George Bush, 41st President, Dies at 94
George
Bush, the 41st president of the United States and the father of the
43rd, who steered the nation through a tumultuous period in world
affairs but was denied a second term after support for his presidency
collapsed under the weight of an economic downturn and his seeming
inattention to domestic affairs, died on Friday night at his home in
Houston. He was 94.
His death, which was announced by his office, came less than eight months after that of his wife of 73 years, Barbara Bush.
Mr.
Bush had a form of Parkinson’s disease that forced him to use a
wheelchair or motorized scooter in recent years, and he had been in and
out of hospitals during that time as his health declined. In April, a
day after attending Mrs. Bush’s funeral, he was treated for an infection
that had spread to his blood. In 2013, he was in dire enough shape with
bronchitis that former President George W. Bush, his son, solicited ideas for a eulogy.
But he proved resilient each time. In 2013 he told well-wishers, through an aide, to “put the harps back in the closet.”
Mr. Bush, a Republican, was a transitional figure
in the White House, where he served from 1989 to 1993, capping a career
of more than 40 years in public service. A decorated Navy pilot who was
shot down in the Pacific in 1944, he was the last of the World War II
generation to occupy the Oval Office.
Mr.
Bush was a skilled bureaucratic and diplomatic player who, as
president, helped end four decades of Cold War and the threat of nuclear
engagement with a nuanced handling of the collapse of the Soviet Union
and the liberation of Eastern Europe.
Yet
for all his success in the international arena, his presidency faltered
as voters seemed to perceive him as detached from their everyday lives.
In an election that turned on the economy, they repudiated Mr. Bush in 1992
and chose a relatively little-known Democratic governor from Arkansas,
Bill Clinton, a baby boomer, ushering in a generational shift in
American leadership.
If Mr. Bush’s term helped close out one era abroad, it opened another. In January 1991 he assembled a global coalition
to eject Iraqi invaders from Kuwait, sending hundreds of thousands of
troops in a triumphant military campaign that to many Americans helped
purge the ghosts of Vietnam.
But the
victory also brought years of American preoccupation with Iraq, leading
to the decision by George W. Bush in 2003 to topple the Iraqi leader,
Saddam Hussein, in a war that taxed American resources and patience.
The
elder Mr. Bush entered the White House with one of the most impressive
résumés of any president. He had been a two-term congressman from Texas,
ambassador to the United Nations, chairman of the Republican National
Committee, United States envoy to China, director of the Central
Intelligence Agency and vice president, under Ronald Reagan.
And
he achieved what no one had since Martin Van Buren in 1836: winning
election to the presidency while serving as vice president. (Van Buren
did so in the footsteps of Andrew Jackson.)
A
son of wealth and a graduate of Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and
Yale, Mr. Bush was schooled in the good manners and graciousness of New
England privilege and civic responsibility. He liked to frame his public
service as an answer to the call to duty, like the one that had sent
him over the Pacific and into enemy fire as a 20-year-old. (“The cockpit
was full of smoke and I was choking from it,” he told his parents in a
letter from the submarine that had plucked him from the sea.)
He
underscored the theme of duty in accepting his party’s nomination for
the presidency in 1988 in New Orleans. “I am a man who sees life in
terms of missions — missions defined and missions completed,” he told Republican delegates
in the Louisiana Superdome, acknowledging a swell of applause. He said
he would “keep America moving forward” and strive “for a better
America.”
“That is my mission,” he concluded, “and I will complete it.”
Tall,
at 6 feet 2 inches, with an athlete’s graceful gait, Mr. Bush was
genial and gentlemanly, except in the throes of a tough campaign.
(Admonished by his mother against self-promotion, Mr. Bush, an
inveterate note writer, in his clipped diction avoided the first person
singular pronoun.) He represented a “kinder” and “gentler” strain of
Republicanism — the often-quoted words he used in his Inaugural Address
to describe his vision for the nation and the world — that has been all
but buried in a seismic shift to the right in the party.
Generations in Politics
Mr. Bush’s post-presidency brought talk of a political dynasty. The son of a United States senator, Prescott S. Bush,
Mr. Bush saw two of his own sons forge political careers that brought
him a measure of redemption after he was ousted as commander in chief. George W. Bush
became the first son of a president since John Quincy Adams to follow
his father to the White House. (Unlike the father, the son won
re-election.) Another son, Jeb Bush, was twice elected governor of Florida and ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 2016.
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As
the elder Mr. Bush watched troubles envelop the eight-year presidency
of his son, however, what had been a source of pride became a cause of
distress, friends said. The contrast between the two President Bushes —
41 and 43, as they came to call each other — served to burnish the
father’s reputation in later years. As the younger Mr. Bush’s popularity
fell, the elder Mr. Bush’s public standing rose. Many Americans came to
appreciate the restrained, seasoned leadership the 41st president had
displayed; in an opinion poll in 2012, 59 percent expressed approval.
Democrats, including President Barack Obama, praised the father as a way
of rebuking the son.
It was a
subject Mr. Bush avoided discussing in public but one he finally
addressed in conversations with Jon Meacham, his biographer, in a book published in 2015.
Mr. Bush was quoted as saying that his son’s administration had been
harmed by a “hard line” atmosphere that pushed an aggressive and
ultimately self-destructive use of force around the world, and he placed
the blame for that on men who had long been part of his own life and
who became key figures in his son’s orbit — Dick Cheney, his son’s vice
president, and Donald H. Rumsfeld, his son’s secretary of defense, with
whom the elder Mr. Bush had feuded.
“I
do worry about some of the rhetoric that was out there — some of it
his, maybe, and some of it the people around him,” Mr. Bush said in the
Meacham book, “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush.”
He
was particularly critical of Mr. Rumsfeld. “I don’t like what he did,
and I think it hurt the president, having his iron-ass view of
everything,” he said, adding, “Rumsfeld was an arrogant fellow and
self-assured, swagger.”
Mr. Bush and
his sons did not attend the Republican National Convention that
nominated Donald J. Trump as its presidential candidate in 2016, and he
pointedly did not endorse Mr. Trump in his race against Hillary Clinton.
During
the primary, Mr. Trump had repeatedly belittled Jeb Bush as “low
energy.” Mr. Bush, who had entered the contest as the son of a president
with an inside track for the nomination, was forced to withdraw by
February.
After his loss in 1992 to Mr. Clinton, in an election in which the billionaire independent candidate Ross Perot
won almost a fifth of the vote, Mr. and Mrs. Bush repaired to their
home in Houston and to their oceanfront compound in Kennebunkport, Me.
By his own account the loss had left him dispirited and feeling
humiliated. But he did not quite retire.
He celebrated several milestone birthdays, including his 90th, with parachute jumps. He traveled the globe on White House missions, joining Mr. Clinton to raise funds for the victims of the tsunami that ravaged Asia in 2004 and of Hurricane Katrina the next year.
Until
these undertakings, Mr. Bush had made little effort to mask his disdain
for Mr. Clinton, but they forged an unlikely, almost familial, bond,
growing so close that Mrs. Bush described her husband as the father Mr.
Clinton never had.
The two former
presidents became a symbol of bipartisanship in an increasingly partisan
age. If Mr. Bush’s embrace helped scrub Mr. Clinton’s reputation of
some of its tawdrier aspects, Mr. Clinton helped transform Mr. Bush’s
image from that of a vanquished one-term president who had never fully
escaped the shadow of his popular predecessor, Reagan, to one of a
respected elder statesman.
Mr. Bush
was president during a shift in the world order that had begun under
Reagan. His measured response to upheaval in Eastern Europe drew
complaints that he was not seizing the reins of history. But he chose a
collaborative approach, working with the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to allow for the reunification of Germany, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The two leaders signed treaties mandating historic reductions in their countries’ nuclear and chemical weapons.
“George
H. W. Bush was the best one-term president the country has ever had,
and one of the most underrated presidents of all time,” James A. Baker
III, the former secretary of state and Mr. Bush’s closest adviser for
nearly 50 years, said in an interview in 2013. “I think history is going
to treat him very well.”
In his first year at the White House, Mr. Bush sent troops into Panama to oust its strongman, Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega.
The rapid, relatively bloodless conclusion of the Persian Gulf war of
1991 earned him a three-minute standing ovation and shouts of “Bush!
Bush!” when he addressed
a joint session of Congress that March. It also sent his voter approval
ratings soaring to close to 85 percent during the four-day aerial
bombardment of Baghdad, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll. It
was the pinnacle of his presidency, yet it lulled him, not to mention
some potentially formidable Democrats, into assuming his re-election was
certain.
The
rapid, relatively bloodless conclusion of the Persian Gulf war earned
President Bush a standing ovation when he addressed a joint session of
Congress in March 1991.
Iraq
was not an unalloyed victory. Mr. Bush felt compelled to defend his
decision to suspend the assault before it could topple Mr. Hussein, and
his critics questioned his earlier effort to give Mr. Hussein financial
aid and intelligence data. Still, foreign policy successes were the
hallmark of his presidency. Not so his domestic record.
By
the midpoint of his term, leaders of both the Republican and Democratic
Parties complained that in the midst of the worst economy any American
president had faced since the end of World War II, Mr. Bush had no
domestic agenda. Many questioned his sensitivity to the worries of
ordinary Americans. Though stung by the criticism, he did little to
dispel that perception on a visit to an economically reeling New
Hampshire during his re-election campaign, when he announced in January,
“Message: I care.”
His signal domestic decision was almost certainly the 1990 budget deal,
which sought to address deepening deficits by raising taxes on the
wealthy. If it helped put the nation back on solid financial footing, it
nevertheless reversed one of the most explicit campaign pledges ever
uttered by a major-party presidential candidate: “Read my lips. No new taxes.”
That
promise had been delivered to roars of approval in his acceptance
speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans, and
the turnabout provoked a chorus of reproach. Conservative Republicans
revolted. Democrats found an opening for a bruising attack. And the
stage was set for an unexpectedly strong third-party challenge by Mr.
Perot, a fellow Texan who had made his fortune in computers. “It did
destroy me,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Meacham years later as he assessed the
damage he had suffered from breaking his 1988 campaign pledge.
Barely a year after the world had hailed his success in Iraq, Mr. Bush found himself almost losing
the Republican presidential primary in New Hampshire to the
conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan. Mr. Bush won the
nomination but was weakened by the Buchanan challenge and accordingly
veered sharply to the right. He then lost to Mr. Clinton. Mr. Perot’s 19
percent of the popular vote helped deny both Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton a
majority.
A Measured Aristocrat
By
any yardstick, Mr. Bush was an aristocrat, a product of moneyed
Greenwich, Conn., where he was instilled with an enduring sense of
noblesse oblige.
As
a candidate, he was known to ask his Secret Service detail to stop at
traffic lights. He wrote enough thank-you notes, courtesy cards and
letters of sympathy — Mr. Bush seemed to know someone in every town in
America — to fill a book, literally.
That
book’s title was his customary signoff, “All the Best, George Bush.”
Published in 1999, it appeared in lieu of a traditional presidential
memoir, which he thought would be unseemly for a man whose mother, Dorothy W. Bush, had taught him the importance of modesty.
But the patrician image also hurt him politically. He drew barbs for his drawing-room mannerisms and expressions.
When a waitress serving coffee at a New Hampshire truck stop during the
1988 presidential campaign asked him if he would like a refill, he
nodded, saying yes, he’d have another “splash.”
His critics saw him as out of touch
with ordinary Americans, pointing to what they portrayed as his amazed
reaction during a demonstration of a supermarket scanner when he visited
a grocers’ convention while president. (He later insisted that he had
not been surprised.)
In a debate during the 1992 campaign, Mr. Bush became flustered when a woman asked him
how he could respond to the economic distress “of the common people” if
he had “no experience with what’s ailing them.” Mr. Bush gazed uneasily
at his questioner.
“Help me with the question, and I’ll try to answer it,” the president said.
Moments
afterward, he watched as Mr. Clinton strode eagerly across the stage to
engage the woman and, some said, win over much of the electorate.
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Aware
of his boarding-school image, Mr. Bush liked to point to his earthier
chapters: his years in the Texas oil business, his wartime service. He
reminded listeners that he did not wear button-down dress shirts or
striped ties, thank you very much, and that he liked country music,
horseshoes and pork rinds.
His
courteousness was often taken — mistaken might be the better word — for
docility. In 1987, Newsweek put his picture on the cover with the
headline “Fighting the ‘Wimp Factor.’ ” (“The cheapest shot I’ve seen in
my political life,” Mr. Bush fumed in his diary.) But he could be
fiercely competitive in both politics and play. He ran a harsh campaign
to beat Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts in 1988. He did not
simply play golf, he played what the White House physician called
“aerobic golf,” a mad rush from green to green.
Mr.
Bush was given to malapropisms, a trait he may have handed down to his
son George. He tangled his sentences, particularly when he was nervous.
And he supplied a stream of entries into the American political lexicon.
He talked about the “Big Mo”
to describe the momentum that a victory in the Iowa caucuses had given
his campaign. Tough moments were “tension city.” In asking voters not to
pity him, he plucked a line from the musical “Evita,” saying, “Don’t cry for me, Argentina.”
His
speeches were delivered with a nasal voice and his signature clipped
cadence that invited parody. The comedian Dana Carvey made his Bush imitation
a staple of “Saturday Night Live.” (“Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be
prudent.”) Rarely did Mr. Bush display the kind of emotional acuity that
could move an audience. In a debate in 1992, a television camera captured him glancing at his wristwatch, as if he were bored.
Yet
for all these moments, Mr. Bush could exhibit a gracious charm and
authenticity. He was that rare figure in Washington: a man without
enemies — or with very few, at any rate.
“You
don’t see anybody trashing this president,” Mr. Baker said in the 2013
interview. “Whether they agreed with him on certain policy positions or
not, people respected him and liked him.”
Besides
his sons George and Jeb, Mr. Bush is survived by two other sons, Neil
and Marvin; his daughter, Dorothy Bush Koch; a brother, Jonathan; a
sister, Nancy Walker Bush Ellis; 17 grandchildren; and eight
great-grandchildren. Another daughter, Robin, died of leukemia at age 3
in 1953. His older brother, Prescott S. Bush Jr., died in 2010 at 87, and his younger brother, William, died in March at 79.
Mr.
Bush remained physically and mentally robust well into his later years,
pursuing a retirement seemingly as active as his career had been. At
Kennebunkport, when not golfing, he could be found piloting his
speedboat, grinning as it roared atop the waves while often terrifying
passengers who had dared to join him.
The day before he turned 80, in 2004, he gave a eulogy at Reagan’s funeral in California. Back in Texas two days later, he celebrated his birthday
with about 5,000 invited guests, including Mr. Gorbachev, at a gala
dinner in Houston’s baseball stadium. The day after that, as 3,000
people watched from below, Mr. Bush strapped on a parachute and jumped
out of a plane.
Privilege and Ambition
George
Herbert Walker Bush — he was named after his mother’s father, George
Herbert Walker — was born on June 12, 1924, the second of five children,
in Milton, Mass., outside Boston. His family moved to Greenwich soon
after. His father, besides his two terms in the United States Senate,
was a banker who commuted to Wall Street as a managing partner at Brown Brothers Harriman,
the white-shoe investment firm. His mother, the former Dorothy Walker,
was a native of Maine. It was she who gave George his nickname, Poppy,
when he was a toddler.
The children
grew up sheltered from the Depression, tended to by maids and a driver.
George enrolled at Greenwich Country Day School and Phillips Academy in
Andover, Mass. They spent summers in Kennebunkport.
Mr.
Bush’s high school yearbook testifies to his ambitions and energy: He
was president of the senior class, chairman of the student deacons and
captain of both the baseball team and the soccer team.
If
his father set the tone for Mr. Bush’s career, his mother shaped his
values. His daughter, Ms. Koch, wrote in a memoir that he had been
admonished to eschew self-promotion. “ ‘Nobody likes the big I am,
George,’ my grandmother would say to him,” Ms. Koch wrote. “ ‘Don’t be
talking about yourself.’ ”
Mr.
Bush once boasted to his mother that he had scored three goals in a
soccer match. “That’s nice, George,” his mother replied, “but how did
the team do?”
Six months before he
graduated from Phillips Academy, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. “I
could hardly wait to get out of school and enlist,” he wrote years
later.
At 18, a handsome and
strapping young man, Mr. Bush did enlist, as a seaman second class in
the Navy’s flight training program. Soon he was flying combat missions
in the Pacific. In September 1944, on a bombing run from the aircraft
carrier San Jacinto, his plane was hit near the island of Chichi Jima by
antiaircraft guns. He looked out and saw the wings on fire.
“I
headed the plane out to sea and put on the throttle so as we could get
away from the land as much as possible,” he told his parents in a
letter. “I turned the plane up in an attitude so as to take the pressure
off the back hatch so the boys could get out. After that I straightened
up and started to get out myself.”
Two
men on the plane died in the attack. Mr. Bush hit his head bailing out,
he said, but landed safely in the ocean. He floated on a raft for
hours, “violently sick to my stomach,” until a submarine rescued him. He
was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross.
He
returned home on Christmas Eve 1944. Days later, he married a young
woman he had met at a dance three years earlier: Barbara Pierce, the
daughter of Marvin Pierce, the publisher of Redbook and McCall’s
magazines. Discharged from the Navy as a lieutenant junior grade, Mr.
Bush enrolled at Yale, where he was admitted to the exclusive Skull and
Bones club. With the arrival of the couple’s first child, their
apartment in New Haven became the home of two future presidents.
After
graduating from Yale in 1948 with a degree in economics, Mr. Bush took
his red 1947 Studebaker — a graduation present from his parents — and
drove to Odessa, Tex. A wealthy family friend, Henry Neil Mallon, gave
him an entry-level job at his Texas oil company, Dresser Industries, landing him in a state that he barely knew but that would become a part of his political identity.
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But
Mr. Bush grew bored in the job, and in 1951 he and a Texas entrepreneur
formed an oil exploration business. Two years later, with the business
struggling, they merged with another company to form Zapata Petroleum. Zapata had a reputation for never drilling a dry hole, and before long Mr. Bush had made his first million.
Politics on the Horizon
By
1963 he was living in Houston, and his thoughts turned to politics.
There was a contest to lead the Harris County Republican committee, and,
by his account, local Republicans pressed him to jump in to prevent the
far-right John Birch Society from taking over.
Night
after night Mr. Bush drove across the county to make speeches, with
Mrs. Bush typically sitting behind him onstage, crocheting. He won, and
the victory caught the attention of state Republican leaders, who urged
him to challenge Senator Ralph Yarborough, a Democrat seeking a second
term in 1964. Mr. Bush agreed.
It was
not the easiest way to begin a career in elective politics. Mr.
Yarborough had ridden in President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade at the
time of the assassination in Dallas the previous year, and the new
president, Lyndon B. Johnson, a fellow Texan who was heading for a
landslide election victory, supported him.
Mr. Yarborough tried to discredit Mr. Bush by tying him to Barry M. Goldwater,
the conservative Arizona senator and overmatched Republican
presidential candidate. Mr. Bush did not resist the association. He
criticized the Civil Rights Act that was before Congress, denounced the
1963 nuclear test ban treaty and warned of a welfare state. He lost, but
his 43 percent of the vote was hardly embarrassing in a still decidedly
Democratic state.
In February 1966,
Mr. Bush resigned as chairman and chief executive of Zapata to run for
Congress in a wealthy Houston district. Surveying his electorate, he
began moving to the center; he now spoke well of the Johnson agenda,
declaring in a speech, “I generally favor the goals as outlined in the
Great Society.” He told his minister: “I took some of the far-right
positions to get elected. I hope I never do it again. I regret it.”
Mr.
Bush won the House seat handily, with 67 percent of the vote. In
Washington, he was one of 47 Republican freshmen in a
Democratic-controlled Congress. In his telling, his most consequential
vote there was for the open housing bill of 1968, an extension of the
1964 Civil Rights Act, which he had campaigned against. He still had
concerns about the act’s constitutionality, he wrote about his
evolution, but the “problem of discrimination troubled me deeply.”
Mr.
Bush was re-elected without opposition in 1968. The next spring,
President Richard M. Nixon encouraged him to challenge Mr. Yarborough
again for a Senate seat, although it would mean giving up a safe House
seat and a post on the Ways and Means Committee. With Mr. Yarborough
appearing more vulnerable this time, Mr. Bush took the challenge for the
1970 election.
Once again things did not turn out as planned. Representative Lloyd Bentsen
challenged Mr. Yarborough in the Democratic primary and, in an upset,
won. Mr. Bush, suddenly confronting a much tougher opponent, lost by
more than 150,000 votes.
Twice
defeated as a Senate candidate, and with his term in the House about to
expire, Mr. Bush was looking for work. He was shortly summoned to the
White House, where H. R. Haldeman,
Nixon’s chief of staff, talked to him about a White House staff job.
Mr. Bush, however, wanted to be the United States ambassador to the
United Nations. Nixon agreed.
His
nomination drew a tide of criticism — his qualifications, as a former
two-term congressman, were not immediately apparent — but Mr. Bush won
confirmation in February 1971.
Diplomat and Partisan
His United Nations service began with an embittering defeat in a vote
on whether to seat a delegation from China. The United States had
wanted both Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China to be represented,
but the United Nations General Assembly voted to expel Taiwan to make
way for China. Delegates danced in the aisles, delighted to see the
United States humiliated. When Mr. Bush rose to speak, he was hissed.
“Gladiatorial ugliness at its worst,” he later called it.
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In
1972, after the break-ins at the Democratic Party offices at the
Watergate Hotel in Washington, Nixon had a more urgent need for Mr.
Bush: to lead the Republican National Committee. He took the job, he
wrote, certain of Nixon’s innocence in the scandal, and he defended
Nixon, though it was not easy.
Meeting
with editors and reporters of The Washington Post at the newspaper’s
offices, he talked about the pressures he felt even from within his own
party. “I had two stacks of mail,” he said. The first asked, “How come
you’re not doing more to support the president?” The second asked, “How
come you’re keeping the party so close to the president?”
But
as the scandal deepened, his support for Nixon began to erode,
particularly after the Supreme Court ordered the president to turn over
64 tapes, including one that recorded him ordering Mr. Haldeman to block
an F.B.I. inquiry into the break-ins. “This was proof the president had
lied,” Mr. Bush wrote in “All the Best, George Bush.”
“The man is amoral,” he said of Nixon in his diary.
After Nixon resigned, ceding the presidency to Vice President Gerald R. Ford,
Mr. Bush hoped to fill the vice president’s office. Ford called him in
Kennebunkport two weeks later to tell him that he had chosen former Gov.
Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York for the job.
Mr.
Bush went instead to China, as head of the United States Liaison
Office, serving as an unofficial ambassador at a time when the two
countries did not have full diplomatic relations. He would describe the
period as a sabbatical, free of stress and obligations.
Ford
brought him back for another assignment in 1976: to lead the C.I.A.,
which was still reeling from accusations that it had abused its power
under Nixon, including plotting to assassinate foreign leaders and
overturn governments. Mr. Bush was credited with restoring morale at the
agency, but it was another short-lived appointment, lasting just under a
year. Ford lost the election to Jimmy Carter that November, and Mr.
Bush returned to Texas.
There he
turned his sights toward running for president. “I am determined to make
an all-out effort for 1980,” he wrote to Nixon in January 1979.
Mr.
Bush put together a cabinet of advisers — including Mr. Baker, a
Houston lawyer who had managed his 1970 Senate campaign and Ford’s 1976
presidential campaign — and began traveling the country. He focused
first on the Iowa caucuses, borrowing from Jimmy Carter’s strategy in
1976 of using a victory there to jump ahead of the field. He succeeded
in Iowa, but then lost in New Hampshire, and by May the party was
coalescing around Reagan. Mr. Bush met with his advisers. “A consensus
was reached — the campaign had no future,” he wrote in his
autobiography. “There was only one dissenting voice. Mine.”
Mr.
Bush decided on a new goal: to become vice president. But that July he
learned from television that Reagan was seeking to enlist Ford. To ask a
former president to take the No. 2 spot was a surprising move, but
Reagan, a former actor and California governor with hard-right views,
hoped that Ford would bring to the ticket both Washington heft and
political moderation. Their negotiation faltered, however, and Mr. Bush
received the telephone call he had wanted.
“Hello,
George,” Reagan said to Mr. Bush. “This is Ron Reagan. I’d like to go
over to the convention and announce that you’re my choice for vice
president, if that’s all right with you.”
That
November, the Reagan-Bush ticket won in a landslide and Mr. Bush
offered the new president his fealty. “I will never do anything to
embarrass you politically,” he wrote to Reagan.
Mr.
Bush happily accepted his first assignment: leading a task force to
reduce federal regulations. He rarely, if ever, said no to attending the
funeral of a foreign dignitary, and he endured the ribbing that is the
cost of being a vice president. “Let ’em laugh,” Mr. Bush said. “There’s
a lot going on, and it’s substantive, and I like it.”
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The Reagan-Bush team was even more convincing in the 1984 re-election campaign, when the Democratic challenger, former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, chose as his running mate Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro,
the first woman nominated for national office by a major party. She and
Mr. Bush sparred throughout the campaign, and he came in for criticism
when he was overheard after a debate bragging that “we tried to kick a
little ass last night.” But almost as soon as the votes began piling up,
he turned to his own political future.
Bumps Along the Trail
Early
in 1986, wanting to shore up his shaky credentials on the right, Mr.
Bush gave a series of speeches in which he backed constitutional
amendments supporting a balanced budget and school prayer and
restricting abortion. He also tied himself ever more tightly to Reagan
by presenting himself as the rightful heir to his party’s presidential
nomination.
But the risks in that strategy became all too apparent. With the exposure of the Iran-contra affair
— the clandestine scheme to sell arms to Iran in exchange for the
release of Iranian hostages and then to divert the proceeds to
right-wing Nicaraguan rebels — the White House came under investigation,
and Mr. Bush was hounded by questions about what he knew about the
deal. He said he had expressed “certain reservations” about it in White
House meetings, a recollection that at one point Reagan seemed to
challenge.
The arms-for-hostages
storm hurt Mr. Bush and emboldened his Republican opponents. In January
1988, when Mr. Bush faced an unexpectedly tough challenge in Iowa from
Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, an interview with the CBS News anchor Dan
Rather turned into a 10-minute confrontation.
Mr. Rather pressed Mr. Bush about his role in the Iran-contra affair.
“I want to talk about why I want to be president,” Mr. Bush said. “I
don’t think it’s fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran.”
Mr.
Bush came in third in the Iowa caucuses, behind Mr. Dole and the
evangelical preacher Pat Robertson. It was an embarrassment for a vice
president in office and the presumed heir to the nomination. Stung, Mr.
Bush turned his hopes to New Hampshire, where his campaign was being run
by Gov. John H. Sununu.
Mr. Sununu
advised him to counter his image as a man of privilege. Soon the
president was campaigning in a windbreaker, pumping hands at factory
gates and, at one point, leaping from his motorcade to help a driver
stuck in a snowbank.
Mr.
Bush won the New Hampshire primary with 37.8 percent of the vote, and
Mr. Dole ended his dwindling chances that night when he flashed anger in
a television interview.
When the NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw asked Mr. Dole if he had anything
to say to Mr. Bush, he responded by saying, “Stop lying about my
record.”
By the spring, Mr. Bush had
pivoted toward the Democratic field, where Mr. Dukakis had emerged as
the party’s choice. The Bush camp decided to portray Mr. Dukakis as a
Massachusetts liberal, highlighting
his membership in the American Civil Liberties Union and his having
supported a program that provided a weekend furlough to a prisoner, Willie Horton, who had raped a woman while free from jail one weekend.
As
president, George Bush steered the United States through a pivotal,
tumultuous period in world affairs, but he was denied a second term in
1992 as the economy slumped.
When Mr. Bush arrived in New Orleans for the Republican convention, Mr. Dukakis had a 17-point lead in opinion polls.
Mr.
Bush did not get off to the most auspicious start. Even some
Republicans questioned his choice for running mate: Dan Quayle, a young,
boyish-looking, little-known Indiana senator who was just finishing his
first term.
But Mr. Bush was focused on his opponent. He mocked Mr. Dukakis for being a “card-carrying member of the A.C.L.U.” and attacked him
for refusing to sign a Massachusetts bill mandating that teachers lead
students in a daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
Mr.
Bush pulled ahead of Mr. Dukakis in the polls. As Election Day neared,
Mr. Dukakis faded under the pummeling of a campaign that even some
Republicans would characterize as ugly. Lee Atwater, who had directed
the campaign, apologized in 1991 for the tactics he had employed.
The
day before the election, Mr. Bush was confident enough about the
outcome that he decided to name Mr. Baker, his campaign manager in 1970
and 1980, as secretary of state and Mr. Sununu, who had saved his
candidacy in New Hampshire, as chief of staff.
His
victory, on Nov. 8, was convincing: He won 40 states and 54 percent of
the popular vote, to Mr. Dukakis’s 46 percent. The next day, seeking to
distance himself from harsher sides of his campaign, Mr. Bush assured
reporters that they would never again see the candidate some had begun
calling George the Ripper.
The Bush White House
Denied
the presidency earlier and overshadowed by Reagan for eight years, Mr.
Bush was triumphant as he stood at the West Front of the Capitol on Inauguration Day
in January 1989, a throng of well-wishers spread out below. He was 64
years old and eager to move into the office down the hall and around the
corner from the quarters he had occupied as vice president — so eager
that he exclaimed “I” before Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist had
finished asking him if he would solemnly swear to faithfully execute the
office of president.
In his Inaugural Address,
Mr. Bush pledged “to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the
face of the world.” He talked about a “thousand points of light,” a
reference to community and charitable groups, “spread like stars
throughout the nation.” But he soon met obstacles to that lofty ambition
— some political, some economic, some of his own doing and some beyond
his control.
The most immediate
difficulty came from operating in Reagan’s shadow. Mr. Bush had
replaced, and would be judged against, a two-term president who had come
to embody a new era of Republicanism while presiding over what was, at
the time, the longest period of economic growth in history. If things
went wrong for Mr. Bush, he would not be able to blame his predecessor.
And
clearly he did not approve of everything Reagan had done as president.
The heavy budget deficit Reagan had left promised to complicate anything
the new president might want to do.
Mr. Bush also faced a solidly Democratic Congress, a disadvantage he would later blame for his limited legislative record.
And although Mr. Bush had defeated Mr. Dukakis soundly, he was not
feared; Democrats were not inclined to afford him much of a ride.
Mr. Bush’s first test came with his nomination of an old ally, John G. Tower,
as secretary of defense. Mr. Tower, a former senator from Texas, had
served on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Mr. Bush thought the
nomination would, as he wrote, “glide through the Hill for two good
reasons: He was more than qualified for the job, and Congress is usually
kind to its own.
“I could not have been more wrong.”
The problems rose from the right. Paul M. Weyrich, an uncompromising leader of the conservative movement, testified before the committee
that he had seen Mr. Tower inebriated in public and in the company of
women other than his wife. Mr. Weyrich said he had “serious
reservations” about Mr. Tower’s “moral character.” The next day, Senator
Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who was chairman of the committee, asked
Mr. Tower if he had a drinking problem. “I have none, senator,” Mr.
Tower said.
But the nomination was sliding off the tracks,
and Mr. Bush responded with fury, denouncing what he called the
“frenzied air of speculation” about Mr. Tower. He and Mr. Quayle began
lobbying senators personally.
The Senate voted 53 to 47 to reject Mr. Tower’s nomination. It was the first time in 30 years that a president had been denied his choice of a cabinet member.
Mr.
Bush next nominated a popular House member for the defense secretary
job: Mr. Cheney of Wyoming. But the Tower episode had taken a toll. The
41st president had not reached the benchmark first 100 days in office,
yet he felt compelled to declare that his White House was “on track.”
“I
would simply resist the clamor that nothing seems to be bubbling
around, that nothing is happening,” he said. “A lot is happening, not
all of it good, but a lot is happening.”
A World in Turmoil
In
the spring, the Bush presidency turned to foreign affairs, where it
stayed for much of the next two years. In Panama, Mr. Noriega claimed
victory in an election in May that independent observers said had been stained with fraud. Mr. Bush declared the election stolen and called for international pressure to make the Panamanian strongman step aside. It would take almost eight months to accomplish that goal.
The
Soviet bloc was in even greater upheaval. Mr. Gorbachev, who had come
to power in 1985, had begun a campaign for economic and democratic
change, shaking the foundations of communism across Eastern Europe. Mr.
Bush found himself under pressure to respond with equal boldness.
In April 1989, he went to a Polish enclave in Michigan to salute the Polish government
for its political liberalization, including providing for the labor
union Solidarity to regain its legal status. “The winds of change are
shaping a new European destiny,” Mr. Bush said. It was time, he declared
in Texas a few weeks later, to “seek the integration of the Soviet
Union into the community of nations.” And at a NATO meeting in May in
Brussels, where many world leaders wanted to see if he could hold his
own, he presented Mr. Gorbachev with a proposal for conventional arms
cuts.
Still, Mr. Bush was criticized, even by allies, for having responded tentatively and tepidly to developments behind the Iron Curtain.
After the Berlin Wall
came down in November 1989, reporters asked Mr. Bush why he seemed
subdued. “I’m just not an emotional kind of guy,” he replied.
He
bristled at the criticism. “If we mishandle this,” he said, speaking of
the rebellions in Eastern Europe, “and get way out looking like an
American project, you could invite crackdown and invite negative
reaction that could result in bloodshed.”
Mr. Bush had been similarly cautious in June that year, when Chinese troops cracked down on students demonstrating around Tiananmen Square
in Beijing and opened fire, killing hundreds. He announced sanctions
against China but said he did not want to cut off diplomatic relations.
That
fall, Mr. Bush announced that he and Mr. Gorbachev would meet, albeit
with no formal agenda, on vessels off the coast of Malta, in the
Mediterranean. The summit meeting
took place in early December 1989. Rough waters forced the cancellation
of a negotiating session, but when the seas abated, the two leaders met
and vowed to conclude treaties on long-range nuclear weapons and
conventional arms by the end of the next year. They agreed, Mr.
Gorbachev said, that “the characteristics of the Cold War should be
abandoned.”
At
the time, Mr. Bush was frustrated by Mr. Noriega’s resilience. In
October, dissident Panamanian defense forces had been crushed in an
attempted coup that received some, but not enough, American support. Mr.
Noriega appeared before cameras in a taunting show of defiance.
On
Dec. 20, the United States invaded Panama in a swift overnight
operation involving 11,000 troops; 23 Americans died. Mr. Noriega fled,
eventually turning up at the residence of the Vatican’s representative
in Panama City before surrendering to the United States to face
narcotics-trafficking charges. Mr. Atwater, the chairman of the
Republican National Committee at the time, said the capture was a
“political jackpot” for Mr. Bush.
Through
all of this, Mr. Bush, trying to establish a presidential identity
distinct from Reagan’s, was moving away from his predecessor’s policies.
He slowed spending
on the missile defense shield and the Strategic Defense Initiative
(known as Star Wars), and delayed production of the Stealth bomber. He
proposed a tougher Clean Air Act to curb major sources of hazardous air
pollution, including emissions from coal-burning power plants. And he
agreed to send humanitarian aid, but not military aid, to the Nicaraguan
contras, the rebels fighting the leftist Sandinista government.
Mr. Bush also negotiated and signed the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act,
largely fulfilling a 1988 campaign pledge. Nearly 3,000 people, many in
wheelchairs, attended the White House signing. “Let the shameful walls
of exclusion finally come tumbling down,” he said.
Supporters
of the bill called it the most significant piece of civil rights
legislation in two decades. It barred discrimination against people with
handicaps in places of public accommodation, transportation and
employment, and mandated that many new public and private buildings be
made easily accessible to people with disabilities. Similar rules
applied to buses and trains.
Environmental
groups praised Mr. Bush’s record on climate change and the environment.
As president, he signed the United States to the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, which led to the Paris
Agreement on a plan to reduce global emissions. Mr. Bush also created
the U.S. Global Change Research Program, the federal body that produces a
sweeping government climate change report every four years.
Mr.
Bush’s popularity and spirits were soaring when he stepped before
Congress for his first State of the Union address, in January 1990. He
used the speech
to hail what he called the “revolution of ’89,” with “changes so
striking that it marks the beginning of a new era in the world’s
affairs.”
In the spring, Mr. Bush and Mr. Gorbachev concluded a summit meeting in Washington with broad agreements to commit to reduce arsenals of long-range nuclear weapons and to eliminate most of their chemical weapons.
On
the domestic front, Mr. Bush was ready to negotiate a deal on the
growing budget deficit. But in doing so he opened the door to what he
would come to see as the worst mistake of his presidency.
“We
need a deal,” he wrote in his diary. “I’m willing to eat crow, but the
others are going to have to eat crow. I’ll have to yield on ‘Read My
Lips,’ and they’re going to have to yield on some of their rhetoric on
taxes and on entitlements.”
Marlin
Fitzwater, the White House press secretary at the time, said the
administration had “no preconditions” as it entered negotiations with
congressional leaders. But Democrats, seeking to guard against
Republican attacks in elections that fall, said they would not consider
any tax increases unless Mr. Bush publicly endorsed such a step.
The White House issued a statement
by the president on June 26. “It is clear to me,” it said, “that both
the size of the deficit problem and the need for a package that can be
enacted require all of the following.” There was a short list of
actions. One was “tax revenue increases.”
Mr. Bush and congressional Democrats agreed on a budget proposal that included raising taxes on gasoline, cigarettes, liquor and luxury items. The reaction
was scathing. “The president gave away the crown jewel of his campaign
promise to bring the Democrats to the table: That was ‘no new taxes,’ ”
said Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California.
The
House voted down the budget proposal, 254 to 179, in October 1990. It
took several weeks to reach a final deal, which included raising the tax
rate on upper income earners to 31 percent from 28 percent. Mr. Bush
said that he would sign it, but that he was “absolutely going to hold
the line on taxes from now on.”
War in the Gulf
In the early hours of Aug. 2, 1990, Iraqi forces under the command of Saddam Hussein rumbled into Kuwait
and seized its oil fields. “This is radical Saddam Hussein moving,” Mr.
Bush wrote in his diary as he sat in the Oval Office at 6 a.m. In an
address to the nation a few days later, Mr. Bush signaled that the
United States was prepared to respond with force. “This will not stand,”
he said.
Over
the next two weeks, Mr. Bush moved the nation toward war while trying
to reassure leaders like Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain,
who told him, “Don’t go wobbly on me, George.” He sent paratroopers to
Saudi Arabia and ordered warships to the Persian Gulf to enforce United
Nations trade sanctions against Iraq.
From
the start, Mr. Bush was dubious that Mr. Hussein would respond to
diplomacy. But while Mrs. Thatcher was trying to steel him, other
European allies, as well as Mr. Gorbachev and Democrats in Congress,
were pressuring him not to act too aggressively. Mr. Bush pressed his
case, saying publicly that he wanted to avoid a military solution, while
preparing for just that. “Vital issues of principle are at stake,” he declared to Congress on Sept. 11. “Saddam Hussein is literally trying to wipe a country off the face of the earth.”
In November, Mr. Bush nearly doubled the size of the United States presence in the Persian Gulf.
Democrats
in Congress were concerned. “Howling in the Congress was loud,” Gen.
Colin L. Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Mr.
Bush, wrote in his memoir. “Was this George Bush, whom some people
criticized as a ‘wimp,’ trying to prove his manhood by starting a war?
The
United Nations Security Council passed a resolution at the end of
November authorizing the use of force against Iraq if it did not leave
Kuwait by Jan. 15, 1991. It did not. On Jan. 12, the House and Senate,
with bipartisan support, authorized military action
in the Persian Gulf. By then Mr. Bush had built a foundation for it: 28
countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union, were
behind him.
At 3 a.m. in Iraq on Jan.
16, after a midnight deadline had passed without an Iraqi withdrawal,
Mr. Bush ordered airstrikes. Waves of bombers and cruise missiles hit
Baghdad and targets elsewhere in Iraq and in Kuwait.
“Our goal is not the conquest of Iraq, it is the liberation of Kuwait,” Mr. Bush said in a televised address. Mr. Hussein proclaimed that the “mother of all battles has begun.”
The
war began with a spectacular display of United States air power, as
precision missile and bombing runs appeared to be inflicting grave
damage on Baghdad. The White House held out hope that this assault alone
would win the war, without American casualties, but Pentagon officials
realized that a ground invasion was inevitable.
When
it came, the ground war lasted almost exactly 100 hours, with minimal
American casualties. Encircled, the Iraqi Army surrendered. Mr. Bush
called a cease-fire, even though it allowed members of the Republican
Guard, an elite Iraqi unit, to escape, and even though it left Mr.
Hussein in power.
General
Powell advised Mr. Bush to end the fighting. “Mr. President, it’s going
much better than we expected,” he recalled saying, according to his
memoir. “The Iraqi Army is broken. All they’re trying to do now is get
out. We don’t want to be seen as killing for the sake of killing.” Mr.
Bush, by General Powell’s account, responded, “If that’s the case, why
not end it today?”
Mr. Bush would be
called to defend that decision time and again, saying that he had been
convinced that Mr. Hussein would be overthrown once the war ended. “We
underestimated his brutality and cruelty to his own people and the
stranglehold he has on his country,” Mr. Bush wrote in February 1991,
years before Mr. Hussein was actually ousted. “We were disappointed, but
I still do not regret my decision to end the war when we did.”
In the next six months, Mr. Bush balanced urgent demands both abroad and at home. He went to Moscow in July 1991 and signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty,
which slashed the American and Soviet long-range nuclear arsenals by 25
percent to 35 percent. But Mr. Gorbachev was losing his battle to hold
on to power. Less than three weeks later, Mr. Bush’s loyalty was put to
the test when Mr. Gorbachev, his country in economic turmoil, was ousted by hard-liners.
Mr. Bush denounced the coup
as a “misguided and illegitimate effort” and demanded that Mr.
Gorbachev be returned to power. For Mr. Bush, it was an
uncharacteristically risky move, considering what might have happened to
United States-Soviet relations had the generals behind the coup
succeeded.
The takeover did not last the week. But the disintegration of the Soviet Union was nearly complete. Mr. Gorbachev stepped down on Dec. 25.
Picking Clarence Thomas
In Washington, Mr. Bush nominated Judge Clarence Thomas,
a 43-year-old United States appeals court judge for the District of
Columbia Circuit, to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the
retirement of Justice Thurgood Marshall, a champion of civil rights and
the first black person to serve on that bench. Judge Thomas, who is also
black, soon faced questions about his conservative ideology and accusations of sexual harassment by a former aide, Anita F. Hill.
The White House responded by trying to discredit Ms. Hill, and after a pitched battle with Congress, the Senate confirmed Judge Thomas
by a vote of 52 to 48, one of the narrowest margins ever for a Supreme
Court nomination. (It was a far more contentious nomination than Mr.
Bush’s choice of David H. Souter, who had been confirmed by the Senate, 90 to 9, the year before.)
The
1992 election was still more than a year away, but Mr. Bush was
considering his prospects for a second term when he took note of a
governor who sought to run against him. “The stories keep saying I will
be very hard to beat: The more we hear of this, the more worried I
become,” he wrote in his diary. “Bill Clinton, a very nice man, may get
into the race.”
Then came an Election
Day jolt in 1991: Harris Wofford, an obscure Democrat running for the
Senate in Pennsylvania and appealing to the economic concerns of the
middle class, defeated Dick Thornburgh, an attorney general under both
Mr. Bush and Reagan.
The next day,
Mr. Bush canceled a trip to the Far East, wary of giving Democrats
ammunition in portraying him as interested only in foreign policy. He
summoned reporters to say the economy was basically sound.
“You
see, there’s some fairly good fundamentals getting out there,” he said.
“Inflation is down. Interest rates are down. Personal debt is down.
Inventories are down.”
But Americans,
including Republicans, were dubious. One opinion poll found that only
one in four respondents approved of Mr. Bush’s handling of the economy.
Signaling more trouble, Mr. Buchanan, the conservative commentator,
announced that he would challenge Mr. Bush for the Republican
nomination.
Mr. Bush’s 12-day trip to
the Far East opened the last full year of his presidency. The White
House presented the trip, six weeks before the New Hampshire primary, as
an effort to open export markets. Instead it produced what Mr. Bush saw
as one of the most damaging moments of his time in office.
At
a state dinner in Tokyo hosted by Kiichi Miyazawa, the Japanese prime
minister, Mr. Bush turned white, vomited on his host and fainted.
Mr. Miyazawa cradled Mr. Bush’s head as the president crumpled to the
floor, an unsettling image that dominated the news for days.
Mr.
Bush came home to a bleak domestic picture. Unemployment was at 7.1
percent, the highest level in six years. A New York Times/CBS News
opinion poll found that just one-fifth of Americans thought Mr. Bush
cared about their problems. When Mr. Bush visited New Hampshire in
mid-January, his anxiety was evident the moment he stepped off Air Force
One.
“I probably have made mistakes
in assessing the fact that the economy would recover,” he said. “I think
I’ve known, look, this economy is in free fall. I hope I’ve known it.
Maybe I haven’t conveyed it as well as I should have, but I do
understand it.”
Mr. Buchanan drew 37 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, unwelcome news for the beleaguered Mr. Bush.
A Loss and a Rebound
The
president’s advisers promptly sent him to 22 cities in 20 days. He
attacked welfare, big government and trial lawyers, and rued the day he
had agreed to raise taxes, calling his decision to renege on his tax
pledge the biggest mistake of his presidency.
Mr.
Bush stopped his slide by solidly beating Mr. Buchanan in South
Carolina. Clearly relieved, the president said he would cut back his
campaign trips.
But Mr. Buchanan’s
candidacy had highlighted Mr. Bush’s political frailty, forced him to
act as a candidate rather than as a president, and pushed him rightward
as Mr. Clinton seized the center.
There
was little respite for Mr. Bush as he prepared for the nominating
convention in Houston. At that point he had to deal with the prospect of
a populist third-party challenge from Mr. Perot. Mr. Bush shrugged off
the threat at first.
“Perot will be
defined, seen, as a weirdo,” he wrote that spring, referring to Mr.
Perot’s eccentric ways and folksy style. (He was drawn to conspiracy
theories, among other things, and hired private detectives to chase his
suspicions.) But Mr. Perot had captured the public’s imagination. He
presented himself as the symbol of change and did not play by the rules
of traditional politics.
Alarmed
Republicans were blunt. At a fund-raiser in Charlotte, N.C., the
president was visibly uncomfortable watching a video in which Senator
Jesse Helms complained about Mr. Bush’s campaign. “Mr. President,” Mr.
Helms said, “tell them once again, ‘Read my lips,’ but this time with
gusto.”
Mr. Bush fixated on Mr.
Clinton’s political skills. Mr. Clinton was “better at facts-figures,
than I am,” he wrote to an adviser. “I am better at life.”
He
also complained to supporters that he was not getting the credit he
deserved for the fall of communism, the handling of the Persian Gulf war
and the arms control treaties. “I have worked my heart out as president
of the United States,” he said.
Mr.
Clinton was nominated by a confident, united Democratic Party in New
York in July. Republicans went on the attack, portraying him as a man of
character flaws that made him unfit to lead. Mr. Clinton responded with
equal force. “George Bush,” he said, “if you won’t use your power to
help people, step aside. I will.”
Mr.
Clinton’s convention was a success. In a New York Times/CBS News
opinion poll, he had the biggest postconvention bounce in 50 years,
leading Mr. Bush 55 percent to 31 percent.
Republicans
despaired. Under pressure to shake up his White House, Mr. Bush pressed
his old friend Mr. Baker to leave the State Department and return as
White House chief of staff.
Mr. Bush
accepted the nomination to run for a second term with a promise to cut
taxes, a pledge to curb spending, an attack on Mr. Clinton’s credentials
and — once again — an apology for having broken his tax cut pledge.
“Who
do you trust in this election?” he said as Republican delegates in
Houston roared their approval. “The candidate who raised taxes one time
and regrets it, or the other candidate, who raised taxes and fees 128
times and enjoyed it every time?”
The
convention was dominated by angry appeals to the party’s conservative
wing, notably by Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Robertson, who were given
prime-time slots to speak against abortion rights and gay rights. By the
end of the month, a New York Times/CBS News poll showed that Mr.
Clinton still had a resounding lead of 51 percent to 26 percent.
The Final Election
Mr.
Bush remained ostensibly confident. “I can make it; I can out hustle
Clinton; out work him; out jog him; out campaign him; and we’ll win,” he
wrote in his diary. But his campaign was frantic. He jumped from
offering an economic plan one day to attacking Mr. Clinton’s character
the next, referring to Mr. Clinton’s military draft exemptions, his
dabbling with marijuana and his protests against the Vietnam War while a
student.
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Mr.
Bush’s attacks escalated as the weather turned cold. “My dog Millie
knows more about foreign affairs than those two bozos,” he said of Mr.
Clinton and his running mate, Senator Al Gore of Tennessee.
But
on Nov. 3, Mr. Clinton defeated Mr. Bush, 43 percent to 37 percent,
with Mr. Perot drawing almost 19 percent. Mr. Bush believed he would
have won were it not for Mr. Perot, Mr. Baker said. That weekend, a
dispirited Mr. Bush retreated with General Powell to Camp David in
Maryland, where they watched the movie “Enchanted April” and tried to
understand what had just happened.
Mr.
Clinton, Ross Perot and Mr. Bush at their final presidential debate in
October 1992.
“I just never thought they’d elect him,” Mr. Bush told General Powell. “Don’t understand it. But life goes on.”
Mr.
Bush had not expected such an early retirement. He and Mrs. Bush did
not even really have a place to go: Their base in Houston was a hotel
suite, and the Kennebunkport retreat had not been winterized.
But Mr. Bush was not finished with his presidency. At Christmas, he pardoned six Reagan administration officials who had been involved in the arms-for-hostages scandal. One, former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger,
was about to stand trial on charges that he had lied to Congress about
his knowledge of arms sales to Iran. The trial would have opened up
private notes referring to Mr. Bush’s support for the secret arms
shipment.
The special prosecutor in the case, Lawrence E. Walsh,
assailed the pardons. “The Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued
for more than six years, has now been completed,” he said.
Mr. Bush returned to Russia for a final foreign policy triumph. He and President Boris N. Yeltsin
signed a Start II agreement providing for the steepest rollback of
nuclear arms yet. Then, on Jan. 20, 1993, Mr. Bush took one last walk
around the White House grounds.
Mr.
Bush spent the rest of his life more as an observer than as a player,
watching as one son was elected president twice and as another was
elected governor twice before attempting his own run for the presidency.
He joined Mr. Clinton in raising money for disaster relief efforts. His
public profile dropped as criticism of his son’s presidency mounted,
and there were reports that foreign policy advisers to the elder Mr.
Bush had counseled against the war in Iraq that so troubled George W.
Bush’s presidency.
As
Mr. Bush moved into the final years of his life, there were signs that
time had left him behind. A handful of women accused him of
inappropriately touching them as they were having their pictures taken
with him. Mr. Bush’s office said the gestures, he patted them on the
rear, were meant in a good-natured matter, but said: “to anyone he has
offended, President Bush apologizes most sincerely.”
Mr.
Bush was never a man comfortable with self-examination, but in an
interview with Mr. Meacham, his biographer, he evinced some insecurity
about how history might judge him. “I am lost between the glory of
Reagan — monuments everywhere, trumpets, the great hero — and the trials
and tribulations of my sons,” Mr. Bush said.
At another point, he asked of those who would examine his career, “What if they just find an empty deck of cards?”
But
the 41st president may have best summed up his talents and ambitions in
a diary entry on the last day of 1989, as the first year of his
presidency drew to a close.
“I’m certainly not seen as visionary,” Mr. Bush wrote. “But I hope I’m seen as steady and prudent and able.”
Correction:
An
earlier version of this obituary misstated the percentage of the
popular vote that Michael Dukakis won in the 1988 presidential election.
It was 46 percent, not 35 percent.
Peter Baker and Manny Fernandez contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Betty MacDonald fan club - The Stove and I
Betty MacDonald fan club groups
Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Linde Lund
Wolfgang Hampel's Satire ist mein Lieblingstier No 1 in Buecher de TOP list
You can order Wolfgang Hampel 'Satire ist mein Lieblingstier' (Satire is my favourite animal)
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Wolfgang Hampel - Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal )
Informationen über die Kultveranstaltung "Vita Magica" der Akademie für Ältere in Heidelberg
Wolfgang Hampel - Satire ist mein Lieblingstier ( Satire is my favourite animal )
Many ESC fans from all over the world are so very sad because we lost Joy Fleming - one of the best singers ever.
Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel sings 'Try to remember' especially for Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Linde Lund at Vita Magica September
you can join
Betty MacDonald fan club
Betty MacDonald Society
Vita Magica
Eurovision Song Contest Fan Club
on Facebook
Vita Magica Betty MacDonald event with Wolfgang Hampel, Thomas Bödigheimer and Friedrich von Hoheneichen
Vita Magica
Betty MacDonald
Betty MacDonald fan club
Betty MacDonald fan club on Facebook
Betty MacDonald forum
Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( English ) - The Egg and I
Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( Polski)
Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel - LinkFang ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel - Academic ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel - cyclopaedia.net ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel - DBpedia ( English / German )
Wolfgang Hampel - people check ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Memim ( English )
Vashon Island - Wikipedia ( German )
Wolfgang Hampel - Monica Sone - Wikipedia ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Ma and Pa Kettle - Wikipedia ( French )
Wolfgang Hampel - Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle - Wikipedia ( English)
Wolfgang Hampel in Florida State University
Betty MacDonald fan club founder Wolfgang Hampel
Betty MacDonald fan club interviews on CD/DVD
Betty MacDonald fan club items
Betty MacDonald fan club items - comments
Betty MacDonald fan club - The Stove and I
Betty MacDonald fan club groups
Betty MacDonald fan club organizer Linde Lund
