oppose the red-baiting of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s and support civil rights legislation.
Bush attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., embracing the sort of “preppy” identity that would later hamper his attempts to cast himself politically as an entrepreneurial Texas oilman.
During his senior year, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, plunging the United States into war. Bush enlisted on his 18th birthday and became the youngest pilot in the Navy. His naval career nearly ended after his plane was struck over the Pacific by Japanese antiaircraft fire. His plane aflame, he delivered his bombs on target before bailing out. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Rotated home in time for Christmas in 1944, Bush two weeks later married Barbara Pierce, daughter of the president of the McCall’s publishing empire, whom he had met before going into the service.
No sooner was he mustered out of the Navy in September 1945 than Bush entered Yale University, where he earned a degree in economics and, like his father, was inducted into Skull and Bones, the oldest of the college’s secret societies. He played soccer, was captain of the baseball team and fathered a son, George Walker Bush.
After graduation, Bush turned down a job offer on Wall Street from his uncle, Herbert Walker, and decided to take his wife and child to Texas to try the oil business. By the time he reached his early 40s, oil had made Bush a millionaire.
It was then — following in his father’s path — that Bush began to carve out a new career in politics.
In his 1964 challenge to Sen. Ralph Yarborough of Texas, a liberal Democrat, Bush turned his back on his father’s moderate stands, tying himself closely to the ill-fated presidential candidacy of Republican Barry Goldwater. In addition to denouncing the 1964 Civil Rights Act as “politically inspired and destined to failure,” he opposed Medicare and the nuclear test ban treaty. He lost — buried in the presidential landslide for Lyndon B. Johnson.
By 1966, when he sought a House seat in an affluent Houston district with a moderate constituency, Bush had tacked again, shifting to the center. With a Republican tide sweeping the country, Bush won easily. Then, mindful that he had been “swamped in the black precincts,” Bush moved on civil rights, voting for the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
His stay in Congress would be brief. Asked by President Nixon to run for the Senate again in 1970, Bush lost, again.
As a salve, Nixon appointed him ambassador to the United Nations. The post kept Bush from fading out of the public scene and, importantly, provided his entree to the world of diplomacy.
Nixon yanked him from that world quickly, however, naming him chairman of the Republican National Committee just as the Watergate scandal was brewing. True to his code of personal loyalty, Bush defended Nixon until the end. President Gerald Ford rewarded him by naming him the U.S. representative to China, but recalled him to take over the Central Intelligence Agency, then under assault from Congress for improprieties around the globe.
He then looked toward the presidency. In the Iowa caucuses, the first official contest of the 1980 campaign, he scored an upset over the overwhelming favorite, Ronald Reagan. In a few weeks, however, Reagan recovered and defeated Bush decisively in the New Hampshire primary.
Bush’s problem, his staff later conceded, was that — while vaulting from obscurity to celebrity — he never gave the voters a good reason to support him.
Bush’s candidacy was memorable chiefly for his description of the Reagan campaign’s supply-side economic proposals. “Voodoo economics,” he called it. He uttered the phrase only once, but he never heard the end of it. Democrats made it a rallying cry against Reagan for eight years.
By May, Bush had dropped out of the race. But he had made enough of an impression for Reagan, despite lingering anger over the “voodoo” remark, to select him as his running mate. To conform to Reagan’s positions, Bush dropped his opposition to a constitutional ban on abortion and his support for the Equal Rights Amendment.
In time, Bush’s unpretentiousness and quiet competence won over many of the Reagan cadre, who had doubted his adherence to the conservative cause. As Bush entered his second term as vice president and as his anticipated candidacy for the presidency drew closer, pressure increased for him to establish his own positions. Bush resisted.
His determination to subordinate himself, combined with mannerisms that sometimes seemed effusive and contrived, led Bush’s critics to deride him as a wimp and an aging preppy.
As the 1988 presidential election approached, Bush arrived at the GOP convention a perceived underdog to the Democratic Party candidate, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis. With the odds against him once again, Bush turned his acceptance address into the speech of his life, finally putting the wimp image to rest with a graceful display of self-deprecating humor. “I’ll try to be fair to the other side,” he joshed. “I’ll try to hold my charisma in check.”
The speech, by contrast to the aggressive acquisitiveness that characterized the Reagan era, sounded the theme of compassion. In its most memorable phrase, Bush called for “a kinder and gentler nation.”
There was little kinder or gentler about the campaign against Dukakis that followed. Besides the standard campaign ploys — Bush branding Dukakis as a big spender and building support with the oft-repeated phrase: “Read my lips, no new taxes” — the vice president and his surrogates, led by the campaign’s strategist, Lee Atwater, attacked Dukakis for defending Massachusetts’ prisoner furlough law, under which a convicted murderer named Willie Horton, who was black, had been released and then committed another brutal crime. This caused some to accuse Bush of appealing to racism.
Still, he carried 40 states and 54 percent of the popular vote.
In the fall of 1989, barely a year after his election, the Berlin Wall fell and the pillars of the exhausted Soviet Union began to crumble. Reagan received the lion’s share of the credit for what Americans perceived as their victory after four decades of Cold War. But Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III deftly managed the transition to what Bush dubbed a “new world order.”
Then, in the summer and fall of 1990, Bush made two momentous decisions — one foreign, one domestic — that came to define his term in office.
On Aug. 2, 1990, Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, sent his army across the border to quickly overrun his country’s tiny but oil-rich neighbor Kuwait. Within weeks, Bush had set in motion a massive U.S. military buildup, the largest since the Vietnam War. With minimal debate or explanation, he made the reversal of Iraq’s aggression the central purpose of his presidency.
Bush succeeded in orchestrating, through the United Nations Security Council, a worldwide embargo against Iraq, along with authorization for a multinational military force based in Saudi Arabia. In January 1991, when the military buildup was complete, the president won congressional authorization to use force to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait. After a massive air bombardment, a U.S.-led coalition of forces launched a ground offensive that achieved victory within 100 hours.
Even as Bush orchestrated the Gulf War alliance, he was wrestling with Congress over how to handle the large budget deficits he had inherited from Reagan.
Democrats insisted that they would accept the spending cuts Bush sought only if he agreed to higher taxes. Bush’s budget director, Richard Darman, and some congressional Republicans urged the president to accept a deal. Others, led by the House’s third-ranking Republican, an ambitious conservative named Newt Gingrich, opposed the idea.
Late in 1990, Bush accepted a compromise — breaking his “no new taxes” vow. The move helped tame the deficit, setting the stage for the surpluses achieved by Clinton at the end of the decade. But it set off a revolt by Gingrich and his allies that weakened Bush.
Then, in 1991, Bush’s nomination of Thomas to the Supreme Court, and the accompanying sexual harassment allegations, which turned his confirmation hearing into national theater, further boosted partisan animosities.
The final blow came from a short, but sharp, recession that took hold in 1990 and raised unemployment.
As the election year moved forward, the attacks in GOP primaries from Pat Buchanan, the conservative commentator, gave way to a far-more powerful danger, a third-party bid by a billionaire Texan, Ross Perot, who attracted many disaffected Republicans with his populist appeals.
At the same time, the Democrats nominated Clinton, a man who was as oratorically skilled as Bush seemed tongue-tied and energetically youthful at a time when the incumbent often seemed tired and out of sync with a rapidly changing country.
At the end, Bush received 38 percent of the popular vote, a shocking outcome 21 months after the swift and nearly bloodless liberation of Kuwait had made many view his re-election as inevitable. No incumbent had done so badly since William Howard Taft in 1912.
After leaving Washington and the presidency, Bush and the former first lady retired to Houston. He wrote his memoirs and traveled — and supported the political aspirations of his sons George and Jeb, the latter of whom served as governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007.
Despite his family’s political accomplishments, Bush disliked the idea that his family was viewed as a “dynasty” with a “legacy.”
“Those two words, ‘dynasty’ and ‘legacy’ — irritate me,” Bush told The New York Times during his son’s campaign for the presidency in 2000. “We don’t feel entitled to anything.”