George H.W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States and the father
of the 43rd, was a steadfast force on the international stage for
decades, from his stint as an envoy to Beijing to his eight years as
vice president and his one term as commander in chief from 1989 to 1993.
The last veteran of World War II to serve as president, he was a
consummate public servant and a statesman who helped guide the nation
and the world out of a four-decade Cold War that had carried the threat
of nuclear annihilation.
His death, at 94 on Nov. 30, also marked the passing of an era.
Although
Mr. Bush served as president three decades ago, his values and ethic
seem centuries removed from today’s acrid political culture. His
currency of personal connection was the handwritten letter — not the
social media blast.
Mr. Bush came to the Oval Office under the towering, sharply defined
shadow of Ronald Reagan, a onetime rival for whom he had served as vice
president.
No president before had arrived with his breadth of
experience: decorated Navy pilot, successful oil executive, congressman,
United Nations delegate, Republican Party chairman, envoy to Beijing,
director of Central Intelligence.
Over the course of a single term
that began on Jan. 20, 1989, Mr. Bush found himself at the helm of the
world’s only remaining superpower. The Berlin Wall fell; the Soviet
Union ceased to exist; the communist bloc in Eastern Europe broke up;
the Cold War ended.
His firm, restrained diplomatic sense helped
assure the harmony and peace with which these world-shaking events
played out, one after the other.
In 1990, Mr. Bush went so far as to proclaim a “new world order”
that would be “free from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit
of justice and more secure in the quest for peace — a world in which
nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A
world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.”
Mr. Bush’s presidency was not all plowshares. He ordered an attack on Panama in 1989 to overthrow strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega.
After Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of
1990, Mr. Bush put together a 30-nation coalition — backed by a U.N.
mandate and including the Soviet Union and several Arab countries — that
routed the Iraqi forces with unexpected ease in a ground war that
lasted only 100 hours.
However, Mr. Bush decided to leave Hussein
in power, setting up the worst and most fateful decision of his son’s
presidency a dozen years later.
In the wake of that 1991 victory,
Mr. Bush’s approval at home approached 90 percent. It seemed the country
had finally achieved the catharsis it needed after Vietnam. A
year-and-a-half later, only 29 percent of those polled gave Mr. Bush a
favorable rating, and just 16 percent thought the country was headed in
the right direction.
The conservative wing of his party would not forgive him for breaking an ill-advised and cocky pledge: “Read my lips: No new taxes.”
What cost him among voters at large, however, was his inability to
express a connection to and engagement with the struggles of ordinary
Americans or a strategy for turning the economy around.
That he
was perceived as lacking in grit was another irony in the life of Mr.
Bush. His was a character that had been forged by trial. He was an
exemplary story of a generation whose youth was cut short by the Great
Depression and World War II.
...
In the years after the White House, Mr. Bush wrote his memoirs and
divided his time between Houston and the family compound in
Kennebunkport, Maine, where he was a vestryman of St. Ann’s Episcopal
Church. He chose College Station, the home of Texas A&M University,
as the site of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum.
After the earthquake and tsunami that devastated African and Asian
nations in 2005, Mr. Bush collaborated with Bill Clinton, his former
adversary, to lead private relief efforts that raised nearly $2 billion
in the United States.
So close did the unlikely friendship of the
41st and 42nd presidents become, that the 43rd joked: “My mother calls
him my fourth brother.”
In 1997, Mr. Bush made a parachute jump
for the first time since bailing out over the Pacific. He did it again
in 2000 to mark his 75th birthday — and still again for his 80th, 85th
and 90th ones.
“Old guys can do neat things,” he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment