George H.W. Bush

Pat Buchanan recently ended his syndicated column, essentially completing his retirement from public life. Yet it’s hard to think of any writer in his or her prime today whose ideas enjoy the currency that Buchanan’s now do. From trade and foreign policy to immigration and the “culture war” — a term that Buchanan introduced into popular politics — views that once set Buchanan apart from his fellow conservatives are now redefining the right. Buchanan was not the only conservative skeptic of free trade or foreign interventionism in the 1990s, but he was the only one that most newspaper-reading or cable news-watching voters knew about. At the zenith of American power and economic globalization, Buchanan defined the opposition to the spirit of the age.

Ross Perot, who has just died at age 89, is wrongly remembered as the man who cost George H.W. Bush his re-election in 1992. He should be remembered as the man who cost his own populist ideas their chance to remake American politics 20 years before the election of Donald Trump. Perot showed the promise of populism — then betrayed it, bottling it up for the next two decades. As far as Perot was concerned, if populism could win without him, it shouldn’t win at all. And so he made it as difficult as possible for anyone else — Jesse Ventura, Pat Buchanan, and yes, even Donald Trump — to build on what Perot achieved in 1992. And maybe Perot did cost Bush I his re-election, just not in the way most people think.

Undisclosed location, Florida In January, when heavily armed FBI agents swarmed my south Florida home in the predawn hours to arrest me for a series of process crimes, it changed my life far more than I ever imagined. The judge in my case has issued a gag order so I am not permitted to discuss the case, the prosecution, the court or the specific charges against me and will not do so here. As the judge said, the place for talking is in court — and that time will come. *** A vast American television audience was allowed to view the spectacle
 of my arrest, because CNN arrived
 15 minutes before the FBI swat team. CNN denies it was tipped off, instead chalking its good fortune up to a ‘hunch’. President Trump asked in a tweet 
‘Who alerted CNN?

If William Floyd Weld wins his primary challenge against President Trump, it will be the greatest political miracle since Jesus Christ intervened to advise Emperor Constantine before the Battle of Milvian Bridge. Weld has no fan base, no name recognition, no political machine. His brand of let-them-eat-cake libertarianism has zero traction in either major party. His complaint to CNN that ‘the President does not exhibit curiosity about history’ probably won’t resonate with the party’s base, given how quickly they took to demanding Trump imprison his opponent once he was elected.

George H.W. Bush was a president without an asterisk next to his name. No one ever wondered what overseas power was bankrolling him or what foreign intelligence service was running an operation to elect him to the White House. Americans had partisan and policy differences with George Bush, but even in the heat of the 1992 campaign, the toughest of his life, no one questioned his motives or his intentions. No one could or can doubt his deep patriotism, loyalty, and commitment to service to the nation he so clearly loved. The remembrances of this good man and consequential leader are many, and as a Republican official, campaign operative, ad maker, pundit, and proud Bush guy, I am happy to see America’s outpouring of gratitude and support for the greatest President in my lifetime.

After losing a US Senate race, Congressman George H. W. Bush was prepared to head back to the Texas oilfields and a life of relative obscurity when the new Republican president summoned him to Washington. The president thought highly of the young man and wanted to ensure his political future. He offered Bush the Ambassadorship to the United Nations, a position that would give him a chance to remain politically relevant as he burnished his foreign policy credentials. Bush accepted. And with that, Richard Nixon launched George H.W. Bush as a national figure.

The world knew him as ‘Bush 41.’ I knew him by a different name during the time I worked for him as his speechwriter when he was Vice President. In those days, the staff called him ‘The Vishnu.’ It was his own devising. He’d been to India on a state visit, where they’d presented him, amid much pomp and ceremony and clanging of brass, with a statue of the four-armed Vedic deity Vishnu. Its plaque described Vishnu’s numerous godly qualities, among them: omniscience, omnipotence, and his title ‘Preserver of the Universe.’ Mr Bush immediately recognized a kindred godhead. He began referring to himself, in staff memos and aboard Air Force Two’s loudspeakers as ‘The Vishnu.’ In more intimate settings, simply, ‘The Vish.

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.