Puro S.A.: George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter had much in common.

This country’s two longest-living presidents, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, have a lot in common.

That fact came into sharper focus Friday when Bush passed away at the age of 94.

Bush and Carter were both born in 1924. They both served in the Navy, with Bush the Navy’s youngest World War II pilot and Carter a participant in the nation’s fledgling nuclear submarine program. They both had stellar entrepreneurial careers before entering politics, with Bush building a lucrative oil business in West Texas during the 1950s and Carter taking over his father’s peanut farm during the same period.

They were also, not so coincidentally, this nation’s two most recent one-term presidents. As the only two elected American presidents to get voted out of office in the past 80 years, they belong to an elite club whose membership dues they would have preferred not to pay.

Some of the same elements that made Bush and Carter one-termers also made them highly admired ex-presidents: They are echoes of a distant, lamented time when public service trumped partisanship and diplomacy mattered more than dogma.

Worst tendencies

It’s always tempting, in the sentimental glow of a political leader’s death, to canonize that leader or iron out the contradictory wrin- kles of their personality.

With that in mind, it’s important to acknowledge that Bush’s soft-spoken manner, like that of Carter, camouflaged a fierce ambitious streak and an occasional willingness to go to extreme lengths to get elected.

Bush ran as a Goldwater conservative for the U.S. Senate in 1964, when he faced a liberal opponent, Democratic incumbent Ralph Yarborough. When he faced a more conservative foe, Lloyd Bentsen, six years later, he ran as a union-courting moderate.

He constructed a 1988 presidential campaign on wedge issues — flag burning, school prayer — that had nothing to do with the pressing problems of the time.

He also benefited from an infamous TV ad, by the Bush-supporting National Security Political Action Committee, featuring an African-American convict named Willie Horton, who committed violent crimes while on weekend furloughs in Massachusetts during the gubernatorial tenure of Bush’s 1988 opponent, Michael Dukakis.

As for Carter, he put aside his natural civil rights leanings during his 1970 gubernatorial campaign in Georgia and tried to win favor with old-South segregationists. He benefited from the mysterious circulation of a leaflet showing his opponent, Carl Sanders, being doused with celebratory champagne by an AfricanAmerican member of the Atlanta Hawks.

If their campaigns sometimes demonstrated their worst tendencies, Bush and Carter found their better angels as public servants. Neither of them seemed consistently focused on economic issues, and both of them paid major political prices for that. But that’s because they were occupied with monumental international events.

Bush steered the United States through the fall of the Soviet empire, always recognizing — much to the irritation of the GOP’s conservative base — the value of building and maintaining multinational coalitions. Carter worked his obsessive magic over 13 days at Camp David in 1978 with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and brought peace to those chronically warring nations.

Appreciating decency

For all their similarities, however, Bush and Carter differed in one crucial respect: Carter was an introspective loner, while Bush thrived on social interaction. Richard Ben Cramer, the author of “What It Takes: The Way to the White House,” the definitive account of the 1988 presidential race, described Bush’s “genius for friendship,” the remarkable thoughtfulness he showed — via handwritten letters — to practically everyone he encountered.

In 2012, I spoke with Shirley Green, a former leader in the Bexar County Republican Party, who served as deputy press secretary to Bush during his first term as vice president and held a variety of positions during his presidency.

Green recalled that Bush “kept up with his friends from school, from university, from the Navy, from the United Nations, and this was not just a casual thing.”

To illustrate Bush’s personal grace, his gift for bringing people into his world, Green told the story of a 1990 meeting between Bush and tennis champion Pete Sampras.

“When Sampras became the youngest (male) player ever to win the U.S. Open, President Bush invited him to the White House,” Green said. “But instead of just meeting him, he put together a tennis game, with Congressman Bill Archer from Houston and one of President Bush’s sons, and then invited a whole bunch of us to come over to the White House tennis court to see Pete Sampras.”

There are thousands of stories like that about Bush. It didn’t translate to the TV screen, the same way his military heroism didn’t save him from being unfairly maligned as a wimp.

As with Carter, it took the slow passage of time for Bush’s essential decency to be fully appreciated.

Ron Edmonds / Associated Press Former Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush appear at the White House in 1993. Among the pair’s similarities were being born in the same year, serving in the Navy and serving just one term as president.