George H. W. Bush

George Herbert Walker Bush was born on June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts, the second son of Prescott Bush and Dorothy Walker Bush. The family soon moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, where George grew up in comfortable circumstances. His father, an investment banker, later represented Connecticut in the United States Senate from 1952 to 1963, giving the household an early connection to Republican politics ^[1].

Bush attended Greenwich Country Day School and then Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he captained the baseball and soccer teams and served as senior class president. He was at Andover on December 7, 1941, when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Six months later, on his eighteenth birthday, he enlisted in the United States Navy rather than proceed directly to college ^[2].

After completing flight training in June 1943, Bush received his wings and commission while still eighteen, making him one of the youngest naval aviators of the war at that time. He flew the Grumman TBM Avenger torpedo bomber from the carrier USS San Jacinto in the Pacific theater ^[1].

On September 2, 1944, during a bombing run against a Japanese radio installation on the island of Chichi Jima, antiaircraft fire struck Bush's Avenger. He completed the attack, then flew the burning aircraft out to sea and bailed out. His two crewmen died. Bush drifted in a life raft for hours before the submarine USS Finback surfaced and rescued him. For the mission he received the Distinguished Flying Cross ^[2]. He flew 58 combat missions in all before rotating home.

In January 1945 he married Barbara Pierce of Rye, New York, whom he had met at a Christmas dance three years earlier. After the war ended, Bush entered Yale University on an accelerated program, studied economics, captained the baseball team that played in the first two College World Series, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He graduated in 1948 ^[1].

Rather than join his father's Wall Street world, Bush moved his young family to West Texas to work in the oil business. He started as an equipment clerk, learned the industry, and co-founded Zapata Petroleum in 1953 and later Zapata Off-Shore, which drilled in the Gulf of Mexico. By his early forties he was a self-made success in Houston and ready to try politics ^[3].

His first campaign, a 1964 run for the United States Senate from Texas, ended in defeat. Two years later he won a Houston seat in the House of Representatives, becoming the first Republican to represent the district, and served two terms. A second Senate loss in 1970, to Lloyd Bentsen, closed his electoral path in Texas for a time but opened a remarkable string of appointed offices ^[3].

President Richard Nixon named Bush ambassador to the United Nations in 1971, a post he held for two years. In 1973 Nixon asked him to chair the Republican National Committee, a thankless assignment during the unraveling of Watergate. Bush defended the party while urging honesty, and in August 1974 he wrote to Nixon recommending resignation ^[1].

Under President Gerald Ford, Bush headed the United States Liaison Office in Beijing from 1974 to 1975, at a time when the two countries had no formal embassies. He and Barbara famously bicycled through the city, and the posting gave him direct experience with Chinese leaders that he drew on for decades. Ford then brought him home in 1976 to run the Central Intelligence Agency, where he spent a year restoring morale at an agency battered by congressional investigations ^[4].

Bush sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, winning the Iowa caucuses before losing the nomination to Ronald Reagan. Reagan chose him as running mate, and the ticket won two landslide victories. As vice president from 1981 to 1989, Bush chaired task forces on deregulation and drug interdiction, traveled widely, and briefly assumed presidential powers in July 1985 while Reagan underwent surgery, the first formal use of the Twenty-fifth Amendment's temporary transfer provision ^[3].

In 1988 Bush defeated Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, carrying 40 states and becoming the first sitting vice president elected to the presidency since Martin Van Buren in 1836 ^[1]. Anyone asking who was George H. W. Bush usually starts with the events that crowded his single term, because few presidencies have coincided with so much geopolitical change.

The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, ten months into his term. Bush deliberately avoided triumphal rhetoric, judging that public gloating could undermine Mikhail Gorbachev and harden Soviet opposition to change. Working with Secretary of State James Baker, he helped manage German reunification within NATO in 1990, negotiated the START I arms reduction treaty signed in July 1991, and presided over the American response to the Soviet Union's dissolution that December ^[5].

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush assembled a coalition of more than 30 nations, secured United Nations authorization, and won congressional approval for military action. Operation Desert Storm began in January 1991 and expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait in a ground campaign that lasted roughly 100 hours. His public approval rating climbed to about 89 percent in the aftermath, among the highest ever recorded by Gallup for a president ^[6]. He chose not to push on to Baghdad, a decision he defended as consistent with the coalition's mandate.

Any fair list of George H. W. Bush achievements must include domestic legislation. He signed the Americans with Disabilities Act in July 1990, the most sweeping civil rights law for disabled people in American history, along with the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and the Immigration Act of 1990. In December 1992 he signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, which his successor carried through ratification ^[3]. He also sent American forces to Panama in December 1989 to remove Manuel Noriega, and to Somalia in 1992 on a humanitarian mission.

At the 1988 Republican convention Bush had promised, in words written by speechwriter Peggy Noonan, "Read my lips: no new taxes." Facing large deficits and a Democratic Congress, he accepted tax increases in the 1990 budget agreement. Many conservatives never forgave the reversal, and a recession that began in 1990 left voters focused on the economy rather than foreign policy triumphs ^[1]. In the three-way 1992 election, with independent Ross Perot drawing nearly 19 percent of the popular vote, Bill Clinton defeated Bush, who received 37.4 percent ^[3].

His marriage to Barbara lasted 73 years, the longest of any presidential couple, until her death in April 2018. They had six children: George W., Robin, Jeb, Neil, Marvin, and Dorothy. Robin died of leukemia in 1953 at age three, a loss both parents described as the hardest of their lives ^[2]. Two sons reached high office: George W. Bush as governor of Texas and then 43rd president, and Jeb Bush as governor of Florida. The Bushes became only the second father and son to each win the presidency, after John Adams and John Quincy Adams ^[1].

Friends and colleagues consistently described Bush as personally generous, a prolific writer of handwritten notes, and averse to boasting, a trait his mother had drilled into him. He loved horseshoes, fishing, and fast boats off the family compound at Walker's Point in Kennebunkport, Maine ^[2].

After leaving office in January 1993, Bush settled in Houston and largely stayed out of partisan combat. He opened the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum at Texas A&M University in College Station in 1997, and the university established the Bush School of Government and Public Service ^[4].

An unlikely friendship developed with Bill Clinton, the man who defeated him, when the two joined forces in 2005 to raise money for victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami and later Hurricane Katrina. Bush celebrated milestone birthdays with skydives, making tandem parachute jumps at 75, 80, 85, and 90 ^[2]. In 2011 President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In his final years Bush used a wheelchair because of a form of Parkinsonism. He died at his Houston home on November 30, 2018, at age 94, seven months after Barbara. Following a state funeral at Washington National Cathedral, a special train carried his casket to College Station, where he was buried beside Barbara and Robin on the library grounds ^[7].

Historians generally credit Bush with skillful stewardship of the Cold War's endgame. The peaceful reunification of Germany inside NATO, achieved without a shot fired, is often cited as a model of quiet diplomacy, and scholars such as Jon Meacham have argued that his restraint in 1989 through 1991 mattered as much as any dramatic action ^[2]. The Gulf War demonstrated coalition warfare under United Nations authority, though critics have debated the decision to leave Saddam Hussein in power.

At home, the Americans with Disabilities Act reshaped daily life for tens of millions of people, and the 1990 budget deal, so costly to him politically, contributed to the deficit reduction that preceded the surpluses of the late 1990s. Any collection of George H. W. Bush facts also records the limits of his political appeal: he was the last World War II veteran to serve as president and the last president defeated for reelection until 2020 ^[1].

A George H. W. Bush biography ultimately describes a public servant shaped by an older code of duty. Aircraft carriers, schools, and Houston's intercontinental airport carry his name. In presidential rankings compiled by scholars, he typically places in or near the top third, with his foreign policy judgment weighing heavily in his favor ^[5].