George H.W. Bush was the representative president
The chapters of the life of President George H.W. Bush, who died on Friday night aged 94, are the history of an era. If he was not one of Emerson’s ‘representative men’, it was to the good. The ‘representative man’ of Emerson’s imagination was Carlyle’s ‘great man’, a conqueror who stamped his mark on his age by forcing his environment to reflect his inborn character. G.H.W. Bush’s character reflected its environment, and represented the virtues of a vanishing class and suddenly distant age. Born in 1924 a senator’s son, Bush was educated at Phillips Academy and Yale, decades before the acronym WASP was coined. In 1942, he enlisted in the US Navy on his 18th birthday. As a naval aviator, he returned to duty after being shot down and rescued from the Pacific.
