GEORGE H.W. BUSH DIES
41st U.S. president saw end of Cold War and built Gulf War alliance
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 reelection, has died. He was 94.
His death late Friday night at his Houston home came less than eight months after that of his wife of 73 years, Barbara Bush.
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 step 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 reelection in 1992, receiving less support than any incumbent president in 80 years.
The chasm between Bush’s achievements and his standing with the American public is a paradox that defines but doesn’t fully explain his legacy.
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 — would result 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, a second son, John Ellis, known as Jeb, sought the Republican presidential nomination but was driven from the race by the eventual winner, Donald Trump.
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 it. His tenure marked a dual transition — from presidencies domi-
nated by the Cold War to a renewed focus on domestic affairs and from an America still largely run by the longdominant 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 new, 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 advisors 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 also defied simple categorization. While he raked in millions giving speeches and serving on corporate boards, he also reemerged in the public eye for his humanitarian work in the wake of the tsunami that devastated southern Asia in 2004 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
In 2010, President Obama awarded Bush the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Barbara Bush died on April 17. She and her husband are survived by their sons George, Jeb, Neil and Marvin; their daughter, Dorothy; 17 grandchildren; seven great-grandchildren; and three siblings, Nancy Ellis and William and Jonathan 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, and raised in Greenwich, Conn. His father, Prescott Bush, was a leading light of the Eastern establishment and a U.S. senator.
During Bush’s senior year at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, plunging the United States into war. When he enlisted on his 18th birthday he became the youngest pilot in the Navy. But his naval career nearly ended in tragedy after his plane was struck over the Pacific by Japanese antiaircraft fire. His plane aflame, he delivered his bombs on target before bailing out. For his exploits, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Rotated home in time for Christmas in 1944, Bush two weeks later married Barbara Pierce. After graduation from Yale University, Bush turned down a job offer on Wall Street from his uncle, Herbert Walker, and decided instead to take his wife and family to Texas to seek his fortune in the oil business. By the time he reached his mid-30s, oil had made Bush a millionaire.
Bush began to carve out a career in politics, serving two terms as a congressman from Texas and failing twice at a bid for a U.S. Senate seat. President Nixon named him ambassador to the United Nations in 1970, where he served for two years, then President Ford asked him to run the then embattled Central Intelligence Agency in 1976.
In the Iowa caucuses, the first official contest of the 1980 campaign, he scored a stunning upset over the overwhelming favorite, Ronald Reagan. In a few weeks, however, Reagan recovered and defeated Bush decisively in the New Hampshire primary. By May, Bush was forced to drop out of the race. But he had made enough of an impression that Reagan, after initial reluctance, selected him as running mate.
While Bush largely served in the shadows of the Reagan White House, he stayed loyal, keeping his political and policy views to himself. But as the 1988 presidential election approached, a new obstacle to his ambitions loomed in the form of the Iran-Contra scandal and suspicion about his possible role. Though it required him to confess being “not in the loop,” the vice president repeatedly denied any knowledge of the deal to trade arms to gain the release of hostages held by Iran, and his candidacy weathered the Iran-Contra storm.
Bush arrived at the GOP convention a perceived underdog to the Democratic Party candidate, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis. And most political professionals believed that he did not help his cause by choosing untested Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle as his running mate. He also found it difficult to articulate what he wanted to accomplish as president — “the vision thing,” as he once famously called it.
In the end, though, he carried 40 states and 54% of the popular vote.
In fall 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 the Cold War. But Bush was able to ride a surge of hope and optimism that stirred the nation and the world, even as critics complained that he was too slow to react to the convulsive changes in the former Soviet bloc.
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.
While Bush left military logistics to the Pentagon, he personally undertook the diplomatic mobilization. He succeeded in orchestrating, through the U.N. Security Council, a worldwide embargo against Iraq, along with authorization for a multinational military force based in Saudi Arabia.
In January 1991, 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 was orchestrating the Gulf War alliance, he was wrestling with Congress over how to handle the large budget deficits he had inherited from Reagan. Democrats insisted 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 within the party and sapped his political strength.
Then, in 1991, Bush’s nomination of Thomas to the Supreme Court, and the accompanying sexual harassment allegations that turned the 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 during the rest of Bush’s presidency. Bush faced a primary challenge from conservative commentator Pat Buchanan. Though he prevailed, Bush seemed to have little to offer in an election about change and new ideas.
Meanwhile, he faced a brash, youthful rival in Clinton, who seemed to signal a new American era, and was dragged down by a thirdparty challenge from Texas billionaire Ross Perot, who drained votes from Bush.
At the end, Bush received 38% of the popular vote, a shocking outcome 21 months after the swift and nearly bloodless liberation of Kuwait had made many view his reelection as inevitable. No incumbent had done so badly since William Howard Taft in 1912.
When George W. Bush was elected to the White House, he did not solicit his father’s expertise on foreign policy and national security — and the father didn’t offer any.
“A president has got plenty of advisors, but what a president never has is someone who gave him unconditional love,” George W. Bush said in an interview at the close of his second term. “And therefore when I talked to my dad, I was more interested in the father-son relationship.”
In the same interview, the elder Bush said that he had been “determined to stay out of the way.”