George H.W.Bush / The Times 1.12.2018

In the spring of 1991 President George HW Bush enjoyed approval ratings of about 90 per cent — the highest recorded for an occupant of the Oval Office.

In the immediate aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait the previous summer Margaret Thatcher felt compelled to warn Bush: “This is no time to go wobbly, George.” However, he had risen to the challenge, assembling the largest international military coalition since the Second World War to reverse the invasion. After five weeks of intense bombing, Iraq’s formidable army was routed in a ground offensive lasting scarcely 100 hours. US and coalition casualties were minimal.

The ghost of Vietnam was laid to rest. The US was indisputably the world’s sole superpower, the Berlin Wall having fallen 15 months earlier. Bush even spoke of creating a “new world order” after four decades of Cold War — “a world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle . . . where the strong respect the rights of the weak”. His re-election the next year appeared such a formality that no leading Democrat was willing to stand against him.

In the event Bush’s approval ratings fell faster than those of any previous president. He took decisive action against Iraq, but failed to combat a painful recession at home. He responded resolutely to Saddam’s aggression, but lacked any inspiring strategy when it came to domestic affairs — indeed he mocked what he called “the vision thing”. He was seen as elitist and out of touch by an electorate fed up with Washington and hankering for change. Bush lost the 1992 election to Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas who spent much of the campaign fending off allegations of womanising and draft evasion.

Yet Bush will be remembered fondly. The last president of the Second World War generation, his personal integrity and political restraint were appreciated all the more when Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes tarnished the Oval Office and Bush’s son, George W, ordered a reckless invasion of Iraq with none of his father’s patient preparation. He was the president who would not eat broccoli, who mangled his syntax (“We’re enjoying sluggish times, and not enjoying them very much”), who loved to play horseshoes or golf or ride his cigarette boat at his Kennebunkport estate on the coast of Maine.

However, Bush was in effect a caretaker, sandwiched between two transformative two-term presidents — Ronald Reagan and Clinton. He served as Reagan’s vice-president for eight years, but inherited little of his aura. The Soviet Union collapsed on his watch, but the process had begun well before he took office. The Gulf war apart, the 41st president of the United States is likely to be remembered by future generations primarily as the father of the deeply controversial 43rd.

Bush’s term of office was, in the words of one book, a “status quo presidency”. Too often his views were determined by political expediency, not least on the litmus test issue of abortion. He moved from firmly pro-choice to staunchly pro-life as the religious right steadily gained strength. Another administration insider wrote: “Nobody, including the president, knew what Bush believed.”

George Herbert Walker Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts, in 1924, the scion of an affluent, patrician east coast family with a history of public service and a strong sense of noblesse oblige. His grandfather, George Herbert Walker, was a wealthy businessman and banker who became president of the US Golf Association and gave his name to the Walker Cup. His father, Prescott Bush, was a Republican senator from Connecticut. A political rival once quipped that Bush was born with a silver spoon so far down his throat “that you couldn’t get it out with a crowbar”.

Bush attended the exclusive Phillips Academy in Massachusetts. He won a place at his father’s alma mater, the Ivy League university of Yale, but the Second World War intervened, so Bush signed up instead. At 18 he became the US navy’s youngest pilot and was sent to the Pacific. A year later his aircraft was hit during an attack on Japanese installations on the Bonin Islands. He managed to deliver his bombs before baling out and spent four hours on an inflatable raft until he was rescued. He was later awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his wartime service.

Weeks after returning from the Pacific in 1945 the 21-year-old Bush married Barbara Pierce, a publisher’s daughter from Rye, New York, whom he had met at a Christmas dance in Connecticut when he was 16. They had become engaged just before he went off to fight, and he named three of his aircraft Barbara I, Barbara II and Barbara III.

They went on to have six children: George W, the future president; Pauline, who died in childhood of leukaemia; “Jeb”, who became the governor of Florida and unsuccessfully sought the US presidency; Neil, a businessman and investor; Marvin, also a businessman; and Dorothy, an author and philanthropist. Nicknamed “Silver Fox” for her thick white hair, Barbara Bush (obituary, April 18, 2018) was a strong, warm and traditional first lady who embraced literacy as her cause, partly because Neil was dyslexic.

At Yale, Bush resumed his gilded progress, captaining the university baseball team, joining the secret Skull and Bones society like his father before him, and graduating with distinction in economics.

Instead of following the family tradition by joining Wall Street, he moved his wife and young children to Texas and learnt the oil business as a sales clerk. Soon he founded his own small oil company, Zapata, which he built up during the 1950s and early 1960s until he became independently wealthy and started engaging in politics.

He became chairman of the Republican party in Harris county, Houston. Having failed to dislodge one of Texas’s Democratic senators in 1964 he won a seat in the US House of Representatives in 1966. He was re-elected two years later and caught the eye of President Nixon, who persuaded him to run for the senate a second time in 1970. He lost that race also, to the Democrat Lloyd Bentsen.

By way of recompense Nixon appointed Bush US ambassador to the United Nations, the first of a string of high-level jobs that he held over the next 12 years. One observer noted, unkindly but not entirely unfairly, that he “never failed in any job, but he has never left a mark on one either”.

After two years at the UN Nixon made him chairman of the Republican National Committee, a hot seat that he held during the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation. Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, briefly considered making Bush his vice-president. Instead he sent him to Beijing as head of the US liaison office, then 14 months later he brought Bush back to Washington to be director of the CIA, a job he held for exactly a year before Jimmy Carter became president.

Bush spent the Carter years preparing to run for president in 1980. On paper he was perfectly qualified for the job, with an enviable track record in business, electoral politics and senior administrative posts. He presented himself as the sensible, moderate candidate to distinguish him from Reagan, his principal rival, and denigrated Reagan’s supply-side “voodoo economics”. He won the first contest for the Republican nomination, the Iowa caucuses, but lost most of the subsequent primaries as voters responded to Reagan’s warm, simple populism. By contrast, Bush came across as stiff and upper class. Relations between the two men were inevitably strained, but Reagan nonetheless picked Bush as his running mate because his breadth of experience and Texan base were electorally valuable. Reagan then beat Carter comfortably in the general election.

Bush spent the next eight years loyally serving as Reagan’s deputy, uttering not a critical word of a president far more conservative than himself. When Reagan was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in 1981, Bush returned immediately to Washington from Fort Worth but refused to take a helicopter to the White House because, he said: “Only the president lands on the south lawn.” The vice-presidency “lends itself to loyally supporting the president of the United States, giving him your best judgment and then, when the president makes a decision, supporting it,” he said much later. However, Bush ducked any blame for the 1986 Iran-contra scandal, claiming not to have known that the proceeds of secret arms sales to Iran had been illegally diverted to Nicaragua’s right-wing “Contra” rebels.

Bush’s reward was to enter the battle for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination as the frontrunner, but he was a poor campaigner. He struggled with the perception that he was a “wimp”. It was said that he “reminded every American woman of her first husband”. He came third in the Iowa caucuses behind Senator Bob Dole and Pat Robertson, the Christian televangelist. He fought back to win the New Hampshire primary by portraying Dole as a tax raiser, prompting Dole’s angry rebuke: “Stop lying about my record.”

Thereafter Bush’s superior electoral machine secured him the nomination, and at the Republican convention in New Orleans he subtly distanced himself from Reagan by promising a “kinder, gentler America”. Typically, however, Bush also pandered to the right by offering one unequivocal pledge that would return to haunt his presidency: “Read my lips — no new taxes!” More than any other issue, lower taxation was at the heart of the conservative philosophy of smaller, less intrusive government. In another move that returned to haunt him he chose a young, little-known conservative senator from Indiana called Dan Quayle as his running mate.

Bush did not campaign kindly or gently. He shed his natural decency on the hustings and his team savaged Michael Dukakis, his Democratic opponent, in a contest that became a byword for negative campaigning. They questioned Dukakis’s patriotism and played the race card by invoking the case of Willie Horton, a black convicted murderer who had raped a white woman while on weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison during Dukakis’s governorship of that state. Lee Atwater, Bush’s campaign strategist, later apologised to Dukakis for the campaign’s “naked cruelty”.

Bush won the presidency, but seemed uncertain what to do with it. He brought in his own people, notably James Baker, his fellow Texan, as secretary of state to signal a break with the Reagan era, but there was no new overarching strategy. He was caught between his own instinctive pragmatism and the ideological demands of Reaganite conservatives. His room for manoeuvre was restricted by the huge budget deficit he inherited after eight years of tax-cutting Reaganomics. Moreover he had, as one critic wrote, “always been less interested in doing anything specific as president than in just being president . . . He wanted the job, as he once said, because he was taken with ‘the honour of it all’. ”

Foreign policy was Bush’s strong suit and he generally handled that well. He refused to gloat when the Soviet Union collapsed, making Mikhail Gorbachev’s task much easier. He ordered a successful invasion of Panama to depose Manuel Noriega, the drug-trafficking dictator, in 1989. He and Gorbachev signed the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, cutting the US and Soviet strategic nuclear weapons arsenals by about 35 per cent, and he laid the groundwork for the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico that Clinton eventually signed into law in 1993.

Bush’s greatest achievement was the ejection of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, but his decision to leave Saddam in power was controversial, especially when the Iraqi dictator brutally suppressed uprisings by his country’s oppressed Kurds and Shias. Bush explained that the US would have owned Iraq had it toppled Saddam — as his son learnt to his cost after the US invasion 12 years later.

At home Bush faced a hostile, Democrat-controlled Congress and his sure touch deserted him. He took some bold decisions, and others that were craven. He angered the right by signing — having earlier vetoed — a Civil Rights Act extending protection against job discrimination, and by temporarily banning the import of certain semi-automatic weapons. He encouraged volunteerism with his “Points of Light” programme. He approved clean air legislation and a landmark bill to improve the lot of the disabled.

Yet to placate conservatives he also nominated the ill-qualified Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court — and then challenged the Democrats to reject his black nominee. An ugly confirmation battle ensued, during which Thomas was accused of sexual harassment and complained that he was being lynched.

Bush’s biggest battle with Congress was over the 1990-91 budget. Congressional Democrats demanded tax rises for the wealthy to reduce the deficit. Republicans demanded deep spending cuts. Stalemate ensued and at one point that autumn Bush took the dramatic step of halting non-essential federal spending, meaning that visitors to Washington found all its national monuments closed. He then capitulated, breaking his solemn “read my lips” pledge to the Republican convention two years earlier. Many Republicans felt angry and betrayed.

At the end of the year Time magazine named “the two George Bushes” as its Men of the Year — the foreign policy president who was a “study in resoluteness and mastery” and the one whose domestic policy was “just as strongly marked by confusion”.

Bush’s record approval ratings after the Gulf war proved to be a mirage and a succession of events, big and small, soon sent those ratings tumbling.

The recession deepened and unemployment rose. John Sununu, Bush’s chief of staff, resigned for using government aircraft for private trips. Bush vomited into the Japanese prime minister’s lap during a banquet in Tokyo. The US was compelled to impose no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq to protect Kurds and Shias from Saddam’s attacks, re-enforcing the impression that Bush had ended the war prematurely.

Leading Democrats chose not to oppose Bush in the 1992 presidential election, but the conservative columnist and commentator Pat Buchanan challenged him for the Republican nomination and used his rapier wit to mock “King George and his hollow army”. Bush was slow and reluctant to join the fray, and when he finally began campaigning in recession-hit New Hampshire he proved inept. He promised but failed to deliver a credible economic recovery package. At one point he appeared to be reading from a cue card as he declared: “Message — I care.”

Bush narrowly survived a humiliating defeat in the New Hampshire primary and eventually saw off Buchanan’s challenge, but he was seriously weakened. Worse followed when Ross Perot, the maverick Texan billionaire, joined the race as an independent, whipping up antagonism towards the Washington establishment. Meanwhile, Clinton proved to be a vastly superior campaigner with his focus on the economy and promise of change.

Bush’s apparent unfamiliarity with a supermarket checkout scanner reinforced the idea that he had lost touch with ordinary people. The Republican convention in Houston was hijacked by social conservatives and the religious right and its harsh, homophobic, stridently pro-life tone dismayed many mainstream voters. Quayle was a drag on the ticket, famously misspelling “potato” during a visit to a school.

Above all, America yearned for change after 12 years of Republican presidents and in November 1992 Clinton was elected with 43 per cent of the vote to Bush’s 38 and Perot’s 19. Bush’s parting shot was to send 28,000 US troops to provide humanitarian assistance in war-torn Somalia — a mission that Clinton inherited and that culminated in the shooting down of two US Black Hawk helicopters in Mogadishu.

Bush retired to Houston where, in 1999, he and his wife became the longest-married presidential couple in US history. He visited Kuwait in 1993 to commemorate that country’s liberation and was targeted by an Iraqi assassination plot. That year he was awarded an honorary knighthood by the Queen. He appeared at state funerals for Nixon and Reagan, and developed an improbable friendship with Clinton.

In late 1992 it had seemed unlikely that another Bush would ever occupy the White House, but in 2000 his eldest son, George, defeated Vice-President Al Gore to become only the second US president to follow his father into the Oval Office (the first being John Quincy Adams, 1825-29, son of John Adams, 1797-1801). The younger Bush did not heed his father’s example. He invaded Iraq with scant international support, removed Saddam without planning for the aftermath and plunged Iraq into many years of bloody chaos. What the elder Bush thought of his son’s adventurism he never said, but senior members of his former administration did not hide their dismay.

Towards the end of his life a form of Parkinson’s disease forced Bush to use a wheelchair. He managed to make an assisted parachute jump in June 2014, at the age 90. It was from a helicopter near his home in Kennebunkport, Maine, and the jump marked the eighth time the former president had skydived, including on his 80th and 85th birthdays.

In 2016, with typical composure, he led a group of 40 wounded warriors on a fishing trip at the helm of his speedboat, three days after his 92nd birthday celebration, but the next year faced allegations that he had sexually harassed an actress at a publicity event in 2013 by touching her from behind as they posed for a photograph and telling a rude joke. He issued a public apology.

Bush’s second son, Jeb, tried and failed to become the third Bush to serve as president. The former governor of Florida was outdone by Donald Trump, whose jibe that Jeb was “low energy” proved fatal.

Bush Sr did not hold a grudge and later wrote to the president-elect expressing his regrets that he could not attend the inauguration, adding that he and the former first lady “will be with you and the country in spirit”. He ended his letter with a quip: “My doctor says if I sit outside in January, it likely will put me six feet under.”

George HW Bush, 41st president of the United States, was born on June 12, 1924. He died on November 30, 2018, aged 94