George H. W. Bush, born on 12 June 1924, was the 41st president of the United States from 1989 to 1993 and Ronald Reagan’s vice president. He died on 30 November 2018, and his son George W. Bush later became the 43rd president.
George Herbert Walker Bush was born on 12 June 1924 in Milton, Massachusetts, the second son of Prescott Bush and Dorothy (née Walker) Bush. His maternal grandfather and namesake, George Herbert Walker, led the Wall Street investment bank W. A. Harriman & Co. and was known as “Pop”, so young Bush was called “Poppy”. The family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1925, and he spent his childhood there, at the family holiday home in Kennebunkport, Maine, and at his grandparents’ plantation in South Carolina.
He attended Greenwich Country Day School and Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he was president of the senior class and captain of the varsity baseball and soccer teams. On his 18th birthday he enlisted in the US Navy Reserve, and flew 58 combat missions in World War II, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross.
He moved to Texas and entered the oil industry, starting the Zapata Corporation and becoming a millionaire by 40. He lost US Senate races in 1964 and 1970 but was elected to the House of Representatives in 1966. From 1971 to 1977 he held ambassadorial, federal and party positions in the Nixon and Ford administrations. He ran for president in 1980 and lost the Republican primaries to Reagan, who then picked him as his running mate, and he won the 1988 election against Democrat Michael Dukakis.
Foreign policy drove his presidency as he navigated the final years of the Cold War and played a key role in the reunification of Germany. He presided over the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War, which ended the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. He negotiated and signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, though it was ratified only after he left office.
Domestically he reversed a 1988 campaign promise by enacting legislation to raise taxes, which he justified as necessary to cut the deficit. In 1990 he signed three bipartisan laws, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Immigration Act and the Clean Air Act Amendments. He appointed David Souter and Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. He lost the 1992 election to Bill Clinton after an economic recession, his reversal on taxes, and a post-Cold War shift away from foreign policy.
After leaving office he was active in humanitarian work, often alongside Clinton. His eldest son, George W. Bush, won the 2000 and 2004 elections, making them the second father-and-son pair to serve as president after John Adams and John Quincy Adams, and his second son, Jeb Bush, unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination in 2016. After a long battle with vascular parkinsonism, he died at his home in Houston in 2018. Historians generally rank him as an above-average president. Because of his family’s wealth he was largely unaffected by the Great Depression in childhood, and he served as the 43rd vice president under Reagan from 1981 to 1989 before winning the presidency himself.
Image: George H. W. Bush speaking at a podium at the Pentagon in 1989 (file photo). Photo: US National Archives / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
