A Thousand Points of Light!
George H.W. Bush lies today in the twilight of his life in a hospital down in Texas! And, as he and the nation confront his eventual mortality, it might be well to remember that, for so much of his life, he has lived in the shadow of others.
It was George H.W. Bush’s hard task to go over to the Nixon White House in August of 1974 and tell the beleaguered president that it was time to resign his office because the last vestiges of political support for him had finally melted away. It was George H.W. Bush who criticized, unsuccessfully, the trickle down economic theory that underpinned the Ronald Wilson Reagan campaign for the White House in 1980, calling it simply “voodoo economics!” It was George H.W. Bush who was the second choice for vice president after the talks to get former president Gerald Ford on the ticket finally collapsed. It was George H.W. Bush who played second fiddle to Reagan for eight years, stating the role of Vive President so succinctly when he said: “They die, we fly!
George Herbert Walker Bush was never one to mince words, and may have been the most taciturn president since Calvin Coolidge!
Jimmy Carter stated of Ronald Reagan that when they met to discuss the transition from one presidency to the next, that the only thing that Carter mentioned that interested Reagan in that whole discussion was when the defense department was brought up. The rest simply bored the man to tears and it showed. This gave George H.W. Bush, as vice president, an opportunity to carve out a place for himself dealing with many parts of the Reagan presidency that Reagan himself just simply did not care to cope with at all.
It was George H.W. Bush who stated when he prepared to take the presidency from Reagan in 1989, that he would be the best prepared person to take the reigns of the office, perhaps in history, because of all of his past experiences in a long and really distinguished life in public service. George H.W., after all, had among other posts, the position as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency on his lengthy resume in his past career.
The first Bush presidency probably hit its height with the first Middle East war back in 1991. Before that event occurred, Bush had stated that he would be available to make the decisions that a president must make in the course of his term. As the Kuwait invasion prepared to unfold, it was Reagan’s old ally--Margaret Thatcher--who told Bush “don’t be wobbly, George!” This was said to the same man who had said at the Republican convention in 1988: Read my lips, No new taxes!, and then, later on in his term, had instituted some new taxes! Reagan got away with new taxes but George H. W. did not! It is perhaps among the foremost of Bush’s legacies to the nation and the Republican party that he was the individual who pegged the party with the no new tax or you lose your office theme. Grover Norquist had been collaring people in public office to sign his no new tax pledge since 1986, but, it never took hold with consequences until the first Bush raised taxes during his presidency and lost it as a partial consequence of doing so.
The freeing of Kuwait was definitely the high point of the first Bush’s presidency. Using all of his past experiences and connections around the world, George H.W. Bush cobbled together a coalition to defeat Saddam Hussein that the post war modern world had never seen before, or since! All throughout his presidency, Bush had been using spare moments to call “sheiks in the desert” simply to ask them how the weather was or what the news was in their area of purview. This combined with all of that flying to funerals during the Reagan presidency gave George H.W. an intimacy with world leaders that few presidencies have ever had. In late 1990 and early 1991, it came in handy when it was needed most. Bush, who seemed to have few policy goals in his presidency, came to realize that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the entire Middle East with his huge army and air force, the fourth largest in the world at that time. So, he cobbled together an excuse that lured the Iraqi dictator into thinking that the world would sit back and watch him add to his empire. It was known as the April Gatsby affair, and, is still cloaked in mystery to this very day.
George H.W. Bush came out of the first middle east conflict with presidential opinion ratings that rivaled those of the founding fathers and his reelection looked so certain that most of the heavy weight democrats passed on running against him in 1992. However, the several term governor of Arkansas--Bill Clinton--noticed that Bush did little with the public opinion mandate that the people had given him after the wars end, so, he mounted a campaign for the presidency. George H.W. Bush was more decisive in some things than people gave him credit for being. He was so decisive that he made eternal enemies across the political spectrum. Among those enemies was Ross Perot who had come to hate Bush with an enduring passion. Perot engineered a third party run for the presidency that was taken seriously for much of the 1992 campaign season. It was, in the final analysis, enough to hand the presidency to Bill Clinton. The presidential debates that year featured a George H.W. Bush looking down at his watch at one point in the proceeding which gave the American people the idea that perhaps he did not want to be their president after all. It was a telling moment in a campaign that had many of them. In an interview held at the White House with CNN’s Larry King, Bush refused to take any questions from the public via phone as was King’s usual practice because Bush did not want to disturb the majesty of the place! Perhaps Bush sometimes wondered if he had belonged there at all since it was rumored that Ronald and Nancy Reagan had never cared much for him and never had him as a guest at the White House. Bush had always been something of a humble and deferring sort. When he ran for president in 1988, he stated that the people might not like him but that they would fall in love with Barbara Bush as first lady. And so they did!
Bush was gracious in defeat and stated that he would give Bill Clinton one year without any public criticism of him just to give his presidency a good start. It would be years later, after Clinton left office, that they would combine to raise money for several charitable causes. And, so, the first Bush existed and lived in the shadows between two far better remembered presidencies--Reagan and Clinton. And after Clinton, he would suffer the helpless feeling of having to watch as his eldest son practically ruined the nation with eight years of devastating and horrible rule. George H.W. Bush never much said what he thought of how his son fought an offensive war in Iraq against a dictator that he had left boxed in a corner and no threat to the world at all in 1991. He mainly supported his eldest offspring through clenched lips. After all, George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara gave all of their children unconditional love. The elder Bush was born a new England patrician but fell in love with the business world and believed that it should come before a career in public service began. But, before that business career could ever commence, a stint at Yale was postponed as George H.W. enlisted in the navy and became the youngest fighter pilot to serve in World War Two in the pacific. His plane was shot down and he watched as his fellow crewmen perished. He often wondered, as so many service veterans did, why he was allowed to live and they to die. George H.W. Bush was the last of a long line of World War Two veterans to serve in the American presidency!
If there is one thing that this writer will remember above all else it is the love and compassion that George H.W. Bush tried to show in his reserved New England way. While the current neoconservative Republicans want to show a hard scrabble type of questionable pseudo love to those who are in need, George H.W. Bush simply spoke of the charity that has always abounded in this very generous nation when he coined the term “a thousand points of light!” One of those lights in dimming down in Texas now and we hope that, in death, the shadows that have always seemed to engulf the first Bush might lift to show the truly amazing and magnificent human being that he really was. George H.W. Bush discussed his fear of death on his eighty eighth birthday. He said that he did not fear death as he once did as a younger man and wondered whom he might meet in the afterlife in Heaven. A few years before that, in discussing the declining fate of the nation that he so loved, the eternal optimist Bush stated that, just perhaps, by the time things became intolerably bad, he and his beloved Barbara might be simply allowed to slip away.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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