George H. W. Bush (1924–2018,) fully George Herbert Walker Bush, was an American Republican-party political leader who served as the 41st president of the United States 1989–93. Bush was the first president of the post-Cold War era.
Born in Milton, Massachusetts, Bush was the son of an investment banker and senator from Connecticut. After high school, Bush joined the navy and served as a torpedo bomber pilot on aircraft carriers in the Pacific during World War II; the Japanese shot him down in 1944. After the war, he received a degree in economics from Yale and founded a successful oil-drilling company in Texas.
Bush emerged as a national political leader during the 1970s. After holding numerous important foreign policy and administrative assignments in Republican politics, he served two terms as vice president (1980, 1984) under Ronald Reagan. In 1988, he was elected the 41st president of the United States.
Bush’s administration was marked by his assertive foreign policy, which encompassed ordering the invasion of Panama 1989 and presiding over the US-led United Nations alliance to push Iraqi forces from Kuwait in the Gulf War 1991. He also signed nuclear arms limitation treaties with the USSR and Russia and the North American Free Trade Agreement 1992 with Canada and Mexico. His domestic record was significantly weaker—Bush faced a sluggish economy, high unemployment, and an enormous budget deficit, forcing him to break his election promise and raise taxes in 1990.
In the 1992 presidential elections, Bush lost to Democrat Bill Clinton. Eight years later, Bush’s son, George W. Bush, became US president in 2001.
In his post-presidency, George H. W. Bush worked closely with Bill Clinton to raised tens of millions of dollars in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In his later years, Bush was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and was frequently in and out of the hospital. When he died, Bush was still heartbroken over wife Barbara‘s death eight months earlier; they were married for 73 years.
Bush published All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings (1999.)
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You do not reform a world by ignoring it.
—George H. W. Bush
Topics: World
We are a nation of communities…a brilliant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.
—George H. W. Bush
Topics: Humanity
The greatest gift a parent can give a child is unconditional love. As a child wanders and strays, finding his bearings, he needs a sense of absolute love from a parent. There’s nothing wrong with tough love, as long as the love is unconditional.
—George H. W. Bush
Communism didn’t fall. It was pushed.
—George H. W. Bush
Topics: Communism
People say I’m indecisive, but I don’t know about that.
—George H. W. Bush
Topics: Politics, Politicians
Think about every problem, every challenge, we face. The solution to each starts with education.
—George H. W. Bush
Use power to help people. For we are given power not to advance our own purposes nor to make a great show in the world, nor a name. There is but one just use of power and it is to serve people.
—George H. W. Bush
Topics: Helpfulness
I take as my guide the hope of a saint:
in crucial things, unity-
in important things, diversity-
in all things, generosity.
—George H. W. Bush
I’ll be glad to reply to or dodge your questions, depending on what I think will help our election most.
—George H. W. Bush
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