George H. W. Bush: The Last Cold War President
On September 2, 1944, a twenty-year-old lieutenant flying a Grumman Avenger off the USS San Jacinto took anti-aircraft fire over Chichijima, finished his bombing run, and bailed out over open water. Both of his crewmen died. He floated alone until the submarine USS Finback surfaced and pulled him aboard. Forty-four years later, the man in that raft was elected president of the United States, and the empire the war had produced dissolved on his watch without a shot fired between the superpowers.
Milton, Andover, and 58 Combat Missions
George Herbert Walker Bush was born on June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Prescott Bush, later a U.S. senator, and Dorothy Walker Bush. He went to Greenwich Country Day School and then Phillips Academy from 1937 to 1942, where he was senior class president and captained baseball and soccer. He enlisted in the Navy as a prospective aviator on his eighteenth birthday and was commissioned an ensign on June 9, 1943, among the youngest pilots in the service. He flew his first combat mission against Wake Island in May 1944 and by his release from active duty in September 1945 had logged 58 combat missions, 1,228 flight hours, and well over a hundred carrier landings. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Navy Air Medal with two gold stars. He married Barbara Pierce on January 6, 1945, three weeks before her twentieth birthday; the marriage lasted seventy-three years.
Yale, Zapata, and Harris County
Bush took an economics degree at Yale in 1948, graduating Phi Beta Kappa while captaining the baseball team and playing first base in the first two College World Series. Then he did the thing that separated him from his class: he moved to west Texas. He co-founded Bush-Overbey Oil Development in 1951 and Zapata Petroleum in 1953, drilling the Permian Basin, and became president of the offshore subsidiary in 1954, moving the operation to Houston in 1959. He sold out for roughly a million dollars in the mid-1960s.
His politics began locally, as Harris County Republican chairman in February 1963. He lost the 1964 Senate race to Ralph Yarborough 56–44, won a Houston House seat in 1966 with 57 percent, and became the first freshman appointed to Ways and Means since 1904. He voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 against the wishes of his district. In 1970 he lost a second Senate race, to Lloyd Bentsen.
The Longest Résumé in Washington
What followed was an unmatched sequence of appointments: Ambassador to the United Nations from 1971, chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1973 through Watergate's collapse, chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing from 1974, and Director of Central Intelligence in 1976–77. No modern president arrived in office having personally run the party, the intelligence service, and two of the most delicate diplomatic posts in the world.
Eight Quiet Years, Then the Prize
In the 1980 primaries he won Iowa 31.5 to 29.4 over Ronald Reagan and coined the phrase that stuck to Reagan's plan for a generation — "voodoo economics" — then lost New Hampshire, withdrew in May, and accepted the vice presidency. He spent eight years being conspicuously loyal. When Reagan was shot on March 30, 1981, Bush refused to land a helicopter on the South Lawn rather than look like a man seizing the building. On July 13, 1985, he became the first vice president to serve as acting president, for roughly eight hours during Reagan's colon surgery. On Iran-Contra he maintained he had been "out of the loop," a claim his biographer Jon Meacham has disputed, writing that Bush knew of the arms-for-hostages trading.
He finished third in Iowa in 1988, won New Hampshire with 39 percent, took sixteen of seventeen Super Tuesday states, promised a nation of "a thousand points of light" and, more fatefully, told the convention: "Read my lips. No new taxes." He beat Michael Dukakis 426–111 in the electoral college with 53.4 percent — the first sitting vice president elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836.
The World Coming Apart
Bush's presidency is chiefly a record of managing collapse. He met Mikhail Gorbachev at Malta in December 1989, backed Helmut Kohl through German reunification in October 1990, signed START I in July 1991 cutting strategic nuclear arsenals by 30 percent, watched the August coup against Gorbachev fail and the Soviet Union dissolve that December, and signed START II with Boris Yeltsin in January 1993. Through all of it he refused to gloat, a restraint that infuriated critics at the time and looks better in retrospect.
He also used force. Operation Just Cause deposed Manuel Noriega in December 1989, at the cost of twenty-three American lives, in the first large-scale U.S. military operation in four decades unrelated to the Cold War. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush assembled a multinational coalition, secured a UN authorization with a January 15, 1991 deadline, won a divided congressional vote, and ran a war that evicted Iraqi forces by February 27 with roughly 300 American dead. His Gallup approval hit 89 percent in March 1991, the highest ever recorded. In 1991 he also convened the Madrid Peace Conference, and with Brian Mulroney negotiated NAFTA, signed in December 1992 after his defeat.
Read My Lips
At home the ledger was better than his reputation: the Americans with Disabilities Act in July 1990, the first major Clean Air Act overhaul since 1977, the Oil Pollution Act after Exxon Valdez, the Ryan White CARE Act, and the Civil Rights Act of 1991. But the deficit had reached $220 billion and unemployment was climbing toward 7.8 percent, and in October 1990 Bush signed a budget deal raising income taxes on top earners — breaking the pledge that had won him the nomination. Newt Gingrich led the revolt; the deal helped produce the surpluses of the late 1990s and destroyed Bush's standing with his own base. Recession, the broken promise, and a post-Cold War electorate uninterested in his strongest subject cost him the 1992 election to Bill Clinton.
Why George Is Called a Genius
Nobody has ever seriously called Bush a genius, and he would have been the first to wave the word away. He was academically able — Phi Beta Kappa in economics — but his gift was social and procedural rather than intellectual: an almost unmatched capacity to accumulate relationships and then spend them. The offices he held before the presidency read as a deliberate education in every institution he would later need, and the Gulf War coalition of 1990–91 was its product, assembled by a man who had personally known many of the leaders he was calling for decades and who wrote thank-you notes obsessively. The same instinct governed the end of the Cold War: he understood that a humiliated Moscow was more dangerous than a face-saving one, and he declined the victory lap that any less disciplined politician would have taken. That is prudence, not brilliance, and prudence has costs. He had no comparable feel for domestic politics, misjudged how long voters would credit a foreign triumph, was slow to acknowledge the recession, and paid for the 1990 budget deal with his party. Historians generally rank him above average — an assessment that says something precise: an exceptionally competent steward of other people's crises, and an indifferent architect of his own agenda.
Legacy
Out of office, Bush raised hundreds of millions for charity, chaired the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center board and the National Constitution Center, and ran tsunami and hurricane relief drives alongside the man who beat him. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2011; an aircraft carrier, CVN 77, bears his name. He died in Houston on November 30, 2018, having seen one son become president and another a governor — the second father-and-son presidency in American history.
Achievements
- United States representative (1967–1971)
- President of the United States (1989–1993)
- Vice President of the United States (1981–1989)
- Director of Central Intelligence (1976–1977)
- Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath
- Order of the White Lion — 1999
- Air Medal
- Philadelphia Liberty Medal
- Educated at Greenwich Country Day School and Phillips Academy
