George H.W. Bush, the careful and pragmatic manager of the Cold War’s final dramas, had nearly every tool a great president needs. He had fire and drive, which are indispensable to a great statesman. From his glamorous youth through his momentous single term as 41st President of the United States, Bush was consumed, in the words of one biographer, by “an almost insatiable ambition and competitiveness.” He had experience, gained over decades in private business and public service. He had good judgment, cultivating the quality that Aristotle called “practical wisdom,” but which Bush referred to as “prudence.” He had the courage to make difficult decisions. He was discerning in his choice of strong advisers, and was comfortable with dissenting views. Bush was a natural born leader.
All of which points to the riddle of his life: why did his presidency end in rejection?
Bush—who died Nov. 30, 2018 at the age of 94 years, eight months after the passing of his wife Barbara—employed all of his strengths as, step by cautious step, he consolidated America’s position as the lone superpower in a new world order while, at the same time, he allowed the Soviet Union to die with a measure of dignity. Rarely, if ever, has so much power shifted so peacefully. Then Bush marshaled this enhanced U.S. influence to lead a global coalition to repel Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Thirty-five nations, from Syria to Senegal and Bahrain to Bangladesh, contributed support to the U.S.-led Operation Desert Storm. Bush’s decision, after driving the invaders out, to stop short of forcing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power was necessary to hold the coalition together. It was the prudent thing to do, though arguably it came at a price that is still being paid more than a quarter-century later.
So what was the missing piece or surplus gene to explain his failure in 1992 to win a second term? Perhaps it was as simple as unlucky timing. Bush had the unenviable task of following Ronald Reagan, the genial conservative who chose Bush to be his two-term vice-president. Eight years in which Reagan restored stability to the presidency after a string of five administrations cut short by assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, an energy crisis and runaway inflation. Reagan was among the most popular presidents of the 20th Century, and—as singer Andy Williams once said of Vegas showman Joe E. Lewis—he was “the star, he always got top billing, and he always closed the show.”
But poor timing alone could not explain the Bush roller-coaster—from landslide victory in 1988 to sky-high approval ratings in 1991, only to meet crushing defeat the following year. Bush was uncomfortable with many of the public aspects of the presidency. The demands of self-promotion ran counter to his well-bred Yankee reticence, even as his will to win drove him more than once to embrace eye-gouging political tactics. Bush was that rare hybrid, a self-effacing president. His blazing internal fire was carefully banked beneath a mantle of modesty carved into his character by his forceful mother. “He was always hearing his mother’s admonitions to avoid talking about himself,” wrote biographer Jon Meacham, “which created an ambivalent relationship between himself and the first-person pronoun.”
In his youth, Bush admired the quiet and modestly great first baseman Lou Gehrig over brash Babe Ruth, and even if you didn’t know this fact, you could guess it from the way he carried himself in office. Bush was better at being president than he was at appearing presidential, and while competence is a necessary ingredient in Oval Office success, it is not sufficient. He never embraced the reality that the presidency is a performance art. Does the artist inhabit the role? After the electorate chose to restore him to private life, Bush slipped from the costumes of power like a boy escaping from a scratchy Christmas sweater.
Indeed, Bush in retirement was widely beloved. Though he became, in 2001, only the second president in U.S. history to see his son follow him to the highest office, Bush always seemed as approachable as a warm park bench. He celebrated his birthdays by jumping from airplanes, entertained photographers by flashing silly socks, and cheered up a young cancer patient by shaving his own head to match the boy’s chemotherapy baldness. The same modesty that made him so winsome in private life had made him, in office, somehow smaller than his accomplishments.
And there was another thing, perhaps. Bush was the last of the World War II generation to serve in the Oval Office. As such, he was steeped in the sense of duty and common purpose that John F. Kennedy once expressed with his call to “pay any price, bear any burden” in the cause of liberty around the world. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought the United States to a position without historical precedent. Bush read the moment as a summons to even greater global leadership. He challenged the country and its allies to “seize this opportunity to fulfill the long-held promise of a new world order, where brutality will go unrewarded and aggression will meet collective resistance.
“Only the United States of America has both the moral standing and the means to back it up,” he continued, a moderate Republican channeling the moderate Democrat Kennedy, linked not so much by wealth and privilege as by common sacrifice. “This is the burden of leadership and the strength that has made America the beacon of freedom in a searching world.”
Bush discovered, to his obvious bewilderment in the campaign of 1992, that a younger generation of voters was less interested in bearing burdens. They wanted a “peace dividend” at the end of the Cold War; instead, the U.S. economy sputtered. And Bush had damaged himself with the Republican right wing by accepting a tax increase as part of a 1990 budget deal to rein in the deficit. And so, with some help from Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot—who struck a populist, nationalist chord by complaining about foreign nations taking advantage of America—the Baby Boomer Bill Clinton rang down the curtain on the Greatest Generation. Bush’s share of the popular vote, less than 37.5 percent, remains the smallest for a major party candidate in the past 80 years.
A Connecticut Yankee goes to Texas
George Herbert Walker Bush was born June 12, 1924 in Milton, Mass., the blue-blooded offspring of America’s industrial-age aristocracy. There was banking on one side of the family tree, manufacturing on the other, and a world of country clubs, prep schools, and black tie dinners where the two branches met. As a boy, he went by the name Walker Bush—Walker as in golf’s Walker Cup competition, which his family created, a talisman of the WASP upper crust. And Bush as in Samuel Bush, whose Ohio-based industrial fortunes were closely tied to the Rockefellers. His mother, the irrepressible and athletic Dorothy Walker, was the daughter of St. Louis financier George Herbert Walker, whose genius with money made him indispensable to the Harriman family of railroad glory. E.H. Harriman controlled the Union Pacific and the Illinois Central and a bunch of other lines to boot. His son Averell wanted to start an investment bank with the family’s stupendous wealth. Bert Walker was recruited from Missouri to New York to help him do it.
In time, Bert Walker brought everything together by hiring his daughter’s husband, a tall and athletic veteran of the Great War named Prescott Bush, to work at the Harriman bank. Bristling and competitive, Walker liked the cut of the young man’s jib and the quality of his golf game. Prescott Bush returned the compliment by naming his second son after his father-in-law. The boy was sometimes called “Poppy” because Bert Walker was known in the family as “Pop.” But the greatest influence on the man who would eventually reclaim his given name and live to see “George Bush” written across two presidential library facades was not his grandfather or his dad. It was his mother, who had “10 times more influence” over her son than anyone else, according to former First Lady Barbara Bush. Dorothy Walker Bush was so tough and intense that she once broke her wrist playing tennis, yet finished the match anyway.
Young George grew up in the rarified worlds of Greenwich, Conn., Phillips Academy, and the family’s summer compound at Walker’s Point in Kennebunkport, Maine. Slim, athletic and handsome, he was a popular boy whose teachers worried that he might be too hard on himself. Push himself he did, but Bush was empathetic and forgiving with others. Classmates dubbed him “Have-Half” Bush, because he was always offering to share whatever he had. Though he would learn years later that his father had narrowly skirted financial disaster in the 1930s, George Bush felt insulated from the Great Depression, riding to and from his boarding school in a chauffeured car.
He was in high school as Europe and Asia sank into war. Men from the Harriman bank had front-row seats. Prescott Bush served on the board of the Union Banking Corporation, which was closely tied to German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, an early supporter and financier of the Nazis who became a critic and was eventually sent to a concentration camp. Averell Harriman represented President Roosevelt in Moscow and London. Robert Lovett, another partner in the firm, was right-hand man to the Secretary of War. George Bush learned more than most teenagers about world events simply by listening to his father’s table talk. Still, it was a shock when—on a December Sunday during his senior year of high school—the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor. At 17, Bush had been poised to follow his father (and grandfather, and great-grandfather) to Yale; instead, he finished high school in a rush and immediately entered training as a Navy pilot.
At an age when he might have expected to be dancing with debutantes and pledging a fraternity, Bush found himself in south Texas learning to fly a torpedo plane. In future political campaigns, he would often be introduced as the youngest naval aviator of the war, but eventually Bush learned of another pilot, 11 days younger, who also earned his wings before his 19th birthday. Still, command of a plane and its crew in combat was an awesome responsibility for one so young, even for the conscientious Bush, and required a lot of growing up in a very short time.
On Sept. 2, 1944, during a bombing run over the Pacific island of Chichi Jima about halfway between Guam and Tokyo, Bush’s plane was hit with anti-aircraft fire. After completing his run, Bush ditched his dying plane in the ocean. During a war crimes trial after the Japanese surrender, enemy soldiers who had served on Chichi Jima testified that other American pilots shot down in the raid were captured, tortured, killed—and even eaten. Bush was spared that gruesome end when the crew of an American submarine spotted the dazed lieutenant bobbing in a life raft, the sole survivor from his crew. Though shocked and grieving, he rushed through his rehabilitation and soon returned to combat, eventually completing 58 missions while earning the Distinguished Flying Cross and two Gold Stars.
After the war, a battle-hardened Bush went back to Connecticut. Waiting for him was a dark-haired beauty with knowing eyes and a tart wit named Barbara Pierce, the daughter of a New York magazine-publishing executive. They had met at a party before he enlisted, and her promise to marry him buoyed him through those 58 missions. The ordeal had matured them like time-lapse photography, and Bush returned from the Pacific ready for a marriage that would last 73 years, until her death on April 17 at age 92. Picking up the thread at Yale, he lettered in soccer and captained the baseball team even as he and his wife began building their family. As he later put it, he felt “that after four years of war, we had a lot of catching up to do.” The first of their four sons, George Walker Bush, was born July 6, 1946.
Given his wide circle of friends and family connections, Bush had plenty of opportunities upon graduation, including an invitation to join what was now the elite partnership of Brown Brothers Harriman. But he wanted to prove himself farther from home. Lured by the gushers of money pumping through the oil industry, Bush packed up his debutante wife and squirmy toddler and moved to the windswept expanse of West Texas. The Bushes and Walkers did not believe in lavish trust funds for young people who were perfectly capable of earning their own way. So George and Barbara Bush moved into a tiny duplex in Odessa, and shared a common bathroom with their next-door neighbors, mother and daughter prostitutes. Not that they were entirely on their own: Bush worked initially for Dresser Industries, whose dynamic chief executive, Neil Mallon, was so close to Prescott Bush that the Bush children called him “Uncle Neil.” And when George Bush decided to leave Dresser to make his way as an independent oilman, friends of his father and his grandfathers were willing to invest start-up capital.
