I have never heard from anyone who sat across a table from the 41st President of the United States and spoke an ill word about him. Sure, opposing politicians had vehement disagreements but never a harsh word about his commitment. The tributes from both sides of the political aisle are pouring in two days after his death at age 94 on Friday. I searched my mind’s history for the highs and lows of his life and it occurred to me one of the most important public figures in American history was an enigma.
He was a fighter pilot and flew amidst the shrapnel, flak, and smoke in the skies of World War II. He was eventually shot down September 2, 1942, and mourned the deaths of two crew members [William G. White & John Delaney] for the rest of his life. A man who had seen the horrors of war over the skies of the Pacific Theater, had the foresight years later to talk about a thousand points of light, “in a broad and peaceful sky.”
He ran against Ronald Reagan in the Republican Primary and took a brief lead declaring that Reagan’s “trickle-down economics” was ‘voodoo.’ Bush was fully aware that Reaganomics was a folly but later joined the ticket as Reagan’s choice as Vice-President. I would guess Bush the elder’s loyalty to the party drove him past his own moderate economic principles. The enigmatic future President throughout his career would bend but not break. As the nominee for his party in 1988 Bush bent to the will of dirty trickster Lee Atwater, notorious for race-baiting politics, and turned a blind eye to the infamous Willie Horton ads and its’ aim to label Democrat Michael Dukakis as soft on crime. The racial politics were deliberate, odoriferous and effective.
The same George Bush whose political fortunes profited from the Willie Horton scheme went on to name two Black men, one the second black Supreme Court Associate Justice [Clarence Thomas] and the other Colin Powell the first and only black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His son would later make Powell the first black Secretary of State. As a young black man in 1988, I cursed Bush’s name for what he did with the Horton imagery but ate my words for what he did with Powell. Those types of moves are what made George H.W. Bush so hard to pin down, just when you were ready to label him, he would morph into something else. ‘Read my lips…” gave way to common sense. The first Gulf War did not become the ego-driven, nation-building debacle his son committed to in Iraq and Afghanistan.
George H.W. Bush’s life reads like an adventure novel, combat fighter pilot, Congressman, Ambassador, CIA Director, Vice President, and President, yet in October of 1987 Newsweek Magazine ran a cover story about him entitled, Fighting the Wimp Factor. It is always hard to summarize the life of a lifelong political opponent but most of us swallow our differences and praise a life well lived. I listened a few days ago to professor and writer Tom Nichols on the Bob Cesca podcast as to why he left the Republican party. He proffered the idea that Republicans have become the cat that has gone too high in the tree and cannot get down. The nicest thing I can say about former President George H. W. Bush is that unlike others who would wall off the tree and let the kitty starve, Bush the elder would have brought a taller ladder.
George Herbert Walker Bush -June 12, 1924- November 30, 2018