Is History Being Too Kind to George H.W. Bush?
From his opportunistic criticism of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to his 1980 election-season embrace of supply-side economics and anti-abortion politics, to his last act as president—pardoning many of the Iran-Contra crew in order to protect himself—there was a recurring tendency to place short-term gain above long-standing values.
The son of Prescott Bush, a wealthy investment banker and moderate Republican senator from Connecticut, George H.W. Bush entered politics at a moment when the GOP’s center of ideological gravity was beginning to move rightward. His career bore the marks of his struggle to square his patrimony of social liberalism and responsible statesmanship with the new demand from Republican voters for a more zealous and populistic conservatism. By launching his career not in New England but in his adopted state of Texas, where he had moved to make his fortune in oil, Bush would find himself continually pressed to sacrifice his Yankee principles of noblesse oblige and social moderation. Most famously, he did this in 1964, when running for Senate amid the great civil rights struggle. Regarded by many Texas conservatives as an Eastern carpetbagger, Bush denounced the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act that outlawed racial discrimination in schools, employment and public accommodations. At other times, as with his congressional vote in 1968 for a fair-housing bill, he incurred his constituents’ wrath. Too often though, the former choice, not the latter, served as Bush’s template in making decisions.
The willingness to put aside conviction for political opportunity resurfaced in 1980 when Bush, after running a surprisingly strong second in the 1980 Republican presidential primaries to Ronald Reagan, recanted his well-known denunciation of supply-side economics as “voodoo economics” and his long-standing pro-choice politics in order to be chosen as Reagan’s running mate. Throughout his career, Bush often said that while he might take the low road in campaigning, he hewed to his ideals while governing. But here he had done the opposite: trumpeting his true views while seeking the nomination, then abandoning them once in office. With Bush’s acquiescence to Reagan’s more conservative politics, the last hope for a restoration of Rockefeller Republicanism perished. Never again would the party boast a major national leader who defended reproductive rights or questioned the merits of supply-side economics.
Many of the encomiums published today dwell on the president’s grace and magnanimity, but his campaigns showed a less attractive side of his personality. Bush’s 1988 presidential bid has been widely deemed the ugliest in modern times. Under the tutelage of hardballers Roger Ailes, James Baker and Lee Atwater, Bush impugned the Americanism of his opponent, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, the son of Greek immigrants, and pandered to prejudice in making hay of Dukakis’ honorable decision to accept a Massachusetts Supreme Court judgment that deemed mandatory pledge-of-allegiance recitals in public schools to be unconstitutional. “What is it about the Pledge of Allegiance that upsets him so much?” Bush taunted. Then came the Willie Horton ads that hyped the scare-story of an African-American criminal, released on furlough from a Massachusetts prison, who raped a woman and assaulted her husband. Never mind that Reagan, as governor of California, had signed a similar furlough bill.
In between, Bush continued to put politics ahead of the national good in many of his appointments. Most notably, in 1991, when Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice, announced his retirement, Bush could have honored his legacy by naming a respected African-American judge or legal scholar such as Amalya Kearse or Leon Higginbotham. But he selected a staunch conservative in Clarence Thomas—served up with the implausible assertion that he was the most qualified person for the job. Given that Bush had appointed David Souter to the court, expecting him to name a more moderate black justice is hardly unreasonable.
In foreign policy, Bush has generally been given higher marks, and in some cases fairly so—particularly for his management of European relations at the start of the post-Cold War era. But he also made terrible mistakes, which were likewise rooted in cynicism. As Saddam Hussein was preparing to invade Kuwait, Bush sent the Iraqi strongman clear signals, through the American ambassador, that the United States had no interest in intra-Arab disputes—the exact opposite position of the one he took very shortly thereafter, in which he drew a “line in the sand.” Bush commendably built international support for a military campaign against Saddam, but by leaving the dictator in power at the war’s end, he fobbed off the problem onto his successors. By 1998, in violation of the cease-fire agreement, Saddam was refusing to let international weapons inspectors carry out their job, making it impossible to know if he would resume a nuclear weapons program. One need not support George W. Bush’s rash decision to invade the country to concede that he was addressing a problem that his father had left—in the words of Dick Cheney, a top official in both men’s administrations—unfinished.
Perhaps the worst act of Bush’s career came at the end of his presidency when he pardoned a bevy of Iran-Contra defendants—including Caspar Weinberger, Robert MacFarlane and Elliott Abrams—to protect himself from further investigation. As vice president, Bush had been present at key meetings about the arms-for-hostages deal that would become the Reagan administration’s greatest scandal, but he had never been fully candid about his support for the policy, insisting disingenuously that he had been “out of the loop.” Late in Bush’s presidency, special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh had learned of diaries that Bush had kept, which he hoped to introduce as evidence at Weinberger’s upcoming trial. Bush’s pardons thus shielded himself from any additional investigation. Walsh fumed that “the Iran-Contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.”
Despite knowing better, George H.W. Bush often slunk aside to create space in the Republican Party for right-wing ideologues and practitioners of the politics of personal destruction. It shouldn’t surprise us to see that others—made of far more malignant stuff than he—have now taken over that space.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/12/01/george-hw-bush-legacy-222730
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I'm sure that lightened things up for him a bit. (The story behind that is he once gave her a cough drop and she noticed it was from a White House box, and she said, "How old are these? You've been out of office for quite a while now!" and Dubya said, "I know, but we still have dozens of boxes of them!" So now it's like their personal joke-thing. 
