Young George Michael in Dance Again Video Congestive Heart Failure

Republican presidential candidate George Bush and his wife Barbara stand together on the podium during the finale of the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, Aug. 18, 1988. (AP Photograph/Ron Edmonds)

KENNEBUNKPORT — George Herbert Walker Bush, the 41st president of the United States and lifelong seasonal resident of Kennebunkport, died late Friday night at his home in Houston. He was 94.

His death, which occurred at 11:10 p.m. and was announced by his office only later on midnight, followed the death of his married woman of 73 years, Barbara Bush, on April 17.

His son George W. Bush-league, 43rd president of the U.S., issued a statement saying, his begetter "was a man of the highest grapheme."

"The entire Bush family is deeply grateful for 41'south life and honey, for the compassion of those who have cared and prayed for Dad," the statement read.

Though he was born in Massachusetts and lived in many locations, Kennebunkport and the family retreat on Walker's Point remained a constant in George H.W. Bush's life, the touchstone of his growing family, a venue for some world-shaping events of his presidency, and the nearest affair he had to a permanent home.

A CONSERVATIVE MODERATE

Bush-league was a conservative of a multifariousness now all but extinct in American politics, an admirer of the 18th-century Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke, who championed prudence, held radical change deeply suspect, and believed voters elected their representatives for their adept judgment rather than compliance with their immediate concerns. "George Bush was a Burkean conservative with the heart and soul of a moderate," biographer Herbert Parmet wrote, "a conservative moderate rather than a moderate conservative."

Although he was elected to the country'south highest office, Bush disliked campaigning and wasn't specially gifted at information technology. He rose politically through a series of appointed positions: chairman of the Republican National Committee, ambassador to the United nations, envoy to the People'southward Commonwealth of China and director of the Primal Intelligence Agency. He was a human relationship builder and diplomat, substantially expanding the social networks he inherited and relying on his friendships and personal relationships rather than what he one time famously derided every bit "the vision matter."

He was the last president cast from the old "Northeastern establishment" mold, projecting a patrician public epitome of dignity and cocky-effacement rather than a firebrand or an accessible everyman. "At the time, (Bush'due south manner) didn't seem to be leadership qualities to the public. Some even saw information technology as weakness," Bush's former national security spokesman Roman Popadiuk told Newsweek in 2011. "But now people are looking dorsum … and they're appreciating how he hearkened dorsum to an era in which people were treated with respect and in which politics had some civility."

2 POWERFUL FAMILIES

George Herbert Walker Bush was born June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts, a few miles from the rubber flooring firm where his father worked. Although his parents lived modestly, they both were heirs to considerable fortunes and powerful family unit alliances built upwards over generations.

George's maternal granddaddy, investment banker Herbert Walker, was an ostentatious risk taker who forced his sons to settle disputes by boxing one some other – and later himself – without gloves or rules. (A golf enthusiast, he endowed the Walker Cup.) He purchased the property now chosen Walker's Bespeak in 1902 – it had previously been used every bit a public park – and too had a erstwhile slave plantation in Due south Carolina, a domicile on Long Island, 2 Rolls-Royces and a pair of personal butlers. Herbert would support his grandson's business and political ambitions throughout his life. When Herbert was on his deathbed, George wrote him a alphabetic character crediting him with instruction him "what loyalty was all about" and acknowledging that he had "handed me the future and made my life sing."

Past contrast, Bush'due south father, future United states of america Senator Prescott Bush, and grandfather, Samuel Bush-league, were affable, polite, frugal and cautious. Samuel had been president of Columbus-based Buckeye Steel, nursing the troubled firm back to prosperity and earning considerable wealth and the gratitude of its owner, John D. Rockefeller'southward brother Franklin, in the process. They did not flaunt their riches; at Yale, Prescott would pass himself off as a middle-form pupil and later campaigned for the U.S. Senate as the son of a man of "pocket-sized income."

"For the Bushes … pleasures were sought and valued but could not be immune to intrude upon the serious affairs of life," biographers Peter and Rochelle Schweizer wrote. "For the Walkers, pleasures were the serious things of life."

I thing the families shared was a conventionalities that each family unit fellow member should become out into the world and earn his own fortune, fifty-fifty if assisted along the fashion by their connections. Accordingly, Herbert Walker spurned a position at the family business, the largest dry goods wholesaler in the Midwest, to instead found his ain investment depository financial institution, merely this venture succeeded because he was able to ally himself with the sons of his father's business partner, E.H. Harriman, president of the all-powerful Union Pacific Railroad. Prescott Bush, after working for a time as a hardware salesman, was hired past the firm, working nether his father-in-law and alongside the Harriman boys, one of whom was a friend and classmate of his from Yale. The Harrimans later helped underwrite Prescott's runs for U.S. Senate, where he represented Connecticut from 1952 to 1963.

Similarly, George H.West. Bush set out and made his ain fortune in the oil business in Texas, simply did so with capital provided past his begetter, his uncle Herbert, and one of his father's business partners and Yale classmate, Neil Mallon. Later, the family network also helped line up initial investors for his son George West. Bush, when he started drilling for oil, with uncles Jonathan Bush and Scott Pierce lining up deep-pocketed partners. "My male parent's name helped me attract early investors for my business," George H.W. Bush told The Washington Post in 1999. "If my name did the same for 'W,' great!"

"While they are certainly more cocky-fabricated than the Kennedys and have a strong drive to prove their worth," the Schweizers noted in "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty," "family members don't think twice about going to family and friends in their climb to the top."

FROM School TO WAR AND BACK Over again

George H.W. Bush started with many advantages. He grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, 1 of the wealthiest communities in the state, and attended the elite Greenwich State 24-hour interval School, Phillips Andover Academy and, ultimately, Yale, from which his male parent, great-granddad and both of his sons graduated. He spent every summertime at Walker'southward Point and met his future wife, Barbara Pierce, at a formal state club trip the light fantastic toe when he was 17 and she 16.

On graduating from Andover in June 1942, Bush was expected to enroll at Yale but instead enlisted in the Navy, becoming its youngest aviator at historic period xviii. He and Barbara were secretly engaged during a moonlit walk on the shores of Kennebunkport days before he shipped out to fight the Japanese.

Bush flew TBF Avenger torpedo bombers on 58 combat missions from the escort carrier USS San Jacinto and was shot down twice, and the second time was the only fellow member of the three-man crew to survive. Although eligible to rotate back to the U.s.a., he flew eight boosted missions over the Philippines, earning three Air Medals and a Distinguished Flight Cross. He rarely spoke of his wartime experiences.

He and Barbara corresponded throughout his combat tour – Bush-league nicknamed his planes after her – and they were married in Barbara's hometown of Rye, New York, in January 1945, merely two weeks afterward he had returned home. The war ended that summer, and George enrolled at Yale.

Bush graduated in just two and a half years, during which time he became a father, played on ii NCAA national championship baseball teams and was inducted into Skull and Bones, the storied cloak-and-dagger order to which his father had belonged. He majored in business concern and economics, and upon graduation piled Barbara and young George W. into their car and collection to Odessa, Texas, seeking their fortune in the oil fields.

A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN TEXAS

Bush initially worked for Dresser Industries, a drilling equipment visitor run by his father's friend, Neil Mallon, where he worked as an equipment clerk and lived in a duplex where his family unit shared a bathroom with a mother-and-daughter prostitution team. After a few months he was transferred to California (as a drill bit salesman) and, in 1950, to Midland, Texas, where he started his ain oil rights trading business organization with his father's and uncle's backing.

Iii of their six children were born in Midland, a booming oil patch boondocks Bush-league would later depict as "Yuppieland Due west" on account of the large number of young man Ivy League Easterners who'd moved there and made upwards the membership of the 2 country clubs. George W. and his brother Jeb attended Midland's public elementary and middle schools, though both would later on follow their father's path to Andover and Yale.

Bush worked long hours, especially afterward founding his own oil drilling firm, Zapata Petroleum, in 1953. Barbara raised the children and maintained the domicile and a growing menu catalog of the family'due south friends, acquaintances and business partners which would later support her husband'due south and sons' political aspirations.

Tragedy likewise struck in 1953. Their four-year-old girl, Robin, developed leukemia and, despite treatment in New York, died a few months afterwards. The family unit has said Bush-league was unable to speak of his girl's death for 40 years; he immersed himself in work, flying around the globe, negotiating offshore oil deals for Zapata.

As his visitor grew, stationing multimillion-dollar oil rigs off Texas and Cuba, Bush moved it and his family to Houston, where he began his first forays into politics.

Bush's male parent had been what would today be idea of as a moderate Republican, pro-business and fiscally conservative just as well a champion of civil rights and an active supporter of the NAACP. George, like later presidential entrant Mitt Romney, was a bit harder to pin downwardly. In some contexts he appeared a mirror image of Prescott Bush-league: a Northeastern moderate in the vein of Nelson Rockefeller or Margaret Chase Smith; at other times in his career he embraced positions much further to the correct and in 1964 would enthusiastically back up conservative Barry Goldwater over Rockefeller for the Republican nomination. Although he would loyally serve 2 conservative presidents from outside the "Eastern establishment," Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, he never earned the trust of his party's conservative wing, including the anti-Communist John Birch Society.

While nonetheless with Zapata, Bush became political party chairman for Harris County, which included metropolitan Houston, a position he held for much of 1963 and early 1964.

"Bush proved a roaring success, the hardest working chairman Harris County Republicans had ever seen," retired New York Times reporter Tom Wicker wrote in his eponymous 2004 biography. "Everything Chairman Bush-league touched seemed to succeed – except that he could never win the Birchers' friendship, hard equally he tried, not even when he named some of them to leadership positions in the county. He was also eastern, also Yale, too moderate, the epitome of everything Barry Goldwater was not – or so the Birchers were convinced."

He stepped down in 1964 and ran for his starting time elected office: the United States Senate. His opponent was first-term incumbent Ralph Yarborough, a liberal Democrat whose support of integration, endangered species and civil rights fabricated him vulnerable in Texas. Bush-league attacked him for voting in favor of that yr's Ceremonious Rights Human action and cast himself every bit a right-wing conservative, denouncing the United nations, affirmative action, President Lyndon Johnson's "soft" strategy in Vietnam, and the nuclear test ban treaty. Goldwater and Nixon stumped for him, even as conservatives denounced him as a tool of "Liberal Eastern Kingmakers."

Bush won the primary but lost the general election by eight points afterward Yarborough labeled him a "carpetbagger from Connecticut who is drilling oil for the sheik of Kuwait" with his "four wives and 100 concubines." Bush took the loss hard and regretted some of his stances. "I took some far-right positions to go elected," he later recalled telling his minister. "I hope I never practice it again."

MR. BUSH GOES TO WASHINGTON

But Texas was rapidly growing, and in 1966 a new congressional commune was created encompassing the wealthier sections of Houston where he was popular and well known. He sold his stake in Zapata for $1.i million and jumped into the race as a mainstream Texas conservative: supportive of the Vietnam State of war, lower taxes and "right to work" laws. He won with almost 58 percent of the vote. He and Barbara moved to the Washington expanse, which would serve as their master residence for nearly of the next quarter century.

In Congress, Bush became the starting time freshman member of the powerful Means and Means Commission since 1900, the result of his father'southward lobbying. "Otherwise his first term was undistinguished except for his typically difficult piece of work for his constituents and his assiduous courtship of even the least among them," Wicker wrote. "The name cards kept piling upwardly in Barbara'southward files." He ran unopposed in 1968, despite supporting a law unpopular in Texas that prohibited racial discrimination in housing. In his second term, he championed family planning and, in 1970, co-sponsored federal legislation to back up family unit planning clinics.

One day in May 1969, Bush's phone rang. Information technology was the White Firm. Nixon wanted to encounter him immediately. Before long thereafter in the Oval Role, the president asked Bush to have a risk on his behalf. Nixon was desperate to retake command of the Senate and wanted Bush-league to make another run at Sen. Yarborough's seat. He pledged to actively support Bush's campaign and, if it failed, to provide a "soft landing." Bush ultimately agreed, giving up a safe House seat for an uncertain Senate bid.

Despite Nixon'south back up, Bush's 1970 effort failed, largely considering Yarborough lost the primary and Bush institute himself up against Lloyd Bentsen, a conservative Democrat. Nixon, true to his word, institute him a task equally U.S. ambassador to the United nations, where he'd serve from 1971 to January 1973. Thereafter, Nixon tapped him to be chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Bush-league headed the RNC as Watergate raged, and remained loyal to the president, apparently believing him innocent. He and Barbara soon found themselves socially isolated, fifty-fifty among congressional Republicans. According to the Schweizers, only after the release of Nixon's secretly recorded tapes – which showed the president had been involved in the Watergate burglary camouflage – did Bush realize "that Nixon had lied to only about anybody, including him."

PURSUING 'A POLITICAL BIRTHRIGHT'

Afterwards Nixon'due south resignation, Bush-league had reason to hope that he might get vice president, merely President Gerald Ford appointed him envoy to the People's Republic of China instead. Biographers draw the 14 months they spent in Beijing as a quiet interlude for George and Barbara, with fewer family and professional responsibilities, but afterward a twelvemonth, Bush wrote Ford request for a stateside date.

To his surprise and consternation, he was asked to caput the CIA, which, in his own words, was being investigated for everything "from lawbreaking to simple incompetence." To make matters worse, a Senate commission insisted Ford exclude Bush from consideration every bit his 1976 running mate to win their confirmation. (Sen. Bob Dole would take that office instead.) Bush sat out the election, upset at having, every bit he put it, "been asked to renounce his political birthright" to take an office the president had asked him to fill. Ford would lose to Carter in 1976, ending Bush's ii-twelvemonth tenure at the CIA.

George and Barbara returned to Texas, bought a Houston home and, afterward Herbert Walker's death in 1977, the Walker's Point property in Kennebunkport. The purchase was a stretch for George, as he had to match the offer his mother received from Arab investors seeking to build condos there. But the holding meant a great deal to him. His female parent had been born on the property, his parents had held their wedding ceremony reception there, and George had spent almost every summer there, including the 1 in which he learned to walk. "Maine is for usa similar a magnet," he wrote a friend in this period. "We are drawn to information technology, and I want that to be that way for all our kids, forever." He and Barbara resided there every summer thereafter.

Meanwhile, the couple had been laying the groundwork for an even more aggressive project: George's 1980 bid for the presidency. He paved the way by traveling the state giving hundreds of speeches extolling mainstream conservative positions: costless markets, complimentary merchandise, lower taxes and fewer regulations. But he also supported the Equal Rights Amendment and women's right to choose to end a pregnancy where state law allowed for information technology, which fueled right-wing suspicion that he was really a closet liberal. In contrast to his 1964 Senate bid, in 1980 Bush emphasized his moderation, not his conservatism, thinking that nigh Republicans would exist uncomfortable with the conservative alternative that year, actor and onetime California governor Ronald Reagan. He dismissed Reagan's supply-side economical theories every bit "voodoo economics."

He was wrong, of course; Reagan had an enormous post-obit. While Bush managed to win his political party's Iowa conclave, Reagan destroyed him in New Hampshire and went on to win the White House.

For Bush, in that location was a silver lining. Reagan, feeling he needed the reassuring presence of a vice president from his party's mainstream, intended to nominate President Ford. But when that fell autonomously – Ford'south remarks to the press suggested he expected something alike to a co-presidency – Reagan tapped Bush-league instead.

Equally vice president, Bush-league was assiduously loyal to Reagan, never expressing differences with him in public or fifty-fifty in Chiffonier meetings. "Information technology is an accented determination not to express myself," he would later say. "I don't call back the president should ever have to choose between me and a Cabinet member. That's not the way to have a human relationship of confidence." His candid thoughts were shared only during his weekly luncheons with the president, from which no information ever leaked, according to Schweizer and Schweizer.

"Don't expect me to make policy," he told an aide early on. "(M)y job is to cement my human relationship with Ronald Reagan and articulate his policies."

While Bush'southward commitment to existence a team player did foster a warm relationship with the president, biographers have written of his tensions with First Lady Nancy Reagan, who spread rumors that Bush was having an affair with the widow of a former congressman.

In 1986 the Reagan assistants was shaken by the revelation that it had sold arms to Islamic republic of iran in order to secure the release of American hostages, with near of the proceeds being diverted to the Contras, a rebel group seeking to overthrow Nicaragua'southward communist authorities. The programme violated both an arms embargo in Iran and a 1982 law forbidding back up for the Contras. Documents showed Bush-league was present at several primal meetings where the sales to Iran were discussed, a fact his opponents used against him in his 1988 presidential run.

TO THE OVAL Role

Polls showed the Iran-Contra scandal was hurting Bush'due south chief campaign, contributing to his early and unexpected loss in Iowa, where he finished behind both Bob Dole and televangelist Pat Robertson. Only he came dorsum in New Hampshire – Goldwater flew in to proclaim him the heir to the "conservative revolution" begun in 1964 – and shortly wrapped upwardly his political party'due south nomination.

He started the full general election entrada with a polling deficit as well, with far higher negatives than his lilliputian-known Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Bush'south campaign staff – which included future Fox News head Roger Ailes and the formidable strategist Lee Atwater – persuaded him to go negative, redefining the race in terms of values rather than issues. The virtually effective ads – one produced by the entrada, another by a political action committee – took Dukakis to task for vetoing restrictions on a weekend furlough program for convicted murderers, some of whom – including a felon named Willie Horton – committed rapes or murders while costless. Other ads focused on Dukakis' opposition to a police force requiring students to say the Pledge of Allegiance, and poor water quality in Boston Harbor. Bush-league rallied conservatives with a famous "read my lips" pledge non to heighten taxes.

Bush won the full general election in a landslide, capturing 40 states. He would serve a single term.

Bush had positioned himself every bit the heir to Reagan's legacy, and appears to have seen himself as a capable steward of the nation, rather than the amanuensis of noun modify. On the eve of Bush'southward inauguration, conservative author William F. Buckley described him as "a consolidator" rather than "an evangelist," "a man of intelligence and mutual sense, a public man of conservative temperament" rather than a movement bourgeois. Biographers Schweizer and Schweizer wrote that Bush had "arrived in the White Firm with no clear vision of the direction he wanted to take."

Commentators noted that Bush'south self-effacing qualities – so valuable in affairs or personal negotiation – may have undermined his standing in the public heart. When the Berlin Wall barbarous – perhaps the greatest historical effect of the second half of the 20th century – Bush resisted his aides' calls to make rousing speeches to take credit for what many saw as a triumphant American victory in the Cold War. This was certainly consistent with his personality, but Bush may have had broader national and international interests in heed. In 2011, Newsweek reported that unnamed Bush aides had confirmed that Bush had received a secret cable from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev the nighttime the wall barbarous, urging him not to take any actions that might provoke protests or confrontation at what was an extremely frail moment. Bush reportedly agreed, suggesting he may have put global security interests ahead of personal political ones.

Bush AT WAR

Instead, history will likely remember his presidency for the 1991 Gulf War, in which Bush congenital and deployed an international coalition that reversed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein'due south invasion of Kuwait. Many of the fundamental meetings with security advisers and heads of state were held in Kennebunkport that August. Victory came faster than anyone had expected. In the wake of the disharmonize, polls put Bush's blessing rating at xc percent.

Outwardly, re-election seemed assured, but backside the scenes Bush-league was in a funk and suffering from an overactive thyroid and the side effects of the medications that helped manage the condition. His son Neil was embroiled in the ongoing savings and loan scandal for his role in a billion-dollar depository financial institution collapse. Conservative Republicans were furious with him for breaking his "read my lips" pledge by raising taxes to residue the budget. The economy was in recession. His polling numbers were fast eroding.

"(W)chapeau happens if nosotros should not get in?" Bush wrote in his diary in early on September of that yr. "Then I said to myself, information technology'south not going to happen. I'm a better person, ameliorate qualified, and amend character to exist President, despite some shortcomings I may have. … Everything is ugly and everything is nasty. But we are a family and I have a certain inner peace, which I'm not sure I've always had in a situation similar this."

In Nov 1992 Bush-league lost the presidency to old Arkansas Gov. Beak Clinton in a iii-way race that featured Texas businessman Ross Perot. "George Bush says (we lost) considering he didn't communicate every bit well every bit his predecessor or successor," Barbara would later write. "I don't believe that." Both she and George complained of what they saw equally biased treatment in the press, with George noting his frustration at having his character distorted.

Bush-league's political career was over, but his dynasty was just get-go. By the cease of 1993, son Jeb announced he was going to run for governor of Florida (a motility expected and praised by his parents) and son George W. said he wanted to exist governor of Texas (which many family members initially took as a joke). During their respective 1994 campaigns, both benefited from the family unit's powerful network of supporters, only in the end Jeb lost and "W" won, paving the latter's path to the White House. "The joy is in Texas," Bush would say on election nighttime, "my center is in Florida."

George W. Bush was inaugurated president in January 2001, the 2nd presidential son to sit in the Oval Office. The success of his less serious, less studious eldest kid perplexed Bush-league. When the family gathered at Walker's Point that summer, Bush insisted his son take the seat at the head of the tabular array; subsequently a biographer asked him what that felt similar. "You remember when your child came home with ii A's – and you thought she was going to neglect?" Bush-league said. "That's exactly what it's like." Bush-league as well reportedly went through something of an identity crisis, equally he was no longer the uncontested patriarch and leader of the family. "I used to be George Bush-league," he told friends at a Houston dinner shortly after his son's election. "Now I don't know who the hell I am."

Bush was as well believed to have been concerned by some of his son's policy choices, which were in many respects a repudiation of his ain. In the late summer of 2002, three of the elderberry Bush-league'southward friends and former top aides – Brent Scowcroft, James Baker and Lawrence Eagleberger – publicly challenged West'due south blitz to war in Republic of iraq. It "is not believable that none of these critics consulted their old boss in accelerate," conservative commentator William Safire wrote at the time. "What is axiomatic is that he made no attempt to restrain their attack on his son'due south position."

George W. wasn't the only Bush descendant thought to have White House potential. Jeb was elected governor of Florida in 1998 and 2002 and was expected to be the frontrunner for his party's 2016 presidential nomination, but he was routed by Donald Trump. Jeb'south bilingual son George Prescott Garnica Bush, whose mother is a native of Mexico, is also thought to take loftier political ambitions, having been twice elected Texas country commissioner and gone out of his way to praise President Trump, a man his family unit did not wish to take at Barbara Bush-league's Apr 2018 funeral.

SKYDIVING AT xc

Subsequently leaving the White Firm, Bush kept a low profile, in part because his son was commander in principal for much of the fourth dimension. In 2011, Fourth dimension magazine asked him what he fabricated of the changes in the Centre Eastward. "For 18 years I take resisted talking well-nigh current events," he responded. "I am not going to start now."

"(Due west)hen all the dust is settled and all the crowds are gone, the things that affair are religion, family unit, and friends," Barbara wrote in her 1994 memoir, adding that the mail service-presidential life "is a commencement and not an end."

"We have been inordinately blessed," she added, "and we know that."

Subsequently, Bush shared his frustrations with two of his son's tiptop presidential advisers with biographer Jon Meacham. Defense force Secretarial assistant Donald Rumsfeld "served the president badly," Bush-league was quoted as saying in Meacham's "Destiny and Power," published in November 2015. "I don't like what he did, and I remember it hurt the president having his iron-ass view of everything." Vice President Dick Cheney, who had served in the senior Bush-league'south assistants, had been allowed to build "his own empire there and marched to his own drummer" and was "very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with." He added that his son ultimately had responsibility for their deportment.

Bush and his wife said they did not vote for either Trump or Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, just did not reveal what alternative or write-in candidate they had supported. In 2017, Bush-league told biographer Mike Updegrove that Trump was "a blowhard" who "doesn't know what it means to be president."

In 1999, on the occasion of his 75th birthday, Bush-league jumped out of an airplane for the offset time since existence shot down over the Pacific; he went skydiving three more than times in celebration of his 80th, 85th and – in June 2014 – 90th birthdays. In recent years he suffered from parkinsonism, a vascular disorder similar to Parkinson's affliction, and relied on a wheelchair scooter to get around. "I appear I was going to spring (from an airplane) when I turned ninety," he said in 2011. "My legs' non working properly might be a deterrent." He was hospitalized for five weeks in November and December 2012 after contracting a bronchial infection, but that didn't stop him from jumping out of a helicopter over Kennebunkport for his 90th. He broke a bone in his neck in a July 2015 autumn at his Walker's Bespeak home.

During his son's presidency, Bush formed a friendship with his former nemesis, Bill Clinton, with whom he partnered to rally support for the victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Ike and the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. (Barbara referred to them as the "odd couple.") In 2003 he upset the right fly of his party by personally presenting liberal Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy – a strong opponent of his son's contempo invasion of Republic of iraq – with the George Bush-league Award for Excellence in Public Service, which is given annually by his presidential library. President Barack Obama awarded him the Medal of Freedom in April 2011.

Bush's twilight years were shaken in the fall of 2017, when ten women came forward alleging he had groped their buttocks, nine of them while posing with him for photographs. The alleged incidents, which spanned a 26-twelvemonth period betwixt 1992 and 2016, included a woman who was 16 at the time and another who was a Republican candidate for the Maine Senate. Through a spokesman, Bush apologized for some of the incidents and didn't deny whatsoever of them. "He has patted women's rears in what he intended to exist a practiced-natured fashion," James McGrath said in a statement at the time. Occurring amid a deluge of more harassment allegations against prominent men in politics, journalism, and amusement, the allegations against Bush-league quickly faded from public attention.

George and Barbara connected summering at Walker'southward Point, maintaining friendships in Kennebunkport and Biddeford and donating their time and resources to local causes, including Maine Literacy Volunteers, the Barbara Bush Children's Hospital at Maine Medical Center, and the University of New England in Biddeford, which is domicile to the George and Barbara Bush Center. While their son was president, the couple hosted French President Jacques Chirac and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the compound, which has remained at the touchstone of the Bush family. In 2004, George Prescott Garnica Bush was married at St. Ann's by the Sea, the Kennebunkport church where his cracking-grandfather worshiped; his grandparents wed; his great-grandmother, grandad, uncles and aunts were baptized; and his uncle George W. Bush commencement saw Baton Graham preach and, as a result, quit drinking and became an Evangelical Christian.

Subsequently 73 years of union, Barbara died on April 17, 2018 at their home in Houston, days after electing to cease medical handling for chronic obstructive pulmonary illness and congestive heart failure. She was 92.

In a July 2012 morning boob tube interview at Walker'due south Betoken with his granddaughter Jenna Bush Hager he said his favorite things to practise had been spending time with family and on the water in Maine. Of his presidency, he said he wanted "somebody else to define the legacy" and that he had banned "the L-give-and-take" from his lexicon.

"I think history will go right, indicate out the things I did wrong," he added as waves lapped the rocky shore behind him, "and maybe some of the things we did right."

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Source: https://www.pressherald.com/2018/12/01/george-h-w-bush-president-with-deep-maine-connections-dies-at-94/

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