George Herbert Walker Bush died at
age 94 in Texas
at the end of last month. The moderately
conservative Republican capped a long career of public service by being elected
President of the United
States and then becoming the patriarch of a great
political dynasty.
As Commander in Chief, Bush skillfully
negotiated the peaceful end of the Cold War on favorable terms to the West and rejected
the first major post-Cold War challenge to international order, the Iraqi
invasion of Kuwait
by liberating the latter.
Born in Massachusetts
in 1924, Bush lived in Connecticut. He enlisted in the Navy in the Second World
War, at one point the branch’s youngest pilot.
Bush, who flew 58 missions in the Pacific Theater in a torpedo bomber
before being shot down and rescued at sea, was highly decorated for his
service. His marriage to Barbara Pierce
in 1945 lasted 73 years until her death in April of this year, the longest of
any presidential couple. After the war, Bush
graduated from Yale University and then worked in the oil business in Texas.
Starting in 1966, when Bush was
elected U.S. Representative as a Republican, he began a political career that
included a series of posts in which he was appointed by fellow GOP Presidents
Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford: Envoy to Communist China, Director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, where he was credited for boosting morale and for
much-needed reforms, and Ambassador to the United Nations. In between, Nixon appointed him Chairman of
the Republican National Committee, where he was loyal to Richard Nixon during
the Watergate scandal, but ultimately urged the President’s resignation. After a failed bid for the GOP presidential
nomination in 1980, Republican nominee Ronald Reagan asked Bush to be his
running mate. After winning the vice
presidential nomination, Bush was elected Vice President, serving a full eight
years after being reelected in 1984.
In what was regarded widely as politically
akin to a third term for President Ronald Reagan, Bush became in 1988 the first
sitting Vice President to be elected President since Martin Van Buren in 1840. He entered office with one of the fullest
resumes of any Chief Executive and was the first President with formal
diplomatic experience since James Buchanan.
Bush’s first act as President was
to lead the American people in prayer.
He appointed conservative, pro-life judges, with the exception of one of
his Supreme Court nominations, and enforced a strong anti-drug abuse policy,
especially during the peak of crack cocaine addiction. Bush created the Department of Veterans
Affairs and successfully resolved the savings and loan crisis. In foreign policy, Bush encouraged
representative government around the world.
He overthrew the dictator of Panama in 1989, who was wanted by the U.S.
for drug trafficking, had nullified a democratic election in which he had lost
and had killed an American Marine, in addition to Bush’s successful ending of
the Cold War with the Soviet Union in 1990-1991, which broke up shortly
afterward, and his 1991 Liberation of Kuwait, which thwarted aggression,.
Bush was re-nominated by the
Republicans for President, but lost re-election after Democratic nominee Bill
Clinton exaggerated how poor the slowly recovering economy was, and the
Democrats portrayed the once- popular Bush, who was responsibly trying to cheer
economic growth, as out of touch.
However two years later, in the 1994 Republican wave election against
Clinton and the Democrats, two of his sons, George W. and Jeb, were elected Governors
of Texas and Florida, respectively, providing a measure of vindication for the
Bush patriarch. Both were re-elected and
the former became a two-term President, the first son of a Chief Executive to
be elected President since John Quincy Adams in 1828. One of Jeb’s sons is a statewide elected
official in Texas.
The former President Bush was appointed
a fundraiser for major disaster relief by Presidents George W. Bush, a
Republican and Barack Obama, a Democrat.
The elder Bush, who campaigned in retirement for his family members and
many other Republican candidates, did not endorse Donald Trump for President.
Bush invited the incumbent Chief
Executive to his state funeral, but he had included in his funeral plans no
speaking role for Trump. Although Bush’s
funeral was not quite as overtly anti-Trumpist as that of Senator John McCain’s
this summer, the focus on Bush’s character, morals, decency, dignity and
selfless public service was widely recognized necessarily as a contrast with
Trumpism and, like McCain’s funeral, was a message of patriotism, duty and
unity around the American ideal of liberty, equality and representative
government.
May George H.W. Bush’s example of
devotion to God, family, community and country continue to inspire Americans to
public service.
