03 December 2018 - Former President George H.W. Bush Dies Aged 94
George H.W. Bush Couldn't Fight His Own Ambition
Charles P. Pierce (Esquire, 02/12/2018)
The very first national political campaign I ever covered was the 1980 Republican primary campaign. I was working for The Boston Phoenix. This made me something of an oddball on the Bush press bus. However, because the Phoenix had a readership demographic to die for, and because the George H.W. Bush campaign was actively pitching itself to what was then called The Youth Vote—Hey, be fair. G.H.W. actually was younger than Ronald Reagan—they treated me with great cordiality. I remember one stop that we made at an insurance company out in Worcester, near where I grew up. He was working the room in his customary charmingly WASP but preternaturally stilted fashion. (I remember thinking he sounded like a prep school rowing coach.) And at one point, a woman came up to him with her baby.
At last, I thought, I actually will see an actual political candidate actually kiss an actual baby. Pinocchio, you’re a real boy now! Then I watched in amazement as Bush took the child, smiled at it, and handed it back to its mother, saying, “I can’t kiss her. I might give her germs.”
The Irreducible Niceness of George H. W. Bush
Thomas Mallon (The New Yorker, 01/12/2018)
“Leave the kid alone,” George Herbert Walker Bush said, when, as a teen-age boy at Andover, he spotted a fellow-student being bullied. As if he were Zorro, performing a casual rescue and then vanishing, Bush left Bruce Gelb, the undersized Jewish kid he’d aided, to ask a witness, “Who was that?” Gelb learned that it was Poppy Bush, “the greatest kid in the school.”
The eulogies for “41,” who died on Friday, will note his underage enlistment in the Navy after Pearl Harbor—how he went from preppy god of the baseball diamond to bomber pilot over the Pacific, with no intermediate step—but the scourge-of-bullies story, told in Jon Meacham’s biography of him, is the essential tale from Bush’s Andover days. It contains the boy who, almost fifty years later, startled the Republican Convention that had just nominated him for President by saying that he wanted a “kinder, gentler nation.” The phrase seemed odd, even candy-assed, to some; it would be mocked, its potential meanings never much pondered. What that night’s audience liked better was “Read my lips,” the signal for a no-new-taxes pledge, a piece of absolutism that didn’t come naturally to a pragmatic moderate. It was those words that, four years later, would do Bush in.
An echo of history as Locomotive 4141 carries George H.W. Bush to his final resting place
Brittney Martin (The Washington Post, 02/12/2018)
When the curtain parted in College Station, Tex., revealing a two-toned blue locomotive standing nearly 16 feet tall and bearing the number 4141 in his honor, former president George H.W. Bush looked around excitedly, his face breaking into a smile.
One word left his lips: Wow.
Thirteen years later, that same Union Pacific locomotive will escort the 41st president to his final resting place in College Station on Thursday afternoon after funeral ceremonies in Washington and Houston.
George W. Bush says he learned from his dad people respect leadership over ‘followership’
Brett Samuels (The Hill, 02/12/2018)
Former President George W. Bush said in an interview scheduled to air Sunday evening that his father, the late former President George H.W. Bush, taught him the importance of standing strong for a policy even in the face of political backlash.
"I learned that policy matters more than politics by watching my dad," George W. Bush told "60 Minutes."
"I learned that sometimes to vote your conscience is not going to be politically acceptable… but if you defend your policy and stand strong for your policy people ultimately respect leadership as opposed to followership," he added. "So I learned a lot from him."