George H.W. Bush: The Stunning Highs and Lows of America’s Last Pre-Modern President

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In all of American history, there have only been two men who were both fathers of a president and the president themselves: founding father John Adams and George H.W. Bush. A decorated Navy pilot and former head of the CIA, Bush was perhaps the most qualified man to ever occupy the Oval Office. When he was elected president in 1988, he became the first vice president to move straight into the job without his predecessor dying or resigning since Martin Van Buren in 1836. For contemporary political watchers, it looked like Bush could become a president almost as great as his old boss, Ronald Reagan. Yet that’s not what happened. Despite approval ratings that peaked at 90 percent, Bush was destined to be a one-term president, with his name remembered today more in connection with his son than his own time in office. Even his signature achievement, defeating Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, was quickly overshadowed by his son’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.

But is this really a fair assessment, or was there more to Bush 41 than meets the eye?

If anyone could have seen the boy that morning, they would have been certain he was about to die. He was sat on a tiny raft drifting in the Pacific, blood flowing down his face from a nasty gash, red welts from jellyfish stings burning his limbs. Every few minutes, the pale, shaking boy would vomit, bringing up yet more seawater. His crewmates were dead, killed when the guns brought his plane down, and now they were coming for him too. As the boy weakly tried to paddle against the tide, he could sense them—the boats carrying the soldiers who would torture him to death like they had the others. It was a fight for his very life, one any independent observer would have concluded the boy was destined to lose. But destiny had other ideas.

The path that led to George Herbert Walker Bush nearly dying that bright Pacific morning began two decades earlier, on June 12, 1924, when he was born into New England royalty. His investment banker father, Prescott Sheldon Bush, claimed he could trace his lineage all the way back to a sister of King Henry VIII. In short, the family George became a part of was the epitome of the wealthy East Coast elite. This meant an early life of privilege, being educated at exclusive boarding schools. But this wasn’t the kind of brash elitism you might see today; the family was old-fashioned rich, for whom volunteering and charity work were as important as attending the country club. As an adult, Bush would live by the motto that there could be no definition of a successful life that does not include service to others. Still, that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy living in the one percent.

Bush’s first 17 years passed in a haze of genteel dances and successes on the sports field, so much so that he even considered becoming a professional tennis coach. But then something happened that would change not just his life but the lives of everyone in America: the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The USA’s 1941 entry into World War II caused an upswell of patriotism that even the ultra-wealthy weren’t immune to. The day he turned 18, Bush enlisted to help fight the Japanese, quickly earning his wings and becoming the Navy’s youngest pilot. By now, he was an athletic young man with a sweetheart, Barbara Pierce, a descendant of the 14th president, whom he had met at a country club dance. It was clear that if Bush survived the war, he was going to come back and marry her. Sadly, that was a pretty big “if.” About a quarter of all U.S. fatalities in World War II were airmen, with a hundred thousand losing their lives in the war’s inferno. George Bush was nearly among them.

On September 2, 1944, the future president was on a bombing run above Chichijima when the Japanese shot him down. He bailed into the ocean, cracking his head on the plane’s tail as he fell. It’s here that we found him, weak and adrift, close to death while the Japanese tried to capture him. After hours at sea, he was finally rescued by a U.S. submarine. Of the nine men shot down during the Chichijima bombing run, Bush was the only survivor. The other eight were captured, tortured to death, and beheaded. There’s even evidence that Japanese officers ate parts of their bodies, although Bush wouldn’t find out how close he came to this gruesome fate for decades. He still had trouble figuring out why he had been the only one spared. He finally concluded, “There’s got to be some kind of destiny, and I was being spared for something on earth.”

In the end, George and Barbara didn’t wait until the war’s end to marry. Four months after his near-death experience, Bush returned home on leave and married Barbara in New York State. Although this was just a short break, he wouldn’t be in the Navy much longer. The war ended in summer 1945, and in September, Bush was discharged, now in possession of a Distinguished Flying Cross medal. Within days, he slotted right back into his privileged old life, enrolling at Yale for a fast-track economics degree. He also quickly became a family man; George and Barbara’s first son was born on July 6, 1946. They named him George Walker Bush after his father. Many decades later, Bush Jr. would grow up to be a president more impactful and more controversial than George could ever dream of, but all of that lay in the distant future.

For now, Bush graduated from Yale and moved the family to Texas, where he planned to strike it rich in the oil industry. It would be in Houston that the former pilot finally made his move into politics. At the time, Texas was a mostly Democratic state that had nonetheless turned red for Eisenhower. Perhaps sensing an opportunity, Bush began working for the local branch of the Republican Party, eventually becoming its chairman. By 1964, he was popular enough among the grassroots to chance a run at the Senate. Twelve years earlier, his dad, Prescott Bush, had managed to win a seat as a GOP senator for Connecticut, and it seems likely that Bush was trying to match his old man. Unfortunately, he chose the wrong election to start with. 1964 was the year the Lone Star State’s own son, Lyndon B. Johnson, not only ran for president but ran against a weak Republican opponent less than a year after the assassination of JFK. The Democrats absolutely crushed the opposition in Texas. Bush might as well have just spent the entire campaign on the golf course for all the good it did him.

Still, Bush was a guy who learned from missed opportunities. When he ran for the House two years later, he ran as a staunch moderate, highlighting his devotion to Texas. This time, it was enough. On January 3, 1967, George H.W. Bush entered Congress for the first time. It was the start of a political career of wild ups and downs. While other presidents, like Lyndon Johnson, hit the ground running the moment they entered Congress, Bush managed to couple nearly every success with an abysmal failure. He won two terms in the House, for example, but again failed to enter the Senate in 1970. On the other hand, his reputation as a moderate caused Nixon to name him the ambassador to the UN. However, Bush would turn out to be a mediocre diplomat, achieving very little in those three years. The epitome of his seesaw luck came in 1973. That year, Nixon made Bush chairman of the Republican National Committee, a powerful post. Unfortunately, he did so the same year the Watergate scandal broke, which meant Bush spent his time in the RNC publicly defending a corrupt and vindictive president with dogged loyalty. He went to bat for Nixon right up until the smoking gun tape was released. By the time he cut Nixon off three days before his resignation, Bush had been so tired by the scandal that he stepped down from his own position. It looked like he might never work again.

But scandals are funny things; what seems utterly explosive one year can be completely forgotten by the next. By the end of the decade, Bush wouldn’t have just returned to the corridors of power; he’d be poised to enter the White House. Now, you might not be poised for a run for president, but you could run your own website thanks to our friends at Squarespace. Now more than ever, people are getting creative with their time. They’re reaching deep into their savings accounts to start that new business or launch that new blog to share opinions with friends and neighbors. The world really is yours, and Squarespace is the perfect web tool to help you fashion it into whatever you want it to be. It’s the platform to use when you’re ready to get started on that next web project that you’ve been thinking about.

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Now, let’s get back to Washington.

The immediate aftermath of Nixon’s fall saw Gerald Ford quietly shunt Bush off to Beijing as envoy to China. It was the perfect place for Bush to keep his head low, do some cycling, and try to shake off the stench of Watergate. Finally, after a year and a half in the wilderness, Bush was at last asked to come back as the director of the CIA. Although Bush held the post for less than a year before being forced out after Jimmy Carter won the 1976 election, his name still looms large in the agency’s history. The CIA headquarters today is even named after him. But for our story, it’s the connections he made while director that are really interesting. It was while at the CIA that Bush first came into contact with a shady Panamanian operative known as Manuel Noriega. Spoiler alert: you’re going to be hearing that name again.

After Carter dropped him from the CIA, Bush returned to Houston to lay the groundwork for what he felt would be a successful bid for the presidency. But we’ll never know whether the moderate, paternalistic Bush could have beaten Carter in 1980 because 1980 was the year a certain governor from California also decided he wanted the Republican nomination. The moment Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy, George Bush was doomed. Although he ran a good campaign, memorably calling Reagan’s policy proposals “voodoo economics,” thus becoming likely the only president ever quoted in a Radiohead song, he just didn’t stand a chance. Reagan crushed everyone in his path. For Bush, it looked like the only thing to do was head back to Houston and stew for four years.

But then something unexpected happened. Reagan, in need of someone who could win over his party’s moderate wing, asked Bush to be his VP. Bush was as surprised as anyone to get the ticket, but he did a good job tirelessly traversing the country, drumming up support that turned out to be totally unnecessary. On November 4, 1980, the Reagan-Bush ticket won in a landslide. When Bush was sworn in the following January, it was as VP of an America that was about to change forever. But while Bush would be a part of Reagan’s transformative White House, he’d never actually be a part of it. Reagan’s team never forgave Bush for that “voodoo economics” jab, nor could they forgive his costumed upbringing and patrician style. Bush might have had a front-row seat for the Reagan revolution, but he’d only ever be a spectator—one good for sending to meet foreign heads of state but kept firmly away from the levers of power.

Still, being out of the loop sometimes had its advantages. If you haven’t heard of Iran-Contra, just know it was the Miller investigation of its day, a scandal that dragged on and on until it was seemingly all anyone could talk about, erupting in Reagan’s second term. The scandal involved White House staff illegally selling arms to Iran and then using the profits to also illegally fund right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua. And no, two illegal things do not make a legal thing. When the scandal broke, a special prosecutor was assigned. Eventually, 11 people close to the White House would be convicted for their roles in it, but not George H.W. Bush. Just by rumors that the deal had only been possible thanks to his CIA connections, Bush insisted that he’d been out of the loop and knew nothing—not an implausible scenario given his unpopularity with Reagan’s team. It was only much later that a diary entry of his was unearthed, reading, “I’m one of the few people that know fully the details of Iran-Contra. It is not a subject we can talk about.”

Regardless, Bush survived the scandal to finish his second term as Reagan’s VP, but he wouldn’t be content to leave office alongside his old boss. Back in 1984, the second Reagan-Bush ticket had won one of the greatest landslides in U.S. history, comparable to FDR’s victory in 1936. Who was to say that leaving Bush on the ticket now as the headline act wouldn’t result in another Republican win? Although no VP had gone straight to being elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836, Bush was certain that he could pull it off. The only reason the 1988 election isn’t commonly remembered as a landslide is that it paled beside Reagan’s two knockout wins. But make no mistake: Bush won a thumping victory, taking 40 states and over 53 percent of the popular vote. Unfortunately, one reason he won so hard was because he made an infamous promise: “Read my lips: no new taxes.” Before long, that quote would come back to haunt Bush like a badly costumed Scooby-Doo villain haunting an abandoned arcade.

Still, Bush entered the White House with a solid mandate, even if Democratic control of Congress meant his agenda would be constantly frustrated. This may be why there’s little to say about his domestic policies. Despite talking at his inauguration about the problems of homelessness and drugs, Bush’s term is best seen through the lens of foreign policy. The reason? The moment he entered the Oval Office, the world went absolutely nuts.

The first major flare-up came in April of 1989 as protests broke out in China, with up to a million students flooding Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to demand change. On June 4, the Chinese Communist Party called in the military, who dispersed the crowd—dispersed here meaning they murdered hundreds of people. As the world condemned China, Congress demanded action, but Bush, believing a strong relationship with Beijing was essential to American prosperity, only imposed limited sanctions. The weak response was seen as characteristic of the overly cautious president.

But there’d be nothing overly cautious about his response to the next international crisis. Since 1983, Bush’s old CIA buddy Manuel Noriega had ruled Panama as an effective dictator with a sideline in drug trafficking. Initially, the U.S. tolerated him because he had anti-communist credentials, but by 1989, Noriega was in business with the Sandinistas, leading to the CIA cutting him loose. When Noriega annulled Panama’s election in spring that year, they began actively plotting his overthrow. Then, Panamanian soldiers killed an off-duty U.S. serviceman on December 16, and all hell broke loose. Bush authorized Operation Just Cause on December 17. Three days later, the largest U.S. troop deployment since Vietnam invaded Panama. In the fighting, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 Panamanians lost their lives, mostly civilians, against just 26 Americans. Noriega fled into the Vatican embassy, where U.S. forces blasted loud music and flashed bright lights at the windows until the former dictator surrendered on January 3, 1990. While the invasion of Panama was seen as a victory in the U.S., it was globally condemned. In Panama, they’re still uncovering mass graves containing civilians killed in the battle.

But before Noriega was even captured, Bush’s attention was being forced elsewhere. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down—the most visible sign of communism’s collapse across Eastern Europe. Mindful of antagonizing the Soviets, Bush chose to play the event in the most muted way possible, merely telling a reporter, “I’m very pleased at the time.” This was seen as yet more evidence that Bush had a spine as limp as a creepy handshake. But today, most agree that he played things well. Rather than gloat and risk a communist backlash, Bush was content to stand back and watch the whole edifice come tumbling down with just a quiet smile. When he did play a part, it was often an unglamorous but essential one. It was Bush, for example, who is credited with making German reunification a reality in the face of hostility from U.S. allies like Britain. Not that his role in the end of European communism was always successful. In 1991, Bush tried to stop the USSR’s republics from becoming new countries, culminating in a speech he gave in Kiev calling the Ukrainian desire for independence “suicidal nationalism.” It was such a tone-deaf, wimpy comment that it’s gone down in history as the “Chicken Kiev” speech. By and large, though, Bush handled the Soviet collapse well, signing a non-aggression pact with Gorbachev in November 1990 that effectively ended the Cold War. Yet even this wouldn’t be remembered as his signature foreign policy achievement. For that, we’ll have to look to a nation that has spent decades as a thorn in the side of American politics: Iraq.

Unlike the mess that was the 2003 invasion, there was a very clear, justifiable reason behind the first Gulf War. On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein attacked the tiny oil-rich nation of Kuwait. In the face of superior Iraqi forces, the Kuwaiti army disintegrated. Half a million people, including the royal family