REMEMBERING HOUSTON’S PRESIDENT
A 36-page tribute honors the life and legacy of George H.W. Bush.
Amid the torrent of words that followed the passing of the nation’s 41st president, a handful were endlessly repeated: civil, decent, caring, considerate, polite, modest. But in 1993, when George Bush exited political life and moved back to Houston, none of that mattered. Having been ungraciously shown the door by an electorate concerned more about its paycheck than his competence, he wasn’t exactly in a kinder and gentler frame of mind. He was despondent, and more than a little angry. Bush had faced defeat before, but nothing like this. How, he wondered, could he have lost to a man described as a womanizing draft dodger, someone who should have come across as clearly less capable than a lifelong public servant who had guided the country to victory in a tricky desert war and an even trickier cold one. Losing ate at him. He knew his campaign had been uninspired, but still … in his darkest moments, he wondered whether history would remember him at all.
Time, of course, brought comfort. And belated respect. His accomplishments came into sharper view, and the hazy affection of the American people grew with each birthday, including the ones celebrated with parachute jumps. As President Donald Trump assumed office, nostalgia for Bush’s personal and professional style swelled. It may be, as the old lyric goes, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. His final triumph was the simple acknowledgment of the man he was, and how starkly he stood in contrast to a class of officeholders, from the top on down, whose scorched-earth politics and overt rudeness made him shudder.
Bush’s long goodbye has invited a tsunami of retrospection. Over the course of a week he received more praise than during all his time in public office. The critics, too, have had their say, claiming that beneath the genteel veneer was an administration that did its part to advance a cause that pushed us to a point of total polarity.
‘For the good of the country’
History’s judgment is never ultimate, so stabbing at too many conclusions might be a fool’s task. But of the man whom Houston came to know in his retirement, a few things became obvious. Bush was fiercely human and endlessly personal. The trappings of office, his erstwhile power, the significance of his last name — none of that insulated him from a deeply embedded impulse to be ready with a kind word, a warm note, a gesture of respect, or a desire to make someone’s day in the smallest of ways. No one was beneath him. Such was apparent from the recollections of countless ordinary folks who had spent unexpected minutes in his company.
He lent his name to myriad causes, but he valued enduring personal relationships above all, famously developing a friendship with onetime rival Bill Clinton and less known with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who had often chided him during his presidency. Dowd wrote of their odd friendship after he died, remarking that “as politicians go, 41 had many good qualities. Most of the time, he tried to do the right and decent thing, as he saw it, to act for the good of the country and the world.” What more can one ask for?
When Dowd’s mother died in 2005, Bush offered up his condolences with an email that made her cry, recalling his own mother’s passing. In a later note, he offered his onetime fierce critic a shoulder to cry on if she needed it. “I’ll be there for you,” he said. “I’ll not let you down.” Of course, it was not only the famous who felt his generosity. If his patrician upbringing imparted any sense of superiority, it never showed.
Bush believed in himself, with no reserve or doubt, and he felt that if he were true to his instincts good choices would follow. It didn’t always work out that way. He came to regret the notorious Willie Horton ad in his 1988 presidential race. Likewise some of his early positions on social issues. He did little to stop the extreme elements of his party, which eventually turned it into something his father, a former GOP U.S. senator, would not have recognized.
Then again, he pushed away business supporters to sign the Americans With Disabilities Act and important measures on pollution control. Bush spent little time looking back, either celebrating good choices or lamenting bad ones. He avoided selfanalysis, so much so that decades passed before he cooperated with a biographer. He did not care about legacy, the so-called Lword that he often ridiculed. He did believe, and said so, that he got more right than wrong, and he was happy to let it go at that and move on. His final defeat bothered him not so much from a sense of personal rejection, he wrote in his diary, but because of the feeling he had let down so many others. Duty called on him to see a thing through.
His calling
From his earliest days, Bush felt a sense of destiny. He had seen his father pursue leadership and was ready by nature and training to follow suit. He was popular in school, in the Navy, in pretty much every spot he landed as he pursued a life of substance after World War II. In time, he became a millionaire oilman, but that status was almost beside the point. Bush was not a rich guy who decided to dabble in politics. Business success was just a necessary step, a jumping-off point for what he wanted most: a life in public service. If he was in some way different from others who pursued the same path, it lies in the motivation.
His mother had inveighed against the “great I am” impulse at every turn during his childhood. That instruction made its mark. While politics and public service remained his North Star, it came from a belief that this was his calling. He didn’t brag about his intellect, and he recognized his shortcomings, a lack of oratorical skills and charisma among them. He had no strong political ideology. He was conservative in some general way, which made him untrustworthy for those of hardright bent, whose ranks were growing. Bush trusted his ability to make the right call more than any political philosophy, not unlike many of the old-school moderate conservatives he’d grown up around, rather like his father.
And so he chased higher office, losing more than he won but ultimately landing the biggest prize, albeit briefly. Over the course of those four years, he lost touch with the electorate, squandering his huge popularity after the first Gulf war. Tellingly, he later lamented — if only to a point — that he had been unable to show people how much he did care about their lives and their difficulties. His last two years in office, and the lackluster campaign at the end of it, suggested indifference. Not so, he insisted, but he didn’t get a second term to make things right. He took the defeat graciously, his seething staying below the surface. And he moved on, gradually jettisoning the baggage of regret.
‘A united country’
About a decade ago, Bush famously said that politics did not have to be mean and ugly. An opponent was not by extension one’s enemy, and he meant it, even when the opponent was leader of the Soviet Union. He practiced politics in the classical sense, as the art of the possible, and that took him across the aisle when need be. So much did he hate government debt that he was willing to accept the Democrats’ argument that a tax hike was sound policy. He didn’t see the proposal as the work of enemies intent of ruining his presidency. “We are a team, we’re a united country,” Bush once intoned, “and when the going gets tough, we get moving.”
If some see politics as warfare in suits, he viewed it as a self-help tool for the American people. It says something about our times that much of the praise heaped on Bush since his passing has emphasized what he wasn’t, what he didn’t do.
He didn’t like taking credit. He wasn’t ugly. He wasn’t mean. He would not insult someone publicly any more than he would broadcast one of the off-color jokes he loved to tell. The fact that simple kindness or genuine thoughtfulness is cause for celebration speaks to a world that he could no longer recognize in his fading days.