New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
1924 A LIFE OF SERVICE
Former president remembered as a humanitarian, statesman
Tributes from around the world poured in Saturday following the death of George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president of the United States who died in Houston late Friday after decades as a public servant that set in motion an enduring family legacy. He was 94.
“The legacy of George H.W. Bush will be forever etched in the history of America and the world. It is a lifelong record of selfless patriotic service to our nation,” former Secretary of State James Baker said in a statement.
“He was the youngest Navy pilot in World War II, a Texas congressman, U.N. ambassador, America’s first envoy to China, CIA director, vice president and president,” he said. “In each and every one of these positions, he led with strength, integrity, compassion and humility — characteristics that define a truly great man and effective leader.”
Bush died peacefully at his Houston home with Baker and several members of his extended family at his side. Other family members were on a speakerphone, talking to Bush in his final moments.
His last words, Baker said, were “I love you, too,” spoken to his son, former President George W. Bush.
Baker and other world leaders past and present on Saturday saluted Bush, the last president to have
served in the military during World War II and the last whose worldview had been shaped by the imperative to contain Communist expansionism. His experience in international diplomacy served him well as he dealt with the unraveling of the Soviet Union as an oppressive superpower, and later the rise of China as a commercial behemoth and potential partner.
As cautious and restrained as he was in foreign matters, Bush had an inclination for personal risk-taking that showed up early in his life, when he became a carrier pilot in the war — one of the most dangerous jobs in the military — and then struck out on his own at war’s end, eschewing a comfortable job in New York to become an oilman in Texas.
Likewise, when his interest turned to politics a decade or so later, he was more than willing to give up his executive suite for a chance at public office.
Steeped in noblesse oblige and the importance of public service, Bush always felt the lure of political life. It finally snared him in 1962 when he was chosen to head Houston’s fledgling GOP. He spent the next three decades in the political limelight, enjoying a roller-coaster career that saw more defeats than victories yet improbably landed him in the White House.
Bush was elected president in 1988 as the successor to Ronald Reagan, a conservative icon whom he ran against and then served as vice president. Unlike Reagan, he was a pragmatic leader guided by moderation, consensus building, and a sense for problem-solving shorn of partisan rhetoric. Like his father, who served in the U.S. Senate, he swore no allegiance to orthodox tenets. That put him at odds with a take-no-prisoners attitude of a new breed of Republicans and helped do in his reelection bid, sending him home to Houston in forced retirement.
Bush was put to the test shortly after taking office. Surging movements in Eastern Europe saw opportunity to free themselves from the Soviet yoke, thanks in part to the liberalizing influence of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Bush’s measured response allowed events to unfold, including the destruction of the Berlin Wall, without triggering potentially catastrophic responses from Soviet hard-liners.
Bush again displayed his diplomatic skills in the summer of 1990 when he coordinated a multinational response to the military invasion of tiny Middle East nation Kuwait by neighboring Iraq and its dictator, Saddam Hussein. The victorious Operation Desert Storm brought high approval ratings that appeared to guarantee a second term.
Domestic matters proved a different sort of challenge. Plagued by inherited budget deficits and a Congress under the control of Democrats, Bush was pushed into a tax increase that belied his explicit promise to allow none. He agreed to it because he recognized it was in the country’s best interest, but the political damage was severe. His reelection bid fell short, a failing that haunted him for years. Uncharacteristically, it even caused him to wonder whether history would regard him as a failed president.
It has not.
Bush’s long life encompassed the full arc of the 20th century, beginning in an era of steamships and a new ideology called communism, and ending as American spaceships explored distant planets and the hammer-and-sickle was mostly a fading emblem on old flags. He was to be the last president of his generation, which came of age during the Great Depression, participated in a cataclysmic world war, and ushered in unprecedented American power and prosperity.
Turning away from the preordained comfortable life, Bush struck out for Texas and found success, first as an independent oilman and later as a young congressman from Houston. The misfortune of bad timing hurt him at times in his pursuit of higher office, yet a string of highprofile appointed positions reflected the faith others had in his ability and kept alive his dream of fulfilling his father’s prediction that someday he would become president.
To some, Bush paled in comparison to his strong-willed predecessor in the White House, but he was simply a different breed of politician: a traditional Republican whose belief in limited government was in no way at odds with his view that public service was a calling.
Bush’s career from start to finish, especially as president, was largely free of scandal or great controversy, with one troubling exception — his role as vice president in the IranContra scandal.
His ethical standards rarely were questioned. His judgment was the product of studied deliberation and ample give-and-take with advisers. He regularly entertained Democratic leaders at the White House and made a great effort to develop personal relationships over drinks and a game of horseshoes, just as he had in the diplomatic world over many years.
He was defeated in an unusual three-way contest with Democrat Clinton and Texas billionaire Ross Perot — a sour coda to a stellar career. Though he had been ambivalent about even running for reelection, the loss would gnaw on him. He believed that he left the job he signed up for unfinished.
Bush was born on June 12, 1924 in Milton, Mass., to Prescott and Dorothy Bush, the second of five children, four of them boys. His was an idyllic childhood spent among the nation’s economically privileged, with numerous trips to family estates in Maine and South Carolina.
Bush piloted 58 combat missions from the carrier USS San Jacinto, but one stood out. During a Sept. 2, 1944, attack on Japanese positions on Chichi-Jima, one of the Bonin Islands, his Avenger was badly hit by flak. He was able to complete the bombing run but ordered the other two crewmen to “hit the silk” as the plane headed toward the water. He did likewise and was able to haul himself into a life raft after popping up from the sea, dazed and out of breath. His crew mates were never found.
Bush was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, yet never considered himself a war hero despite the efforts of later political advertising.
In January 1945, while on leave, Bush wed his pre-war fiancee, Barbara Pierce. The two had met at a dance when he was at Phillips and she at a tony boarding school in South Carolina. Her family, like his, came from old money, and among her ancestors were early New England settlers. A distant relative, Franklin Pierce, was the 14th American president.
After the war, Bush and his new wife moved to New Haven, where he would begin his college education at Yale, the alma mater of his father and four other relatives.
He graduated in under three years because of an accelerated program offered to veterans eager to make up for lost time.
In the summer of 1948, Bush loaded up his new Studebaker, a graduation gift, and pointed it southwest, ending up in Odessa several days later. Barbara and their new baby, George, flew down after he had found lodging in a weathered duplex, their first Texas home. Their new life began.
By 1950, he, Barbara, and their two young children were living in Midland, where he had formed an oil company with a neighbor, John Overbey. Financial backing came from Bush’s father and some of his father’s friends and business contacts.
With no geologic or engineering background, Bush learned the business from the ground up, “walking fields, talking to people, and trying to make deals,” Overbey later recalled in an interview. .
His fledgling business career was all but put on hold for more than six months as he, Barbara and Robin made repeated trips to Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Barbara tried to approach their new circumstances with stoic resolve, to the point of booting visitors out of Robin’s hospital room if they cried. Her husband became increasingly emotional and often was the one who had to leave the room. Robin died later in 1953.
During the early 1960s, Bush began to feel the political itch, or to be more precise, respond to an itch that had been there for years, and waded into a successful race for Harris County GOP chairman.
Perhaps because his father had just left the U.S. Senate, Bush then brashly decided to take on incumbent U.S. Sen. Ralph Yarborough in 1964. Yarborough portrayed Bush as an extremist and won easily, gaining 56 percent of the vote as Lyndon Johnson swamped Goldwater in the presidential race.
In November 1966, Bush ran for Congress and won, becoming the first Republican from Houston and the star of the growing Texas GOP.
Bush was in his second term when President Richard Nixon asked him to take on Yarborough again. Bush lost again and after two terms in Congress, he was out of a job.
Since Nixon had pushed him toward the Senate bid, he responded by appointing Bush to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. What followed over the rest of the decade was a series of appointed posts, each of which gave him useful experience. Nixon named him chairman of the Republican National Committee, his tenure coinciding with investigations into the Watergate affair, which resulted in Nixon’s resignation. Although Bush survived untainted, new President Gerald Ford knew it was time for a change and appointed him “envoy” to China — the two nations did not yet have full diplomatic relations, so Bush could not be called an ambassador.
In Ford’s final year in office, Bush was appointed director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was in disarray after years of scandalous revelations. Though he was only there a year, he was credited for restoring the agency’s morale. The main building at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va., was renamed in his honor in 1999.
When Ford was defeated by Jimmy Carter in 1976, Bush found himself once again unemployed.
As the decade was closing, Bush saw an opening to run for the office to which he had long aspired — president. Bush claimed an early win in Iowa, and he scored big primary wins in a handful of important states. Reagan remained in front, however, and longtime friend and campaign manager James Baker finally convinced him the numbers would not add up, and Bush dropped out.
Bush showed up at the 1980 Republican National Convention skeptical that Reagan would offer him the vice presidency. Just before midnight, as the convention’s final day loomed, Baker picked up the phone in Bush’s hotel suite, then handed over the receiver. He had his reprieve.
Over the next eight years, the relationship between Reagan and Bush grew increasingly warm and cordial. There was little doubt after Reagan’s reelection in 1984 that Bush would follow on with another campaign of his own.
The election was a decisive victory. Bush carried 40 states and claimed more than 53 percent of the vote.
Bush had not been in the White House long when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a principal signal that the Soviet bloc was in its final days.
The end of the Cold War did not mean an end to international trouble. When the Chinese government violently put down a dissident student movement, most notably in a 1989 confrontation at Tiananmen Square, Bush used his personal relationship with the premier to allay fears of American intrusion into Chinese matters. In the summer of 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein decided to end a simmering dispute over ownership of a large oil field by invading Kuwait and hovering menacingly on the northern border of Saudi Arabia, which at the time was a major source of America’s crude oil.
Bush quickly declared that the occupation would “not stand.” The ability of Bush to craft the Gulf coalition, with Baker’s help, and prod the United Nations to fulfill one of its central purposes was a significant achievement. More than 40 nations contributed financially or in some way to the cause.
As his re-election campaign came closer, it seemed apparent that the polls showing trouble were accurate. In his final personal thoughts about his time in the Oval Office, Bush wrote that he had tried to serve with honor, to do nothing that “would tarnish and hurt the presidency.”
His spirits were buoyed in 2000 when son George was elected president. It was only the second time in American history that a father and son had served in the White House. The fatherly pride of Bush 41, as he came to be known, was tempered by his son’s second term, by the end of which he was pilloried for a long and costly war premised on bad information and for the coming of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.
Bush rarely gave interviews, though eventually he was convinced to cooperate on his biography. He made a final parachute jump after turning 90, but age and disease began to take a toll. When he lost the ability to walk, there were few public appearances.
In 2010, Obama awarded Bush the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In the East Room of the White House, Obama spoke words that would have meant everything to Bush’s parents and grandparents, who insisted that the advantages he enjoyed were not to be squandered.
“His life is a testament that public service is a noble calling,” Obama said. “His humility and decency reflects the very best of the American spirit.”