George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president of the United States, has died. He was 94. Bush's health had been declining for some time. In the past 13 years, the lifelong Republican increasingly used a wheelchair to get around because "vascular Parkinsonism" affected his ability to walk.
In his single term as president (1989-1993), he invaded Panama, saw the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, signed a major nuclear disarmament treaty with the Kremlin, presided over the first war against Iraq's Saddam Hussein and famously broke his pledge to "Read my lips: no new taxes," a move which contributed to his defeat for re-election in a three-way race against Democrat Bill Clinton and independent Ross Perot.
A month before he left office, in December 1992, Bush pardoned six members of the Reagan administration for their involvement in the Iran-contra scandal, including former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. Deeply unpopular with Americans, that move was widely seen not only as letting top officials off the hook for criminality, but protecting himself. The New York Times reported at the time:
"[The] case was expected to focus on Mr. Weinberger's private notes that contain references to Mr. Bush's endorsement of the secret shipments to Iran." The Times also reported: "[N]ot since President Gerald R. Ford granted clemency to former President Richard M. Nixon for possible crimes in Watergate has a Presidential pardon so pointedly raised the issue of whether the President was trying to shield officials for political purposes."
A grandson of industrialist Samuel Bush and son of Connecticut Sen. Prescott Bush and Dorothy Bush (née Walker), Bush attended the posh, all-male Phillips Andover Academy during his high school years, joined the U.S. Navy after his graduation in June 1942 and, just days after his 19th birthday in 1943, became the youngest-ever Navy aviator up to that time. He flew 58 combat missions in the Pacific from the carrier USS San Jacinto. He was the only survivor of his three-man crew when flak brought down the plane he was piloting during an attack on the Japanese-held island of ChiChi Jima. During his tour of duty, he received numerous air medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross.
President Barack Obama stands alongside former presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter as they attend the dedication ceremony for the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, April 25, 2013.
Upon his return to the States, he married Barbara Pierce—with whom he would have six children, five of whom are still living—enrolled at Yale where he majored in economics, graduated in 1948, moved to Texas, co-founded his own oil-drilling business in 1951, the Bush-Overby Oil Development, whose board included his father. In 1953, Bush, together with other principals and a former CIA officer, Thomas J. Devine, created Zapata Oil with a million-dollar investment, much of it from his father and maternal grandfather, George Herbert Walker. By 1965 he was a millionaire.
Devine went back to work for the CIA in 1963. And, in 1967, Devine went with Bush to Vietnam as a "cleared and witting commercial asset" of the agency. He and Bush continued in a close relationship until Bush left the CIA after a year as director in 1977.
Many Bush critics have asserted that the Bush family was involved from the beginning with the CIA and benefited financially from its association with the agency. Russ Baker, an award-winning investigative journalist, published a nearly 600-page unauthorized biography of Bush—Family of Secrets—in which the CIA ties and alleged ties are probed at great length, along with Bush family ties to the Saudi royal family. Zapata, which became Zapata Offshore, seemed to boast few oil rigs, and the ones it had always seemed close to political hotspots.
In his 2005 book—Prelude to Terror: Edwin P. Wilson and the Legacy of America's Private Intelligence Network—John Trento wrote that in an interview, John Sherwood, the CIA's chief of operations against Castro at the beginning of the 1960s, told him that Zapata Offshore was used to direct agency funds to covert operations, the money concealed as oil contract payments. The CIA would neither confirm nor deny this.
Having gotten a good start on building his fortune, Bush switched to politics in 1964, serving as a sacrificial lamb in the Texas Senate race against Democratic Sen. Sam Ralph Yarborough in the Lyndon Johnson landslide of 1964. But in 1966, he won a seat in Congress. There, he served as a moderate and won a coveted seat on the House Ways and Means Committee. After two terms, he again ran for the Senate, this time losing to Democrat Lloyd Bentsen.
But Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford kept him in the limelight. He served as U.S. envoy to the United Nations, chairman of the Republican National Committee, U.S. envoy to China, and, for just under a year, as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. It was a period of great turmoil for the agency, whose spying on U.S. citizens and murderous activities abroad had been placed under the spotlight of the Frank Church Committee. Bush was confirmed in the post only after vowing he would not run for president in 1976.
In the 1980 presidential primary campaign that he lost to Ronald Reagan, Bush was generally viewed as a moderate Republican on social and fiscal matters—he was pro-choice and famously called supply-side theory "voodoo economics." But during eight years as Reagan's vice president, including being the White House point man in the "War on Drugs," Bush moved rightward.
His specific role in the Iran-contra affair was never clearly delineated. Some say that's because he stonewalled the investigators. Even to the most cursory examiner, however, it was clear that Bush knew arms were being secretly sold to Iran and a portion of the take being secretly handed to the Nicaragua contras, violating a congressional ban on aid to them.
Although Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel who investigated Iran-contra, managed to interview Bush once, a follow-up became difficult once Bush became president. In 1987-1988, Bush did not hand over his diary entries to the Tower Commission, the Joint Congressional Committee empaneled to investigate the scandal or to Walsh, who asked again for the diary notes after Bush took office as president. He didn't get them until Dec. 24, 1992, when Bush had just a month left in office.
Bush claimed then that he hadn't known about Walsh's 1987 request. There is a far more plausible reason than that. When he learned that Secretary of State George Shultz had turned over his notes to Congress, he wrote in his diary:
Howard Baker in the presence of the President, told me today that Shultz had kept 700 pages of personal notes, dictated to his staff […] Notes on personal meetings he had with the President. I found this almost inconceivable. Not only that he kept the notes, but that he'd turned them all over to Congress […] I would never do it. I would never surrender such documents and I wouldn't keep such detailed notes.
On that same Christmas Eve when he handed over his diary notes to Walsh, Bush pardoned Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger just 12 days before he was to go to trial. He also pardoned former National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane, former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, former CIA Central American Task Force Chief Alan D. Fiers, Jr., former CIA Deputy Director for Operations Clair E. George, and former CIA Counter-Terrorism Chief Duane R. Clarridge. Bush noted in issuing the pardons that he had done so because the independent counsel's prosecutions amounted to a "criminalization of policy differences.'' Chapter 28 of the Walsh report states:
The Weinberger pardon marked the first time a President ever pardoned someone in whose trial he might have been called as a witness, because the President was knowledgeable of factual events underlying the case.for any part they might have played in the Iran-contra affair.
Bush continued his rightward move under pressure from the Republican Party's ultraconservatives in the 1988 presidential campaign. He won that contest against Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis.
Whatever his secrets, Bush was of the "realist school" of U.S. foreign policy, not of the neoconservative school the would later dominate his son's presidency.
Cautious and generally slow to act, he was perfectly happy to break international law when it suited the interests of U.S. plutocrats and Cold Warriors, as was the case in Panama when he ordered an invasion that deposed the military dictator Manuel Noriega—previously a CIA informant and foe of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas—and slammed him into a U.S. cell for 18 years. That was done essentially because Noriega had decided after a few years to no longer be, in the words of Franklin Roosevelt about another Central American dictator, "our son-of-a-bitch," and would become an independent one instead.
Many Democrats and the left excoriated Bush for his unwillingness to condemn apartheid South Africa or step up sanctions against the racist regime.
Right-wing elements of the Republican Party, including a growing cohort of neoconservatives such as Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, were not happy when Bush failed to gloat after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the symbolic end of the Cold War. It is argued, however, that his temperate remarks on the matter probably weakened the Kremlin hard-liners and led to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's signing of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty to cut the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. just 19 months later.
The neoconservatives in and out of the administration were also displeased with Bush's efforts to make war with Saddam Hussein a last instead of first resort to reverse the dictator's invasion and occupation of Kuwait. Waiting for international support was, in their view, a waste of time. They also were unhappy with Bush's failure to order a push toward Baghdad and oust Hussein in 1991 after Operation Desert Storm had forced Iraqi troops to head home.
From the other side, there was widespread criticism from Democrats and the left over Desert Storm—the Senate vote to authorize military force against Iraq passed by a slim 52-47 margin.
His popularity ratings after the success of Desert Storm were sky-high. But the postwar recession, his modest raising of taxes in violation of his '88 campaign pledge and the ultra-conservative disgust with him within the GOP that led to the racist demagogue Patrick Buchanan's entry into the primaries all weakened Bush in the general election. Combined with the upstart candidacy of Perot, that gave the presidency to Bill Clinton.
After his presidency, Bush's public life had focused on volunteer work at his church in Houston, goodwill relief projects, including, in 2004, joining with Clinton to form the Bush-Clinton Houston Tsunami Fund to raise funds for assistance after the Southeast Asia tsunami in December that year.
Athletic and energetic all his life, he took the occasional birthday skydive after leaving the presidency, the last of which he made—tandem with an instructor—in June 2014 on his 90th birthday.
The consensus of historians surveyed for their assessment of presidents over the years since he left office generally rank Bush in the middle, between 18th and 21st.
