George H.W. Bush

George Herbert Walker Bush was born on June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts, into one of America’s most prominent political families — his father, Prescott Bush, was a US Senator from Connecticut. On his eighteenth birthday, he enlisted in the Navy and became its youngest commissioned pilot. He flew 58 combat missions in the Pacific theater during World War II, was shot down over the Bonin Islands in September 1944, and was rescued by a US submarine. After graduating from Yale in just two and a half years on an accelerated postwar schedule, he moved to Texas to enter the oil business, founding Zapata Petroleum in 1953. He was elected to Congress from Houston in 1966, then rose through a series of high-profile appointments — UN Ambassador, Republican National Committee chairman (where he steered the party through Watergate), the first US Liaison to China, and CIA Director — building arguably the most comprehensive foreign policy resume of any modern presidential contender. He ran for president in 1980, lost the nomination to Reagan, was chosen as VP, and served two full terms as Reagan’s loyal deputy before winning the presidency himself in 1988 with 426 electoral votes over Michael Dukakis.

Bush’s presidency unfolded at one of the most consequential moments in twentieth-century history. The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989 — just nine months into his first term. Over the next two years, the Soviet Union dissolved, Germany reunified, and the Cold War that had defined American foreign policy for four decades ended — largely without the catastrophic conflict that strategists had long feared. Bush navigated this transition with a deliberate steadiness that critics called passionless but historians now widely credit as wise. He built a 35-nation coalition and secured UN authorization before launching Operation Desert Storm in January 1991 to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The 100-hour ground campaign was a military triumph: Kuwait was liberated, coalition casualties were minimal, and the stated objective — restoring Kuwaiti sovereignty, not marching to Baghdad — was achieved. Bush’s approval rating reached 89% in Gallup polling immediately after the Gulf War — a number not reached by any president before or since.

The fall was swift. A recession that began in mid-1990 dragged into 1991, and the recovery was sluggish. His 1988 convention pledge — “Read my lips: no new taxes” — had been broken in the 1990 budget deal with congressional Democrats, infuriating the Republican base. Ross Perot entered the 1992 race as an independent and ultimately drew 19% of the popular vote, fracturing the center-right coalition. Bill Clinton, the Arkansas Governor, ran a disciplined campaign focused entirely on the economy and won with 370 electoral votes. Bush finished at 37.4% — the worst performance for an incumbent seeking re-election since Herbert Hoover in 1932. He died on November 30, 2018, at age 94 in Houston, the longest-lived president in American history at the time.

Bush’s approval rating trajectory is one of the most dramatic in the history of Gallup polling. He entered office with a solid 51% approval in January 1989. His handling of the Gulf War coalition and Operation Desert Storm drove his approval to 89% in late February 1991 — the highest approval rating ever recorded for any American president at the time, later matched but not exceeded. The fall was equally dramatic: as the economy stagnated and the “no new taxes” betrayal crystallized, his approval fell to 64% by late 1991 and collapsed to 39% by early 1992. By the summer of 1992, as the election campaign intensified and Perot drew independent voters, Bush’s approval reached a low of 29–34%. He left office at approximately 56%, partially recovering in the lame-duck period, but the election result — 37.4% of the popular vote — told its own story.

The pattern is instructive about the limits of foreign policy popularity in American presidential politics. An 89% approval rating 20 months before an election offered no protection against a domestic economic narrative that a disciplined opponent could sustain. James Carville’s internal campaign phrase — “It’s the economy, stupid” — became one of the most quoted lines in the history of American political strategy precisely because it diagnosed why the Gulf War triumph did not translate into re-election.

Bush’s historical reputation has risen steadily since his 1992 defeat and has accelerated sharply in the post-Iraq War and post-Trump era. The decision not to march to Baghdad in 1991 — widely criticized at the time as leaving the job unfinished — is now almost universally regarded by historians and national security scholars as the correct call, especially in contrast to his son’s 2003 experience. His management of German reunification and the Soviet collapse — achieved without triumphalism, without destabilizing Russia, and without a major crisis — is cited in diplomatic history as a masterclass in great-power transition management.

The Bush dynasty is unique in American history: father and son both reaching the presidency (the Adams family being the only prior parallel). His son, George W. Bush, became the 43rd president in 2001 and served two terms defined by 9/11 and the Iraq War — a war that George H.W. Bush’s memoirs and biographers suggest he privately opposed but did not publicly criticize during his lifetime. The ADA, signed in 1990, remains one of the most consequential domestic achievements of his presidency and one of the most durable bipartisan legacies of the late twentieth century. Presidential historians now typically rank Bush in the upper-middle tier — roughly 10th to 20th — with his foreign policy management rated as among the best of any modern president.