What about the "hot rhetoric" that his father spoke of? "It is true that my rhetoric could get pretty strong, and that may have bothered some people-obviously it did, including Dad, though he never mentioned it," Bush 43 said. He remembered that his wife, Laura, had expressed skepticism about his choice of words when he had declared that he wanted Osama Bin Laden "dead or alive" after 9/11. It may have sounded too Wild West to some ears, Bush 43 acknowledged, but one thing was clear: "They understood me in Midland," he said wryly.
As the elder Bush saw it, the "iron-ass," or uncompromising, views of Cheney and Rumsfeld had failed to serve his son well, and his son's rhetorical style had been occasionally problematic. It was hardly surprising that "Have-Half" Bush felt this way. What was more surprising was that he would say so, out loud, on the record. Yet his son's presidency was moving into the realm of history, and by the time he made the remarks Bush 41 may have felt that posterity could benefit from a reminder that diplomacy and force should be seen as complementary, not competitive. Bush 43 himself had arrived at the same position, investing time and capital in diplomacy in his second term-so much so that Cheney found himself on the losing side of foreign-policy arguments more often than he had in the first term. Though they never spoke of it, then, Bush 41 and Bush 43 may have been more in sync all along than even they knew.
- On Saturday, January 10, 2009, just ten days before he left the presidency, George W. Bush commissioned the USS George H. W. Bush, CVN-77, the Navy's newest aircraft carrier. In an emotional ceremony on a bright winter's day in Norfolk, the forty-third president, standing near a purple-scarf-clad forty-first, paid tribute to his dad.
"Over the years, our parents have built a family bound forever by closeness, warmth, and unconditional love," George W. said. "Jeb, Neil, Marvin, and Doro and I will always feel blessed to have had the best father anyone could ever ask for. We will always be inspired by the faith, humor, patriotism, and compassion he taught us through his own example. And for as long as we live, we will carry with us Dad's other lessons: that integrity and honor are worth more than any title or treasure, and that the truest strength can come from the gentlest soul."
Turning to the business at hand, the forty-third president continued: "George H. W. Bush has the deep love of his family, the admiration of his friends, and the thanks of a grateful nation....So what do you give a guy who has been blessed and has just about everything he has ever needed? Well, an aircraft carrier."
The commissioning moved Bush deeply. Doro was the ship's sponsor, and in the ensuing years he loved reading email updates about the carrier on its various missions. "The ship is so majestic, and so powerful, and so strong," Bush said of the commissioning. "The honor of it all was just overwhelming. A lot of nice things happen to you after you've been something."
- The elder Bush wore that same splendid purple scarf to the Obama inauguration, and he boarded the presidential helicopter at the foot of the steps of the east front of the Capitol before Laura and George W. climbed on. It was the same route the senior Bushes had taken sixteen years before-from the Capitol to Andrews Air Force Base and home to Texas. Bush 43 seemed content and upbeat. He had finished the race and now it was time to step offstage.
Asked a month later how his son was doing, the elder Bush was happy to report that all was well. "He's fine," Bush said. "Talk to him all the time. I think he's very happy, very content. I don't think he misses anything yet-he may, down the line, but he's very reluctant to criticize Obama, to me even, and I'm glad to have him back, out of the rat race, out of the name-calling, out of the Bush bashing."
He recalled an exchange between George W. and Patrick Kennedy, a son of Ted Kennedy, who was ill. "You know, it's really hard to live up to your father," said Patrick, referring to his own dad.
"Believe me," George W. replied, "I've been living with that for a long time." Telling the story, the elder Bush added: "I thought that was very nice. George has been very generous to me in public, and in private, too. We're very close."
Bush talked to himself, sometimes, about the current state of play. When he would hear President Obama, who had control of both houses of Congress in those years, say that it was hard to get things done, Bush would mutter-inwardly-"Try this one on for size: being president with neither house."
- He lived his final years in his usual way. In the middle of a storm on a September 2 in his retirement he was eager to take out his speedboat with some of the grandchildren. The Secret Service asked Jean Becker to stop him-it just seemed too dangerous. She made a noble effort.
"Sir, it's probably too late to go out in the boat today," Becker said.
He looked at her over a pair of reading glasses. "Here's the deal," Bush replied. "This is the day the Japanese shot me down off Chichi-Jima. I survived that. I think I can survive this."
He was tireless, too. After a long weekend of events at College Station commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his inauguration as president, Bush was supposed to go home to Houston to rest. (His staff all collapsed onto sofas or beds.) Instead, the former president announced that he was going over to the closing round of the Shell Houston golf open.
After he left office, except for usual age-related issues, his health was good, though he worried about his memory from time to time. Bush continued to be treated for his thyroid condition with occasional adjusted dosages of his medicine to keep his thyroid hormone level within the normal range. Around 20062007, the former president began experiencing issues with his balance. "The condition progressed slowly over the years, and proved to be a Parkinson's-like disorder involving mainly his legs," said Dr. John Eckstein, one of his physicians who treated Bush from 1994 to 2009. The former president was confined to a wheelchair about 2012-and used decorative socks, always a favorite, to have the most fun with his necessarily exposed ankles.
During a 2012 hospitalization over the Christmas holidays for bronchitis-he was sick enough that nervous editors and television producers were moving into obituary mode-he was coughing so badly that he began to bleed internally. In the night at Houston's Methodist Hospital, the end seemed near. A blood clot nearly killed him, but he held on until morning, when the danger passed.
It had been the closest of calls. "Did I almost buy the farm last night?" he asked the next day, lying in his bed in a small suite at the end of a quiet hospital hallway. He spent a few hours each day in a wheelchair in the sitting room with Barbara, who needlepointed, and with Neil, who read aloud to his father, usually from an iPad. In the hospital Bush came to a resolution. "I've decided to live until ninety," he announced to friends.
No one doubted it.
- Life went on. There were great-grandchildren, two of whom were named after their great-grandfather: Georgia Helena Walker Bush and Poppy Louise Hager. At ninety, Bush parachuted once more, landing, roughly, at St. Ann's near Walker's Point. One day in Houston, on learning that President Obama was coming to town, the forty-first president went out to the airport to greet the incumbent. "When the president comes to your hometown, you show up to meet him," Bush told reporters.
In the fall of 2013, the elder Bushes were invited to a same-sex wedding between two women who own a general store in Kennebunkport. After the outdoor ceremony was concluded, the couple asked the former president to sign their license as a witness, which he cheerfully did. Images from the wedding went viral, and Jean Becker recalled that Bush 41 "found his popularity on gay websites intriguing."
As a presidential candidate in 1988, Bush had once mused about how the country was not ready for "codified" gay marriages, and the issue had grown in significance through the Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama years.
In a September 2015 note to the author in response to a question about whether he had changed his mind on same-sex marriages, the forty-first president wrote: "Personally, I still believe in traditional marriage. But people should be able to do what they want to do, without discrimination. People have a right to be happy. I guess you could say I have mellowed."
EPILOGUE.
I Don't Want to Miss Anything
As good a measure of a president as I know is somebody who ultimately puts the country first, and it strikes me that throughout his life he did that, both before he was president and while he was president, and ever since.
-BARACK OBAMA on George H. W. Bush ON A RELAXED AFTERNOON three fourths of the way through his son's tumultuous presidency, sitting on the family's stone porch overlooking the Atlantic, sipping coffee and occasionally lifting a pair of binoculars to look out across the blue water, George H. W. Bush was talking reluctantly but politely about his place in history.
As he grew into old age, Bush did not see himself as a Great Man, or even as an especially interesting one. He saw himself, rather, as a forgotten figure, a one-term president overshadowed by the myth of his predecessor and by the drama of his sons' political lives. At Walker's Point, the coffee cooling, Bush let his mask fall, if only for a moment. "I feel like an asterisk," he said, and lifted the binoculars again, turning to look outward, across the sea.
And so this combat hero, war president, and emblem of the rise and reign of the most powerful nation in history lived with a kind of emptiness, a curious insecurity about the legacy of his quest for power and his decades of service. History was being kinder, he knew, but history is a fickle thing. "I am lost between the glory of Reagan-monuments everywhere, trumpets, the great hero-and the trials and tribulations of my sons," Bush said one day in Houston, riding in the backseat of an SUV en route to an Italian restaurant in a strip mall near his office. On another occasion, he worried aloud about what biographers might make of him on close inspection. "What if they just find an empty deck of cards?"
He needn't have fretted. (Though that would have been unnatural.) "How great is this country," Jeb Bush once said, "that it could elect a man as fine as our dad to be its president?" The remark so struck Laura Bush that she included the moment in the White House memoir she wrote after she and George W. left Washington in 2009.
- The forty-first president represented the twilight of a tradition of public service in America-a tradition embodied by FDR, by Eisenhower, and by George H. W. Bush. "My father was the last president of a great generation," George W. Bush said in accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, eight years after his father's defeat. "A generation of Americans who stormed beaches, liberated concentration camps, and delivered us from evil. Some never came home. Those who did put their medals in drawers, went to work, and built on a heroic scale...highways and universities, suburbs and factories, great cities and grand alliances-the strong foundations of an American Century."
He brought the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion, successfully managing the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, and the end of the Soviet Union without provoking violence from Communist bitter-enders. In the first Gulf War, Bush established that, on his watch, America would not retreat from the world but would intervene, decisively, when the global balance of power was in jeopardy.
His life was spent in the service of his nation, and his spirit of conciliation, common sense, and love of country will stand him in strong stead through the ebbs and flows of posterity's judgment. On that score-that George H. W. Bush was a uniquely good man in a political universe where good men were hard to come by-there was bipartisan consensus a quarter century after his White House years.
- A key to understanding Bush-like other politicians who rise to great heights in America-is the recognition that what is easily perceptible is not all there is to perceive. In 1967, when Murray Kempton, the midcentury American writer, came to review the presidential memoirs of Dwight Eisenhower, Kempton discerned at a distance what he admitted he had failed to detect during Eisenhower's active years in the arena. "He was the great tortoise upon whose back the world sat," Kempton wrote in Esquire magazine. "We laughed at him...and all the while we never knew the cunning beneath the shell."
The cunning beneath the shell: The words, too, apply to George Herbert Walker Bush. He spent his life presenting a face of grace and generosity to the world, and that face was real. He was gracious, and he was generous. Yet he was more than well mannered. Beneath the kindness lay a steely ambition, a drive to win, a persistent, unshakable sense of himself as a man whose capacities were commensurate with the challenges of command. He was personally deferential-and politically determined to take his place among the great men who shaped the fates and the futures of millions, even billions, of others.
His life was not a lesson in philosophical consistency, but then political lives rarely are. The lapses from heroic narrative in his life's journey were the prices he paid for a rise to the top that enabled him, on crucial occasions, to use his power in the service of a larger good once he reached the White House. His inconsistencies and his compromises-opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to please Texas conservatives; the reversal of his views on abortion rights and on Reaganomics to win his place on the 1980 ticket-can be explained by his twin familial mandates to serve and to win. Politics, he remarked, was not "a pure undertaking"-it was a practical one.
He accepted a fundamental irony of history: One plays by the conventions of politics in order to be in power when the hour calls for unconventional decisions. As a political aspirant, Bush adapted himself to the shifting realities of his own party in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, inviting-and enduring-charges of opportunism and cynicism. Yet as president, Bush broke with anti-tax Republican orthodoxy to strike a deal that he believed was in the best interests of the country. As president, he withstood pressure from American conservatives who argued that Mikhail Gorbachev was a faux reformer secretly seeking to expand Soviet influence. As president, he resisted isolationist calls from the right, and led the Gulf War coalition to accomplish a clearly defined mission.
Raised to serve and to compete, he naturally gravitated to the political world of his father, as did two of his own sons. A Bush appeared on six of the nine national Republican tickets between 1980 and 2012-a remarkable feat-and Bushes governed two of the nation's largest states between 1994 and 2006. (George W. in Texas from 1994 to 2000; Jeb in Florida from 1998 to 2006.) Why the Bushes? Why have they proven so politically durable? The family's capacity to reflect a changing country, from George H. W. Bush's postwar move to Texas as the nation's center of gravity moved south and west to Jeb Bush's embrace of his wife's Hispanic heritage, is one reason. Another is the value of the now-multigenerational Bush organization in a Republican Party where no one ideological faction is truly dominant.
When assessing what makes the Bush sons run, though, the answer is less about mechanics, however important those are, and more about the man who has always been at the center of their lives. George H. W. Bush was no patriarchal mastermind. He never sat his sons down to plot a dynastic future. His power was quieter and subtler, but undeniably real. All five of Bush's children adore him in much the way he adored his own parents. For George W. and for Jeb, the politically inclined of the brood, following their father's path into the arena was a way of honoring the most compelling man they had ever known. In a sense, then, the Bush saga flows from reverence and from love for a father-for George Herbert Walker Bush-whose own twentieth-century odyssey took him to the highest levels and which, in the twenty-first, in the intertwined lives of his family and of his nation, unfolds still.
- The telephone in the Bushes' Houston house rang on Tuesday, November 16, 2010. President Obama was calling; was President Bush available? He was, and the incumbent president was on the line to ask if Bush 41 would come to Washington to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. Bush was delighted, not least because he had been struggling of late with a form of Parkinson's disease that made it difficult for him to walk-a depressing development for a man so devoted to constant motion. "I am not doing any travel these days," Bush told Obama in a handwritten note, "but I will be there for this one."
At the White House, President Obama paid warm tribute to Bush and his decades-long attention to duty. "We honor George Herbert Walker Bush for service to America that spanned nearly 70 years," Obama said in an East Room ceremony that also saluted John Lewis and Stan Musial.
From a decorated Navy pilot who nearly gave his life in World War II to U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, from CIA director to U.S. envoy to China to the vice presidency, his life is a testament that public service is a noble calling.
As President, he expanded America's promise to new immigrants and people with disabilities. He reduced nuclear weapons. He built a broad international coalition to expel a dictator from Kuwait. When democratic revolutions swept across Eastern Europe, it was the steady diplomatic hand of President Bush that made possible an achievement once thought impossible, ending the Cold War without firing a shot.
I would add that, like the remarkable Barbara Bush, his humility and his decency reflects the very best of the American spirit. Those of you who know him, this is a gentleman, inspiring citizens to become points of light in service to others, teaming up with a onetime political opponent to champion relief for the victims of the Asian tsunami, then Hurricane Katrina, and then, just to cap it off, well into [his] 80s, he decides to jump out of airplanes because, as he explains, "it feels good."
- It would be difficult to imagine two more different men, in terms of background, than Barack Obama and George H. W. Bush, and yet the first African American president held the consummate WASP president in the highest regard.
Reflecting on the forty-first president in an interview with the author four years after the Medal of Freedom ceremony, Obama said that the Bush he had come to know after 2008 "was exactly the gentleman that I had perceived him to be, perhaps even more gracious and thoughtful than he came across publicly." Bush, Obama thought, was "one of our most underrated Presidents," and, in the middle of a late winter afternoon a quarter century after Bush left Washington, the incumbent president made the case for the Bush legacy.
"I would argue that he helped usher in the postCold War era in a way that gave the world its best opportunity for stability and peace and openness," Obama said in the telephone interview from the White House. "The template he laid in a peaceful and unified Europe and in what for at least twenty-five years was a constructive relationship with Russia and the former Soviet satellites, and the trajectory away from nuclear brinksmanship at a time when things were still up in the air, was an extraordinary legacy." As challenging as the world remained, "the one thing that we don't have right now is any serious prospect of a great power war anywhere in the world," Obama said. "Part of the reason for that is that I think George H. W. Bush did a really good job in managing that postCold War transition." At home, Obama cited the Americans with Disabilities Act-something, Obama said, "that it's hard to imagine a current Republican president initiating....So although President Bush was sometimes mocked for talking about 'a thousand points of light,' the fact is, even in his policies, there was a genuine conservative compassion there that manifested itself in working with Republicans and Democrats on the Hill to get some big things done."
As the conversation wound down, Obama offered a benediction. "As good a measure of a president as I know is somebody who ultimately puts the country first," he said of Bush, "and it strikes me that throughout his life he did that, both before he was president and while he was president, and ever since."
- In the end, after he lies in state in the Capitol Rotunda, after the funeral service at Washington National Cathedral, after the hymns and the flags and the tributes and the tears, after the last flight home to Texas, George H. W. Bush will come to rest in a quiet graveyard tucked behind a grove of trees across a small stream from his presidential library in College Station.
There he and Barbara are to be buried next to Robin. It is a serene spot, but close enough to the world that a visitor can't help but hear the subtle rumble of traffic on the Texas highways and the occasional roar of a plane. Bush will be interred beneath an enormous iron seal of the Presidency of the United States, at peace but not far from the sounds of lives still moving, still striving.
Which is fitting, for he never really stopped, either. Once when he was nearing ninety, a hurricane was about to hit the Maine coast. As the storm came in, Walker's Point was being boarded up. The power was out and there were 50 mph winds. The rain had just stopped, briefly, when Jean Becker, the forty-first president's chief of staff, realized she did not know where Bush was. She went from room to room in the house-no Bush. Finally she peeked out the door and saw the former president of the United States on a scooter on the putting green, looking out at the stormy sea.
There he sat on the stony shoreline, near the cottage path where he had learned to walk and the rocks where he had played as a child. This was the place he had proposed marriage and raised his children and grandchildren and now great-grandchildren. This was the place he had received heads of state. This was the place he had contemplated war and peace. This was the place he always returned to, in hours of victory and of defeat, in good times and in bad.
He gazed off in the distance, his still-auburn hair riffling, his jacket pressed against his body, his eyes scanning the horizon. The winds were so strong that the Secret Service agents around Bush could barely stand, but there Bush sat, serenely. Becker struggled through the winds to his side. "President Bush, what are you doing, sir?"
He looked at her with a puzzled expression, as if the answer were obvious.
"I can't see anything from the house," he replied, just audible over the whooshing weather, "and I don't want to miss anything."
Credit pai1.1 James Smith Bush, George H. W. Bush's paternal great-grandfather, graduated from Yale and became an Episcopal clergyman. After serving churches in New Jersey, San Francisco, and on Long Island, he was drawn away from his traditional faith to the transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau.
David Davis Walker, George H. W. Bush's maternal great-grandfather, attracted the patronage of a cousin, future Supreme Court justice David Davis, and became a successful dry goods merchant in St. Louis.
The family property known as Walker's Point, Kennebunkport, Maine, circa 1902.
Credit pai1.4 S. P. Bush, Bush's paternal grandfather, was educated at the Stevens Institute of Technology and rose to become president of Buckeye Steel Castings in Columbus, Ohio.
George Herbert Walker, Bush's maternal grandfather, was a freewheeling businessman and financier who could be alternately impatient and generous. "He was kind of an up-and-down guy," George H. W. Bush recalled.
Lucretia "Loulie" Wear Walker, wife of G. H. Walker. A great beauty of her day, Loulie grew up in a Presbyterian household in St. Louis. Her husband, whom she called "Bertie," abandoned the Roman Catholic Church of his upbringing to marry her.
G. H. Walker with daughters Dorothy and Nancy at Walker's Point.
Nancy and Dorothy Walker playing on the rocks at Walker's Point.
Bush's mother, Dorothy, was raised in a house of rambunctious brothers: Herbie, John, Jim, and Louis Walker.
Dorothy and Prescott Bush, who married in August 1921, on a shooting holiday at Duncannon, her father's South Carolina plantation.
The Bush family house on Grove Lane in Greenwich. Poppy Bush was chauffeured to and from Greenwich Country Day School; his childhood was shaped by affection and competitiveness.
Dorothy Bush on the tennis court. She once fell and broke her wrist in the middle of a point-but finished the match.
A championship golfer, Prescott Bush became a favorite partner of President Eisenhower's when Bush served in the U.S. Senate in the 1950s.
Dorothy, Poppy, Nancy, Jonathan, and Prescott Bush on the steps at Grove Lane in the 1930s. Poppy, Jon Bush recalled, had an "innate empathy" for others and earned the nickname "Have-Half" for his habit of splitting treats with friends.
Poppy with his sister, Nancy Bush, circa 1928. He was, Nancy later remarked, the "star of the family."
Poppy Bush at age twelve. After graduating from Greenwich Country Day School, he was sent to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.
Bush (front row, second from right) with the Phillips Academy baseball team, circa 1938.
Credit pai1.18 The interior of the library at Phillips Academy in the 1930s, Bush's time at the school. Though he tended to hide it well, Bush had a propensity, his instructors noted, to over-worry.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, which occurred halfway through his final year at Andover, Bush decided to pursue naval aviation. He signed up upon graduation-which was also his eighteenth birthday.
Beginning in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Bush trained to fly at a series of installations around the country. He became a torpedo bomber pilot, flying an Avenger off carriers in the Pacific.
In the cockpit of an Avenger. He was thought to be the youngest flying officer in the navy.
Shot down on Saturday, September 2, 1944, Bush is pictured here (front row, second from left) with other pilots rescued by the USS Finback, a submarine on what was known as "lifeguard duty."
The Bushes were married on a cold Saturday, January 6, 1945, at the Pierces' Presbyterian church in Rye, New York.
Mrs. George H. W. Bush dances with her beloved father, Marvin Pierce, at the wedding reception in Rye. Not long afterward, in a letter to a friend, Mr. Pierce predicted that his new son-in-law might well become the president of the United States one day.
The image of Barbara Pierce that her fiance carried in his wallet during his navy years during World War II.
They first met at a Christmas 1941 dance at the Greenwich Country Club; he proposed on the rocky coastline at Walker's Point.
At the plate for Yale, 1947. Barbara kept score at every home game.
Credit pai1.28 Bush finished his Yale degree-Phi Beta Kappa in economics-in two and a half years. After the war, speed was essential: He was now a husband and a father. His eldest son, George W. Bush, was born in July 1946 in New Haven.
The young marrieds on the town circa 1948.
Dorothy Bush with her grandson George W. after his baptism, December 1946.
Neil Mallon and Prescott. Along with Bush uncle Herbie Walker, "Uncle Neil" Mallon was instrumental in the young Bushes' move to Texas and into the oil business.
The elder Bushes on the campaign trail in Connecticut in the 1950s. Prescott would serve in the U.S. Senate from 1952 to 1962.
George Bush meets with former president Eisenhower in 1964, the year Bush unsuccessfully challenged incumbent Democratic senator Ralph Yarborough for the U.S. Senate from Texas.
At an offshore oil rig. Bush would make the bulk of his fortune in offshore ventures, building a global business based first in Midland and then in Houston.
With his mother, Dorothy; George W.; and Robin in April 1953.
George W., Neil, Jeb, and baby Marvin, Midland, 1956.
Congressman Bush with his House staff, pictured with longtime aides Chase Untermeyer (far left) and Don Rhodes (far right).
Credit pai1.38 The bright, young rising Republican star on the campaign trail in Texas in his second bid for the U.S. Senate, this time against Lloyd Bentsen, 1970.
Ambassador Bush in action at the United Nations in New York City, early 1970s.