To his credit, President Trump rose to the occasion on the death of George H. W. Bush. Among other things, his immediate response—on Twitter, of course—was a generous and eloquent tribute, mindful not only of the late president’s distinction but of his own obligation to the office he now inhabits. Yet Trump must also have taken some measure of comfort from the obituaries. I was hardly the first or only observer to note that many of the statesmen and journalists who lined up to heap praise on the life and character of George Bush had not, to put it gently, felt quite the same way when he was in office.
To some degree, this is our modern equivalent of Dr. Johnson’s maxim that “in lapidary inscriptions, a man is not upon oath.” But it also reminds us that, death notwithstanding, the passage of time alters perspective. When Harry Truman left office (1953) his approval ratings were among the lowest of any modern president’s; by the time he died (1972) he had become Give ’Em Hell Harry, the personification of integrity and plain speech.
Among the many pages of revisionist acclaim for Bush in the Washington Post, one errant headline stood out: “Is Trump the new McCarthy?” (Answer: Yes.) Well, once upon a time the same question was posed about George Bush—especially when he (slyly and accurately) described his 1988 rival, Michael Dukakis, as a “card-carrying member of the ACLU.” Will posterity prove equally generous to Trump? We’ll see.
In the meantime, I was surprised and gratified in equal measure by the kindly words and generous assessments of Bush the man and president. He was, by any reckoning, a faithful and consequential steward of the presidency and skillful practitioner of the diplomatic arts. I may also confess that, as one who tends to regard the presidency in sociological terms, Bush was a great enthusiasm of mine—much more to my personal taste than his iconic predecessor. This is a grand illusion, of course: Credentials are not all they’re cracked up to be—in 1980 it took me a while to get used to the actor-candidate Ronald Reagan—and the old WASP ascendancy that produced George Bush has long since fallen into disrepair.
Still, the virulence of the media’s contempt for Bush—in 1988 and, especially, in 1992—caught me off-guard at the time since he seemed to embody much of what Americans seek in political leaders. To be sure, in speech, he was not especially fluent or what we might regard as a natural politician. His syntax belied his Phi Beta Kappa key from Yale, and while I found his awkward courtliness endearing, we tend to expect our presidents to be smoothies on stage. Like Dean Acheson or Bush’s great friend James Baker, Bush seemed suited more to appointive than elective office—and indeed had flourished in a number of them.
Yet he also had the requisite instinct for the jugular and, as wartime flyer, Texas oilman, and Senate candidate, even as a pioneering envoy to China, a taste for adventure, risk, and danger. The obituary tributes have tended to emphasize Bush’s kindness, generosity, and good manners, all of which were abundant. But no one in America gets elected president without a fearsome supply of ambition and guile, which he also possessed. Bush was a gentleman in the old-fashioned sense of the term and appreciated the perquisites of a privileged life. But he played to win.
That may explain, perhaps, why an adversarial press was so delighted when Governor Ann Richards of Texas told the 1988 Democratic convention that Bush had been “born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Or why Newsweek thought it plausible to suggest that the youngest American naval aviator in World War II was a “wimp.”
What were they expressing? I suspect it was a combination of resentment and frustration. Bush was a storybook representative of what we might call the old Establishment, and his status as Reagan’s predestined successor annoyed both right and left. Moreover, in 1988, veterans of the Second World War were considerably more numerous than they are now, and all seven of our previous commanders in chief had served in uniform during that war. The Bush presidency delayed a generational shift.
That delayed gratification, in turn, produced a kind of frenzy, the character of which may now seem familiar. George Bush, a longtime patron of the NAACP, was routinely accused of racism, along with contempt for women and “women’s health,” as well as indifference to AIDS. I once sat through a lecture by the distinguished diplomatic historian Stanley Hoffmann, of Harvard, whose thesis was that Bush was “obsessed” with domestic politics at the expense of foreign policy. The New Republic explained that Bush, in his embrace of the radical right, had “destroyed . . . conservatism.” Endorsing Bill Clinton, his successful rival for the presidency in 1992, the Washington Post complained that Bush had “long since squandered whatever claim he had to national leadership. . . . The country’s present weakness is in part a reflection of his own.”
No doubt, some of last week’s retrospective admiration for President Bush reflected a consensus about the present incumbent. Which is understandable: In terms of character, if not politics, Trump and Bush are two different men. But sometimes, in history, comparisons are deceptive and the qualities we value in our presidents may be variable. A quarter-century ago George Bush was replaced in office by a serial philanderer and draft-dodger who was destined to be impeached, and his name was not Donald Trump.
