Neither philosopher nor king. But he did keep his hands to himself wisely as the Communist world collapsed.By Yours Truly
https://www.themaven.net/theresurgent/community/george-h-w-bush-rip-a-decent-man-in-an-indecent-profession-3oQe2MOL9UqdLzxtAiNA6w/
A portrait of the future president as a young artist playing first base for Yale.If you don’t count his passion for birthday parachuting even unto his ninetieth, my personal favourite story about the now-departed George H.W. Bush involves nothing he did in public life but something he also didn't do while attending Yale University after World War II.
One fine 1947 day, Yale played Fordham University and won, 3-1, the key blow being Yale shortstop Art Moher’s two-run homer in the eighth inning. It was another win for Yale
en route a pair of College World Series while Mr. Bush held first base. At first base that day he recorded ten putouts. But he also didn't get a single base hit in three trips to the plate. Neither did Fordham’s center fielder that day—a New York kid named Vin Scully, who recorded four putouts at his position in the game.
In subsequent decades when meeting each other, Messrs. Bush and Scully cherished needling each other about their futilities at the plate that day. Their field performances should tell you something about the primacy each team’s pitching seems to have placed upon ground outs. Moher went on to a very brief career (two seasons) in the Detroit Tigers' organisation. Bush and Scully would enjoy far different and far more consequential post-collegiate lives.
Mr. Bush went to his reward at November’s very end. He is now serene in the company of the angels and in the renewed company of his beloved Barbara and their beloved little daughter, Robin, taken from them too young (age three) thanks to a thief known as leukemia whose crime wave then was insurmountable.
It was always fair and sad enough to suggest that, as is so often true of couples whose love endures decades, that Mrs. Bush’s death in April indicated her surviving, grieving husband, already in health’s decline, would not be much longer for earth. Yogi Berra lived barely a year and a half following the death of the nearly seven decades worth love of his life.
A former president’s death provokes real enough grief and excuse enough for hagiography, even upon former presidents who incurred profound enough criticism while they served and later merely walked among us. That is understandable and untoward at once if you’re of the mind that the American presidency was not designed to be an American royalty, but if you are of that mind you crash often enough into those masses who believe an American president is nothing short of ordained by God and worthy of worship.
But neither was Mr. Bush found wanting for achievement before he chose to enter the mucky political field. His family’s preference to the contrary, he became at the time the Navy’s youngest commissioned aviator after his enlistment at eighteen and flew a subsequent 58 combat missions, on one such hanging courageously awaiting his rescuers after a shoot-down. He entered Yale after World War II and graduated with the requisite qualifications to Phi Beta Kappa membership.
After graduation he became an oil industry salesman and earned sufficient capital and professional companionship on his own to co-create a successful drilling enterprise the operation of which he departed in the middle 1960s to take up the political life. Perhaps that came from boredom with business at last. Perhaps it came of a sense that he’d done what the
bellelettrist Albert Jay Nock defined as superflousness: having taken up something, shown well enough and precisely enough how it could and should be done, he set it to one side for all time without further requirement to prove its viability.
Politically speaking Mr. Bush was one of the most malleable of men. He was no degree of political philosopher and decades before the expression took its temporary residence in the nation’s political lexicon it was fair to say he was either for something before he was against it or against something before he was for it. His sole known electoral success before Ronald Reagan named him as the 1980 running mate was three terms in the House of Representatives from 1967 through 1971.
He had far more pronounced success as an appointed official. Richard Nixon made him the United States’ ambassador to the United Nations, where he fought futilely to prevent Taiwan’s expulsion as the Republic of China but subsequently condemned the “gladiatorial ugliness†of the debate and suggested civil enough relations with the incoming People’s Republic of China delegation.
Mr. Bush was named to chair the Republican National Committee in 1973 and it was his unhappy job to keep Watergate’s tentacles from choking the party itself as best he could with what he had. Gerald Ford named him to lead the Central Intelligence Agency in 1976, where his unhappy job for the year he served would be restoring the agency’s morale amidst the fallout of the Church Committee investigations into intelligence community abuses foreign and domestic.
There are those who believe Mr. Bush a mere political time server before he became vice president. But
someone elected him to the White House in his own right in 1988. About 48.89 million someones, to be precise, which was about seven million more than voted for his Democratic opponent. It's not unreasonable to suggest at once that there was a little more animating the vote than the hoped-for continuation of Mr. Reagan's overall good feeling, the hiccups (budget deficits, stealthy tax increases, Iran-Contra) notwithstanding, or that Mr. Bush was just anyone but the technocratic dullard Michael the Carcass.
As president Mr. Bush didn't exactly dig the grave into which most of the Communist world fell but he was at least smart enough not to move more than the occasional muscle as that world collapsed. Even his most severe critics acknowledged that they could think of plenty of others who might have botched it entirely. On the terms he laid out, Mr. Bush prosecuted Operation Desert Storm swiftly and successfully, never mind that the coalition he marshaled for its support invited concurrently a doing or two that proved through little fault of his to portend consequences far more grave in the birth of the millenium to follow.
His fundamental character was no mere image. When Teddy Kennedy unhorsed his fabled enough "Where was George?!?" keynote at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, it wasn't Republicans alone for whom the correct answer to the title question was, "Dry, sober, and home with his wife!" Mr. Bush’s posthumous hagiographers rest enough upon his character especially in comparison to today’s incumbent, which drives the latter’s sycophancy to apoplexy even as they know in their hearts how impossible it is to avoid.
Charles C.W. Cooke, the online editor of
National Review,
is more than mildly unamused that the nation will grind largely to a halt come Wednesday on behalf of Mr. Bush's funeral. The government will close, likewise the stock market, the snail mail will not go through, the House of Representatives will begin a week off, the Supreme Court will recess, likewise classes at several universities.
Why? asks Mr. Cooke. "Irrespective of whether he was a great man or a poor one, George H. W. Bush was a public employee. He was not a king. He was not a pope. He did not found or save or design the republic.â€
Nor did he die in office, of natural causes (Franklin D. Roosevelt) or an assassin’s bullet (John F. Kennedy), and he would likely have rejected the sanctification and the funeral day stoppages at once. “To shut down our civil society for a day in order to mark his peaceful passing,†Mr. Cooke continues, “is to invert the appropriate relationship between the citizen and the state, and to take yet another step toward the fetishization of an executive branch whose role is supposed to be more bureaucratic than spiritual, but that has come of late to resemble Caesar more than to resemble Coolidge."
It came a lot further back than "of late" to resemble Caesar more than Coolidge, but Mr. Cooke's point is taken only too well. Mr. Bush himself never quite saw the presidency as equal to sanctification, even if nothing he did in his public life before, during, or after his presidency indicated a disposition against statism. (Here I confess that upon breaking of a certain campaign promise against tax hikes I referred to him often as not as President Lips.) Anything but a man who believed in limited government, he would have been stuck for an answer if you asked him to conjugate the distinction between a properly construed government and the improperly consecrated State.
He was hardly the best, never the most transformative, and far from the worst to hold and perform the presidency. But if you sought nothing more than fundamental decency, sincere graciousness, and an innate sense that he knew when it was time to pronounce himself a superfluous man in the best sense of the term, Mr. Bush was as good as it got. His successors are hardly the only American presidents who could have stood to learn that lesson from him.
