HE LIVED TO SERVE
41st president’s legacy includes Gulf War and end of Cold War; he said there was ‘no higher honor’ than serving his country
He was the man who sought a “kinder, and gentler nation,” and the one who sternly invited Americans to read his lips — he would not raise taxes. He was the popular leader of a mighty coalition that dislodged Iraq from Kuwait, and was turned out of the presidency after a single term. Blue-blooded and genteel, he was elected in one of the nastiest campaigns in recent history.
George Herbert Walker Bush was many things, including only the second American to see his son follow him into the nation’s highest office. But more than anything else, he was a believer in government service. Few men or women have served America in more capacities than the man known as
“Poppy.”
“There is no higher honor than to serve free men and women, no greater privilege than to labor in government beneath the Great Seal of the United States and the American flag,” he told senior staffers in 1989, days after he took office.
Bush, who died late Friday at age 94 — nearly eight months after his wife of 73 years died at their Houston home — was a
congressman, an ambassador to the United Nations and envoy to China, chairman of the Republican National Committee, director of the CIA, two-term vice president and, finally, president.
Air Force One was being sent to Texas to transport Bush’s casket to Washington, where his body will lay in state at the Capitol Rotunda. The public can pay their respects from Monday evening through Wednesday morning.
Bush will be buried Thursday on the grounds of his presidential library at Texas A&M University at the family plot next to his wife Barbara, who died in April, and their 3-year-old daughter Robin, who died in 1953. The Bush family is still arranging funeral services, but the White House said President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump plan to attend.
Bush was no ideologue — he spoke disparagingly of “the vision thing,” and derided the supply-side creed of his future boss, Ronald Reagan, as “voodoo economics.” He is generally given better marks by historians for his foreign policy achievements than for his domestic record, but assessments of his presidency tend to be tepid.
“Was George Bush only a nice man with good connections, who seldom had to wrest from life the honors it frequently bestowed on him?” journalist Tom Wicker asked in his Bush biography.
Wicker’s answer: Perhaps. But he said Bush’s actions in Kuwait “reflect moments of courage and vision worthy of his office.”
The Persian Gulf War — dubbed “Operation Desert Storm” — was his greatest mark on history. In a January 2011 interview marking the war’s 20th anniversary, he said the mission sent a message that “the United States was willing to use force way across the world, even in that part of the world where those countries over there thought we never would intervene.”
“I think it was a signature historical event,” he added. “And I think it will always be.”
After Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush quickly began building an international military coalition that included other Arab states. After freeing Kuwait , he rejected suggestions that the U.S. carry the offensive to Baghdad, choosing to end the hostilities a mere 100 hours after the start of the ground offensive.
“That wasn’t our objective,” he said. “The good thing about it is there was so much less loss of human life than had been predicted, and indeed than we might have feared.”
But the decisive military defeat did not lead to the regime’s downfall, as many in the administration had hoped.
“I miscalculated,” Bush acknowledged. The Iraqi leader was eventually ousted in 2003, in the war led by Bush’s son that was followed by a long, bloody insurgency.
Unlike his son, who joined the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam era but served only in the U.S., the elder Bush was a bona fide war hero. He joined the Navy on his 18th birthday in 1942 over the objections of his father, Prescott, who wanted him to stay in school. At one point the youngest pilot in the Navy, he flew 58 missions off the carrier USS San Jacinto. His wartime exploits won him the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery. He was shot down on Sept. 2, 1944, while completing a bombing run against a Japanese radio tower.
Bush was born June 12, 1924, in Milton, Mass. His father, the son of an Ohio steel magnate, had moved east to make his fortune as an investment banker with Brown Brothers, Harriman, and later served 10 years as a senator from Connecticut. His mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, was the daughter of a sportsman who gave golf its Walker Cup.
Competitive athletics were a passion for the Bushes, whether at home in Greenwich, Conn., or during long summers spent at Walker’s Point, the family’s oceanfront retreat in Kennebunkport, Maine. Bush, along with his three brothers and one sister, had lives of privilege seemingly untouched by the Great Depression.
Young Bush attended Greenwich Country Day School and later Phillips Academy at Andover, Mass., where he was senior class president and captain of the baseball and soccer teams. It was there, at a dance, that he met Barbara Pierce, daughter of the publisher of McCall’s magazine. George and Bar would marry when he left the Navy in January 1945. They were together for more than seven decades, becoming the longest-married presidential couple in U.S. history.
Out of the service, Bush resumed his education at Yale. Lean and 6-foot-2, he distinguished himself as first baseman and captain of the baseball team, which went to the College World Series twice.
But rather than joining his father on Wall Street, in 1948 he loaded his wife and young son George W. into the family Studebaker and drove to the hot, dusty Texas oil patch to take a job as an equipment clerk for the International Derrick and Equipment Co.
By the turn of the 1960s, the family — and Bush’s oil business — had moved to Houston. There, he got his start in politics, the traditional Bush family business. A handsome and well-spoken war hero, he was sought as a candidate by both parties. He chose the Republicans.
Bush lost his first race, a 1964 challenge to Sen. Ralph Yarborough, but won a seat in the House in 1966. He won re-election in 1968 without opposition. In Congress, he generally supported President Richard Nixon and the war in Vietnam.
In 1970, he tried for the Senate again. Yarborough was upset in the Democratic primary by Lloyd Bentsen, and Bentsen defeated Bush in the general election.
Nixon appointed Bush ambassador to the United Nations and, after the 1972 election, named him chairman of the Republican National Committee. Bush struggled to hold the party together as Watergate destroyed the Nixon presidency. He urged Nixon to quit one day before the president resigned in August 1974.
Denied the vice presidency by Gerald Ford in favor of Nelson Rockefeller, Bush was given his choice of jobs and surprised Ford by asking to head the small mission in Beijing. Then, in 1975, Ford put Bush in charge of the Central Intelligence Agency, beset by congressional probing and allegations of assassination plots and domestic spying.
Bush returned to private life when the Republicans lost the presidency in 1976, but he quickly began planning his own run for the White House.
He won the first contest of 1980, the Iowa caucuses, and boasted that he had the “big mo,” his slang for momentum. But Reagan, who had led the conservative movement for more than a decade, won the New Hampshire primary and the nomination.
In 1988, many Democrats assumed Bush would be easy pickings. He was the man “born with a silver foot in his mouth,” as fellow Texan Ann Richards jibed at the Democrats’ convention in Atlanta. He trailed Michael Dukakis by as many as 17 points that summer. Bush did little to help himself by picking Dan Quayle, a lightly regarded junior senator from Indiana, as a running mate.
The campaign was bitter and muddy. Advised by campaign manager Lee Atwater, Bush became an aggressor, wrapping himself in patriotic themes and settings — even visiting a flag factory — while flaying Dukakis as an out-of-touch liberal. Commercials hammered Dukakis for a prison furlough policy that allowed murderer Willie Horton to rape a woman while out on a weekend pass.
Bush won by a landslide, with 40 states and a nearly 7 million vote plurality, becoming the first sitting vice president to win the White House since Martin Van Buren in 1836. He entered office with a reputation as a man of indecision and indeterminate views. A wimp, one newsmagazine suggested.
He pledged to make the United States a “kinder, gentler” nation and called on Americans to volunteer their time for good causes — an effort he said would create “a thousand points of light.”
It was Bush’s violation of a different pledge, the no-new-taxes promise, that helped sink his bid for a second term. He abandoned the idea in his second year, cutting a deficit-reduction deal that angered many congressional Republicans and contributed to GOP losses in the 1990 midterm elections.
Bush, an avid outdoorsman who took Theodore Roosevelt as a model, sought to safeguard the environment, signing the first improvements to the Clean Air Act in more than a decade. It was activism with a Republican cast, allowing polluters to buy others’ clean air credits and giving industry flexibility on how to meet tougher goals on smog.
He also signed the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act to ban workplace discrimination against people with disabilities and require improved access to public places and transportation.
Seven years of economic growth ended in mid-1990, just as the Gulf crisis unfolded. Bush insisted the recession would be “short and shallow,” and lawmakers did not even try to pass a jobs bill or other relief measures.
Bill Clinton took advantage of the nation’s economic fears, and a third-party bid from independent Ross Perot added to Bush’s challenge in seeking a second term.
In the closing days of the 1992 campaign, Bush fought the impression that he was distant and disconnected and seemed to struggle against his younger, more empathetic opponent.
“I lost in ‘92 because people still thought the economy was in the tank, that I was out of touch and I didn’t understand that,” he said. “The economy wasn’t in the tank and I wasn’t out of touch, but I lost. I couldn’t get through this hue and cry for ‘change, change, change’ and ‘The economy is horrible, still in recession.’
“Did I hurt when I lost the election? Sure. There’s a feeling of letting others down.”
This was not the first heartbreak in Bush’s life, or the worst. In 1953, his 3-year-old daughter, Robin, died of leukemia.
Barbara and George Bush had four sons and another daughter: John, known as Jeb, the former Florida governor who sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2016; Neil, Marvin, and Dorothy; and George, president 43 to his father’s 41. The day George W. Bush took office, the elder Bush signed a letter “the proudest father in the whole wide world.”
Mostly, he stayed out of the public eye. Summoned by his son, Bush joined with Bill Clinton to raise money for relief after the Southeast Asian tsunami in 2004. He piloted his speedboat, played tennis and golf. On his 72nd, 80th, 85th and 90th birthdays, he reprised his World War II parachute jumps.
Quietly, occasionally, he counseled his son, the president. Mostly, he served as a cheerleader.
On the day George W. sent forces to attack Iraq, he also sent his father a letter. “I know what you went through,” he wrote.
The senior Bush responded that his son was “doing the right thing,” a decision made “with strength and compassion.” But he ended his note with the words of a little girl, dead a half-century.
“Remember Robin’s words ‘I love you more than tongue can tell,’” he wrote. “Well, I do.”