Really Cool Stuff about George H W Bush
1. George H W Bush was, at one time, the youngest pilot in the Navy. “George Bush chose to become a naval aviator, earning his wings in June 1943 and becoming the youngest pilot in the entire US Navy” (p. 7).
2. Bush’s plane was shot down in the war. “Failing to make a clean jump, Bush hit his head on the back of the plan and ripped his chute. Tumbling 2,000 feet into the water—moving faster because of the hole in his chute—Bush nevertheless escaped major injury. He deployed a small life raft and began paddling. A pilot seeing him in distress strafed Japanese ships on their way to capture Bush. A few hours later a US submarine fished the young lieutenant out of the water. Bush was the only man of his plane to survive” (p. 8).
3. George H W was the fourth generation of his family to attend Yale. “The fourth generation of the Bush family to attend Yale, George made a conscious effort to emulate his father’s collegiate achievements and succeeded for largely the same reasons” (p. 9).
4. Bush desperately wanted to be Ford’s vice president and was disappointed when Ford chose Nelson Rockefeller instead. “No American politician had ever tried so hard to be vice president and failed” (p. 30).
5. The election of 1988 was abysmal in terms of voter turnout. “Only 50 percent of eligible American voters bothered to participate, the lowest turnout rate since World War II” (p. 63).
6. Congress decided to decline Bush’s nomination of John Tower as defense secretary, thereby making history. “These enemies sank the nomination by allowing gossip about Tower’s womanizing and drinking so cloud the matter that he became the first cabinet nominee of an incoming president to lose a confirmation vote” (p. 70).
7. Interesting fact about the Panamanian coup of 1990: “Only twenty-four US servicemen lost their lives in the largest American military operation since the end of the Vietnam War” (p. 89). This coup also allowed us to arrest Noreiga and send him to Miami for trial.
8. Not only did George H. W. suffer from the extremely rare Graves’ disease but his wife, Barbara, did as well. “(In a remarkable coincidence, Barbara Bush had already been diagnosed with this same rare disease in 1989)” (p. 130-31).
9. The end of the Soviet Union had major ramifications for the US. “By year’s end Gorbachev himself announced that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would itself be dissolved. For the first time, the United States was the world’s lone superpower” (p. 138). We weren’t alone as a superpower for that long because China nipped up behind us when we weren’t looking…
10. In 1992, Bush’s approval rating tanked. “After the Democratic convention in July, Bush’s approval rating dropped to 29 percent. Only Harry Truman during the impasse of the Korean War (23 percent), Richard Nixon in the Watergate year of 1974 (24 percent), and Jimmy Carter in 1979 (28 percent) had been more unpopular” (p. 145).
11. I lived through Hurricane Andrew in southern Florida so I’m adding this little tidbit to the list. “With estimates of $45 billion in damage, Andrew exceeded the cost of any previous natural disaster in US history” (p. 148). Even though I lived only an hour and a half north of Miami-Dade County, all we experienced was some heavy rain, a few palm fronds jogged loose from their moorings, and one day off school. That is all.
12. Here’s something else I remember: Dana Carvey playing George H. W. on SNL! “To perk up his staff and lay to rest the
rumors [that Bush would retire before Clinton was sworn in], he invited to the White House Dana Carvey, a comedian who had achieved fame impersonating Bush’s nasally halting cadence on the popular television show Saturday Night Live. Without letting the staff in on the surprise, he asked Carvey to appear as him at the start of the Christmas party” (p. 152).
13. In April 1993, Bush traveled to the Middle East in order to be honored and feted by the Kuwaiti people. Little did he know that there was an Iraqi assassination plot afoot. “The Kuwaitis arrested seventeen people, some of whom confessed to being on a mission from Baghdad. The plan was to detonate a car bomb, and, indeed, the Kuwaitis found a Toyota Land Cruiser with eighty to ninety kilograms of plastic explosives…After the FBI gather some additional corroborating information from the suspects, the Clinton administration concluded without a doubt that Saddam Hussein had authorized the assassination of George Bush. To send a message to Baghdad, Bill Clinton ordered a cruise missile strike on the headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service on June 26, 1993…George Bush was the first US president, sitting or former, to be the target of a foreign assassination plot” (p. 156-57).
14. Although he was over eighty years of age, George H. W. decided, after being a guest of honor at the annual meeting of the International Parachute Association, to
try the extreme sport of sky diving. “Oddly, the action that had the greatest influence on Bush’s public appeal in the second half of the 1990s involved jumping out of an airplane at 12,500 feet…Covered by newspapers and on television around the world, the jump revealed a different George Bush than the stiff and awkward man who had served as president for four years” (p. 162-63).Well we’re getting down to the very end of this list of presidents and I’m confronted with what I know (or think I know) about these men and what is the truth. I was surprised, therefore, with how much I disliked George H.W. before he became president. And I wasn’t the only one—due to very specific word choices, I was convinced that the author, Timothy Naftali, did not like him either. The reason that I make the distinction of disliking him pre-presidency is due to the fact that I really quite liked him afterwards. It’s hard to explain but before he was elected president, I felt that George was simply a political chameleon, ready to change his mind and his stance on any issue that would reflect voter attitudes. He mirrored Nixon when those ideas were expedient and replicated Reagan when that was necessary to further his political career.
All that being said, however, I really grew to like this guy during his tenure as president and since then. I feel that the presidency really agreed with him, for the most part, and through being president, he was able to find his political identity, which he’s stood by all these years. It’s kinda cool to watch a grown man find his way during all those tricky foreign and domestic issues he faced. Also I think it couldn’t have been easy following in the hallowed footsteps of old Ronald Reagan. It just couldn’t. “Ronald Reagan was a hard act to follow…Yet the campaign of 1988, so long on patriotic symbols and so short on substance, had left only a vague impression of the incoming president, certainly nothing as powerful as the public image of Ronald Reagan, who despite Iran-Contra appeared to be departing directly from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for Mount Rushmore” (p. 65).
I have to take a moment to mention this really interesting fact but it’s about Reagan so I didn’t include it up top. It’s about the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project and I’ve seen evidence of it in Georgia. “In 1997 a nationwide Ronald Reagan Legacy Project established the goal of naming something—a bridge, a highway, a park—for Reagan in every one of the United States’ 3, 067 counties” (p. 161). Near where I live there are several things named after Ronald Reagan so I think it’s cool to finally find out why.
The author did a good job of portraying this misunderstood man and in quite a funny way too. For instance, “The weather turned horrible the next day—the worst in decades, according to the Maltese—and what was supposed to be a two-day visit of choreographed shuttling between the U.S. cruiser and the Soviet ship because a superpower struggle against seasickness” (p. 87). Here’s another example, detailing the circus surrounding the Clarence Thomas affair. “By the end, the nation had been exposed to discussions of sexual harassment, pornographic videos, and pubic hair left on a Coke can” (p. 134). I got a crack outta this next event. “In August 1991 Bush used a speech in Kiev to send a message over the heads of his Ukrainian audience to the Yugoslaves to slow the disintegration of their state, so that political will and diplomacy, not violence, would dictate the outcome…Derided at home as the ‘Chicken Kiev’ speech, because it implied a lack of support for Ukrainian self-determination, the speech captured Bush’s belief that national self-determination alone was not a guarantee that the successor states of any empire would be liberal democracies” (p. 138-39).
Sometimes truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Once such instance of this phenomenon is the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent end of the Soviet Union. For something that was so serious and engulfing as the Cold War, it ended in a complete fizzle. “The last act of the nasty East German police state came in a moment of farce. At a press conference on November 9 [1989], designed to introduce new rules for travel to West Germany, the party chief in East Berlin, who was poorly briefed on the new system, mistakenly told reporters that free travel to the West would begin immediately. East Germans took him at his word and approached the Berlin controls. The police there, just as confused as the party chief, assumed it was all right to let them pass. That night thousands of Berliners jumped onto the Berlin Wall and, meeting no resistance from East German border guards, began to take sledgehammers to it. The twenty-eight-year-old wound dividing Berlin was no more” (p. 84-85). The Soviet Union would not last much longer. Ha!
Unfortunately, the end of this book was all about George W and that bothered me. I understand that it was inevitable that George W make an appearance in this book, considering he is the son of Geroge H.W., but I thought the author spent too much time and page content on the presidency of the son. This aspect of this biography annoyed me until I reached the last page in which Naftali explains his emphasis on George W. “When George W. Bush had spoken confidently in 1997 of how history would revise his father’s reputation, he had no reason to assume that it would be because of his own shortcomings as president…A decade later, as the younger Bush’s own presidency limped to an end, many missed the elder Bush’s realism, his diplomacy, his political modesty, and yes, even his prudence” (p. 176). What do you think? Did the morphing of George H. W.’s presidential reputation occur due to his son’s inanity in the White House? Discuss.
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