Barbara Bush / The Times 18.4.2018

 Addressing the Republican national convention in Houston, Texas, in 1992 was not a task Barbara Bush would have relished, but it was one that she felt she had to perform.

Her beloved husband, George HW Bush, was struggling badly in his attempt to be re-elected as US president. She was one of his greatest assets, an extremely popular first lady, strong, plain-speaking, gracious, compassionate, devoid of airs and graces and the embodiment of “family values”. She was, as she put it with typical self- deprecation, “everybody’s grand- mother” and a woman who “looks as though I had forgotten to iron my face”. She was the polar opposite of Hillary Clinton, the ambitious young lawyer and feminist who would succeed her at the White House if Bush lost.

The first lady was fiercely protective of her family, and her husband was, in her view, “being trashed by one and all”. And so she spoke. George Bush was “the strongest, the most decent, the most caring, the wisest and healthiest man I know,” she declared before proceeding to extol his record as a US navy pilot, businessman, public servant and father. She then summoned the president, their five children and 12 grandchildren on to the platform for the ultimate family photo.

In the event, not even she could avert her husband’s defeat by Bill Clinton that November. “I felt a lesser man by far had won the election,” she lamented. Yet while she was devastated for Bush, a side of her would not have been so sorry. She would have more time with the man to whom by then she had been married for 47 years. They could return to Texas, where they had brought up their family before he had entered politics. And, as she had confided to her diary at the start of the election, were her husband to lose, “think how good it would be for our children. They could get on with their lives.”

Things did not turn out quite as planned for a woman nicknamed ‘Silver Fox’ by the media because of her snowy white hair (which she declined to dye on the grounds that women who worry about their locks are “boring”). To her family, she was known as ‘the enforcer’ because of her strict discipline and efficiency. It did not go unnoticed that she would have dozens of Christmas presents carefully wrapped and stacked each year by June.

Nine years later Mrs Bush’s eldest son, George W Bush, reached the Oval Office, making her only the second woman to be the wife and mother of US presidents after Abigail Adams in the 18th century. (Mrs Bush was also a distant cousin of Franklin Pierce, the US president between 1853 and 1857.)

The Bushes’ second son, Jeb, the Florida governor, considered running for president in 2016, but she made it clear that she’d had enough. Asked if he should stand, she replied: “He’s by far the best-qualified man, but no, I really don’t. I think it’s a great country. There are lots of great families . . . There are other people out there that are very qualified and we’ve had enough Bushes.” Jeb ran anyway, so the matriarch of America’s most prominent political dynasty dutifully campaigned for him until he withdrew.

Mrs Bush was a committed old-school Republican, an intensely loyal political spouse and, behind that benign exterior, a tough, shrewd operator, but politics was never her be-all and end-all. As she wrote in her memoirs: “Long ago I decided in life that I had to have priorities. I put my children and my husband at the top of my list. That’s a choice I have never regretted.”

She also did much to promote universal literacy and other good causes. Perhaps her proudest achievement, though, was that by the time of her death she had been happily married for 73 years. It was the longest presidential marriage in history.

As she once told students at Wellesley College, an all-female institution: “At the end of your life you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child or a parent.”

Barbara Pierce was born in 1925 in a Salvation Army maternity hospital for unmarried mothers in New York City, where the family obstetrician happened to be working that day. She was brought up in a well-to-do family in Rye, outside the city. Her father, Marvin Pierce, became president of the McCall Corporation, which published popular women’s magazines, and she was sent to Ashley Hall, a genteel girls’ boarding school in Charleston, South Carolina. She described her mother, Pauline, as a humourless, unapproachable woman who was always telling her she was fat.

In 1941, when Barbara was 16, she met George Bush, a blue-blooded student at Phillips Academy, at a Christmas dance in Greenwich, Connecticut. They fell for each other immediately.

He joined the navy straight from school, became one of the youngest pilots and went off to war in the Pacific. There he was shot down by the Japanese, but survived. She went to Smith College in Massachusetts, but dropped out after 18 months. “The truth is I just wasn’t interested. I was just interested in George,” she said. They married in Rye, aged 19 and 20, while he was home on leave in January 1945.

There were six of them. George W became America’s 43rd president. Robin, a daughter, died of leukaemia, aged three. “We awakened night after night in great physical pain; it hurt that much,” Mrs Bush wrote in her memoirs, and it was then that her brown hair began to turn white. Jeb became governor of Florida. Neil became a businessman whose reputation was tarnished by the 1980s savings and loan scandal. Marvin worked in insurance and Dorothy was a charity event organiser.

For the rest of the war Barbara followed her husband’s squadron around America and then, after his discharge, to Yale where he read economics. Once he graduated, they moved to Odessa, Texas, to join the oil boom. She raised their family while he set up his own company, Zapata, in Midland, Texas.

It was a period, she said later, of “diapers, runny noses, earaches, more Little League games than you could believe possible, tonsils and those unscheduled races to the hospital emergency room. Sunday school and church, of hours of urging homework, of short chubby arms around your neck and sticky kisses; and experiencing bumpy moments, not many but a few, of feeling that I’d never be able to have fun again; and coping with the feeling that George Bush, in his excitement of starting a small company and travelling around the world, was having a lot of fun.”

In 1959 the Bushes moved to Houston, which is where her husband, by then a wealthy man, became involved in politics. He was elected chairman of the Harris County Republican Party and ran unsuccessfully for the US Senate, before winning election to the US House of Representatives in 1966. The family moved to Washington DC and stayed there for four years until George Bush lost a second Senate contest and President Nixon sent him to New York as US ambassador to the United Nations.

Two years later the family returned to Washington when Nixon appointed George Bush to head the Republican National Committee at the height of the Watergate scandal, a job his wife had urged him to reject. Having escaped that scandal relatively unscathed, he was sent as the US envoy to China by Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford.

Fourteen months after that, in 1976, the Bushes were back in Washington, when Ford appointed George Bush as director of the CIA. That was a less happy time for Mrs Bush. The children had left home. She could not share in her husband’s work. The rise of the feminist movement made her question her worth. “I was very depressed, lonely and unhappy,” she wrote in her memoirs. “Sometimes the pain was so great I felt the urge to drive into a tree or oncoming car.”

She was not of a generation that sought counselling. After six months the depression lifted, which was fortunate because, three years later, back in Houston during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, her husband decided to seek the Republican presidential nomination.

Mrs Bush campaigned hard for him, but generated some controversy with her belief, unpopular in Republican circles, that abortion should be a matter of personal choice. “In all our years campaigning, abortion was the toughest issue for me,” she wrote. “Everyone, it seemed, tried to make me say how I felt about the issue, hoping to catch me disagreeing with George.”

Bush lost in the Republican primary to Ronald Reagan, but he chose Bush as his running-mate and defeated Carter. Thus, in January 1981 the Bushes moved into the vice-president’s residence in Washington, the US Naval Observatory. They stayed eight years, the longest they had stayed in any house in their 44-year marriage. During that time they visited 65 countries, travelling roughly 1.3 million miles.

Mrs Bush also began to emerge as a forceful personality in her own right. She became a more confident public speaker. Occasionally, however, her tart tongue landed her in trouble. Asked during the 1984 presidential campaign what she thought of Geraldine Ferraro, the first female vice-presidential candidate and a Democrat, she replied: “I can’t say it, but it rhymes with rich.” She swiftly apologised.

As the 1988 campaign approached, Mrs Bush wrote in her diary: “George is obviously the most qualified person for the job. Do I want him to run? Absolutely not!”. He ran anyway and won, meaning that the Bushes took up residence in their 29th home, the White House, in January 1989.

Mrs Bush was a traditional first lady who made a show of eschewing designer dresses, make-up and dyed hair, and was one of the last to have had no career of her own. She nevertheless became a high-profile figure, with jibes about her being George HW’s “mother”, because of her white hair, and running jokes about her in the Naked Gun films.

She disavowed any policy role, insisting: “I don’t fool around with his office, and he doesn’t fool around with my household.” Indeed she was occasionally criticised for failing to speak out on issues such as gun control, on which she was perceived to hold different views from her husband.

She was, however, the president’s strongest supporter and a ferocious defender of his interests. She was said to be a much better judge of character than him, and readier to confront those who she felt were not serving him well. “Look out! The Silver Fox is really mad at you,” he would tell reporters who wrote hostile stories.

Mrs Bush was also a shrewd and tireless promoter of good causes who regularly visited run-down schools, Aids clinics, hospitals and drugs treatment centres. Hearing that an upmarket shopping mall had banned the Salvation Army from soliciting donations one Christmas, she shamed it by visiting another mall with her press entourage and pointedly dropping money into the charity’s collection buckets.

The cause she made her own was combating illiteracy. She adopted it, partly because her son Neil suffered from dyslexia, but also because she believed illiteracy was the root cause of many social problems: “I realised that a more literate America would benefit every single thing I worry about: crime, unemployment, pollution, teenage pregnancy, school drop-outs, women who are trapped into welfare and therefore poverty.”

To raise money she wrote a humorous children’s book, C Fred’s Story, about life as the vice-president’s dog, and later followed it with Millie’s Book in which the Bushes’ springer spaniel describes a day in the White House: it topped The New York Times bestseller list and raised more than $1 million for the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. She also hosted a national radio show called Mrs Bush’s Story Time to encourage families to read.

She played tennis and swam, but her White House years were punctuated by mishaps. She broke her leg while tobogganing at Camp David in Maryland. She was diagnosed with Graves disease, a thyroid condition that can cause, among other things, distended eyes. But, unlike her husband, she left the White House with stellar ratings.

The Bushes settled in a smart district of Houston where Mrs Bush had to learn to drive and cook again after 12 years of being served. “My driving’s better than my cooking”, she quipped. They were never far from the public eye, especially after George W Bush became president and launched the deeply unpopular war in Iraq. Though neither spoke publicly about the conflict, Mrs Bush told an interviewer that one difference between being the wife and the mother of a president was that “it hurts much more if your son’s president. My husband would tell you that too. He’s in agony half the time over it, and when you hear people say things that aren’t true and are unfair it really hurts”.

A throwback to an age of civility and decorum, she decried the escalating polarisation and coarseness of US politics and had no time for Donald Trump, Jeb’s opponent in the 2016 Republican primaries, dismissing him as a misogynist and a hatemonger. She did not know how women could vote for him, she said, and neither she nor her husband attended the Republican convention where he was nominated.

In her final days Mrs Bush opted to forgo further hospital treatment for congestive heart failure and to receive “comfort care” at home with her equally frail husband, who is suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Asked how she would like to be remembered, Mrs Bush had told an interviewer before she fell ill: “I hope people will say, ‘She cared.’”

Barbara Bush, first lady of the United States, was born on June 8, 1925. She died on April 17, 2018, aged 92