President George H W Bush & Barbara Bush, Houston 1992, Photo: Laura Patterson, rights permission from Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2018648376/

 

It is fitting that the opening of the new film “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” starring Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers is also the one year anniversary of the death of President George H. W. Bush, the political epitome of Mr. Rogers. His son George W. Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mr. Rogers in 2002, the year before his death.

By temperament, Bush, Sr. became the Mr. Rogers of politics: nice; caring; upright. He had come like a breath of fresh air to Texas politics, which was dominated by the old backroom politics of a Democratic Party used to having its way with anything or anyone that they wanted. Three years after marrying Barbara Pierce in Rye, New York, he moved in 1948 to the oil field town of Odessa, Texas, then in 1950 buying a little house about 24 minutes away in a development in Midland, Texas called Easter Egg Row. He started in the grass roots of politics as a precinct captain for the Republican Party. His family remembers this as an idyllic time of family, neighbors, hamburgers made by Barbara and grilled by “Pappy.” After making his fortune in the oil patch, he moved in 1959 to Houston Texas, where he served at a higher level in the GOP.

Texas had so few Republicans then, and the alternatives were the liberal Democrats, whom had little power, and the “Yellow Dog” conservative Democrats. They were called that because in West Texas, the joke was “I will vote for a little yeller dawg if he is a Democrat.” But Texas was changing, getting more educated, less racist, and looking to cross the frontier into a modern society. With his g-whiz enthusiasm, his business practicality, connections to the East Coast, his informality, and humbleness, many people looked at Bush as the new young generation that would remake Texas.

Bush took over in 1963 as the chairman of the Harris County (Houston) Republican Party. The city became one of the centers of the Republican insurgence. Dallas and West Texas were other centers. Bush promoted Republicanism in Texas by running a losing but highly noticed campaign for the United States Senate in 1964. In two years, the time was ripe for a political revolution in Texas.

In 1966, West Texas sent Bob Price to the United States Congress as a Republican and George H. W. Bush became a congressman from a Houston district that had sent Democrats to Washington for eighty years. Younger Republicans learned how to organize and fight hard. The GOP picked up about a third of the congressional seats in the South. Nationally, the party gained 47 House seats, three Senate seats, eight governorships, and 557 state legislative seats. Bush, John Lindsay (assuming the mayoralty of New York City in January 1966), Ronald Reagan in California, and other upstart Republicans were the “Class of 66” that had energy, smarts, and enthusiasm. Hillary Clinton became the chair of the Young Republicans at Wellesley College. Many people thought that Bush was going places, the only question was how far. A presidential run seemed a likely destiny. But the young politician had to show that he could move onto the national stage in a bigger office.

So, in 1968, he launched a bid to become a United States Senator from Texas. I knew him and his family during this time and even grabbed some burgers and beer together. He exuded integrity and a can-do spirit.  I was very young and my friends and I admired Bush’s youthfulness too and his compassion for the poor and downtrodden. His vote for the Fair Housing Act, the last major civil rights bill of the 1960s, was very unpopular back home. He faced a raucous crowd back in Houston. In my small way, I started working with local Blacks to build Black-owned businesses and agitated against Texas political leaders who wouldn’t let Blacks into most political offices. Bush’s later presidential concern for the “thousand points of light” of the army of compassion was not a late add on. I did wonder if such a preppy guy from the East Coast could win a statewide race in Texas. He also seemed a little too liberal for Texas.

In 1970, Bush ran for the Senate expecting to “retire Ralph Yarborough,” a liberal Democrat who inspired a mixture of admiration and disdain in the Democratic Party. But Yarborough lost the Democratic primary to Lloyd Bentsen. The winning candidate was part of the conservative Democratic establishment and knew every political trick in the book. Raising gobs of money, he beat Bush as being “too liberal for Texas.” Perhaps, Bush learned that to be a Mr. Rogers in office one needed to be much tougher in politics. That seemed to be the end of Bush’s climb upward in electoral politics.

But President Richard Nixon, who told me that he always admired Bush, kept the Texan’s political hopes alive by appointing him ambassador to the United Nations. This meant that for a short time Bush was a New Yorker. After several more appointive offices, he ran a spirited campaign for the GOP nomination for president. He was bested by Ronald Reagan in an April 1970 debate in Houston and even lost the Texas primary to the Californian. But Reagan admired Bush’s integrity and circle of savvy political gurus like James Baker.  Reagan took Bush on as his Vice-President, a way to have an energetic side-kick who knew his way around Washington and the world.

Reagan took a very different tack with opponents than does the current President. Reagan had bested Bush in a fierce fight for the presidency, yet he had the strength to win a friendship with a former foe. He brought Bush, a former ambassador to China, liaison to China and a CIA director, to tame the bureaucracy. The new Vice President knew where all the bodies were buried and how to craftily lay the ground to win bureaucratic fights. After President Reagan was shot in March 1971, Bush was in charge of the nation for two weeks or so until the president returned to the White House. Showing a new toughness in politics, Bush later became president himself in 1989.

He said that his first act of office would be to pray, which he did at his inauguration. He closed his remarks by saying, “I do not fear what is ahead. For our problems are large, but our heart is larger. Our challenges are great, but our will is greater. And if our flaws are endless, God’s love is truly boundless.”

He didn’t talk too readily about his religious faith, but often God came out as a steadying force in his life.

In his Thanksgiving Day remarks on 1990, Bush discussed the nation’s faith heritage, saying, “The grand experiment called America is but a recent manifestation of humanity’s timeless yearning to be free. Only in freedom can we achieve humanity’s greatest hope: peace. From the wisdom of Solomon to the wonder of the Sermon on the Mount, from the prophecies of Isaiah to the teachings of Islam, the holy books that are our common heritage speak often of the many blessings bestowed upon mankind, often of the love of liberty, often of the cause of peace.”

 

Bush teamed up with General Colin Powell, who grew up in “Banana Kelly” in the Bronx, to quickly and efficiently win the first Gulf War in 1991.

He told CNN that he knew the United States would go to war against Iraq quickly after Saddam Hussein went into Kuwait, and he had a meeting with Edmond Lee Browning, then the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. During that meeting, Bush described this exchange: “He said, ‘Mr. President, you must not use force. It would be immoral.’ And so I said to him, ‘Ed, I’m afraid I view this differently. I don’t think it’s immoral.’ I said: ‘Here’s what I think is immoral.’ Showed him this Amnesty International report on the brutality to the Iraqi kids. I mean there is this overt, crystal-clear wrong brutality.”

In 1992 Mr. Rogers made a speech at a fundraiser for Bush, Sr.

“I know of a little girl who was drawing with crayons in school,” he said, according to Jeanne Marie Laskas in a recent article for The New York Times. The article continues:

“The teachers asked her about her drawing,” he said. “And the little girl said, ‘Oh, I am making a picture of God.’ The teacher said, ‘But no one knows what God looks like.’ The little girl smiled and answered, ‘They will now.’ ” With that he asked everyone to think of their own images of God, and he began praying. He talked about listening to the cries of despair in America and about turning those cries into rays of hope.

After he lost his bid for re-election, some Houstonians thought that Bush and his wife Barbara would retire to the northeast, leaving Texas behind. A few were surprised that he really wasn’t an East Coast preppy guy at heart when he and his wife said that their home and roots were in Texas. He and former First Lady Barbara Bush marked their 73rd wedding anniversary on January 6, 2018. The Bushes hold the record for the longest-married presidential couple. Barbara died on April 17, 2018. The Mr. Rogers of a generation of elected officials went to Heaven from his home in Houston on Friday night at 10:10 pm. He was 94 years of age and said he was eagerly looking forward to seeing his wife Barbara and Robin, a daughter who died decades ago as a young child. Till the day he passed, Bush, Sr. always looked toward those rays of hope.

 

 

Reverend Russell Levenson, rector of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Houston, on the spiritual life of former President George H.W. Bush.

 

https://youtu.be/I2kTmj7Xdr0

 

From President George H. Bush’s first inaugural address:

“We meet on democracy’s front porch. A good place to talk as neighbors and as friends. For this is a day when our nation is made whole, when our differences, for a moment, are suspended. And my first act as President is a prayer. I ask you to bow your heads.

Heavenly Father, we bow our heads and thank You for Your love. Accept our thanks for the peace that yields this day and the shared faith that makes its continuance likely. Make us strong to do Your work, willing to heed and hear Your will, and write on our hearts these words: “Use power to help people.” For we are given power not to advance our own purposes, nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power, and it is to serve people. Help us remember, Lord. Amen.”

 

Gary Scott Smith, author,  Religion in the Oval Office and Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush. June 20, 2017 —

“While Bush’s faith helped shape many of his policies, it was perhaps most evident in his Thousand Points of Light Initiative. In more than 500 speeches and public statements, Bush urged Americans to increase their personal efforts and financial contributions to aid the less fortunate. Service to others, Bush asserted, advanced Christ’s mission. He beseeched Americans to emulate “the selfless spirit of giving that Jesus embodied.” Bush strove to create a society where serving others became “part of everyone’s everyday thinking.” His Points of Light initiative did help significantly boost volunteerism. Individuals logged millions of hours helping needy individuals during Bush’s four years in office, and almost 25 years after Bush left office, Points of Light “is the world’s largest organization dedicated to volunteer service.'” 

 

New York City responses:

Bush was often in New York for momentous personal and political events.

In 1945, George Bush while still in the Navy, he married Barbara Pierce in Rye, New York on January 6, 1945.  They had six children.

In 1971, Bush was appointed by President Nixon to be Ambassador to the United Nations.

And in 1988, with international policy with the Soviet Union at a critical juncture, then Vice President Bush and President Reagan met with Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev in New York.

 

 

“George Herbert Walker Bush, who died Friday night, at 94, was the last president of the Greatest Generation, a gentleman who came of age in an ever-uglier arena, the embodiment of a postwar era of consensus that, in our time, seems as remote as Agincourt. He deserves our praise, but he also repays closer historical consideration, for his life offers an object lesson in the best that politics, which is inherently imperfect, can be. He’d grown up in a world where politics was a means to serve the public good, not a vehicle for self-aggrandizement or self-enrichment.”

— in The New York Times Jon Meacham, author of Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

 

Franklin Graham posted this on his Facebook page this morning: “Our deepest condolences to the family of George H.W. Bush who passed away late yesterday at the age of 94. President and Mrs. Bush were very close friends of my parents and our family through the years. He represented the presidency when politics in our country was more civil. He was a man of character who served our nation during war and led our nation during peace. He was a man of many accomplishments, but one of the greatest was his family—two sons to serve as governors and one to follow as president of our nation. Our prayers are with the entire Bush family.”

 

 

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