by Curt Smith
Bush knew his stance must “cause you a little grief from time to time; and it hurts me. . . . So dear kids—batten down the hatches.” Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii told him “to be prepared for some in Congress to file impeachment papers” if the war went badly. “That’s what he said, and he’s 100% correct. And so I shall say a few more prayers, mainly for our kids in the Gulf, and I shall do what must be done, and I shall be strengthened every day by our family love which lifts me up every single day of my life. I am the luckiest Dad in the whole wide world. I love you. Devotedly, Dad.”
Desert Storm would proceed brilliantly, but Bush couldn’t know that then. I recall his grace and poise under pressure, refusal to ignore principle, capacity for love and sympathy, and a quote he used a year later, at Pearl Harbor: “‘In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart,’” adding, “It is as though God Himself were crying.” Bush cried that day, as does almost everyone who visits Pearl’s sacred shrine.
I have often thought of that time since George Bush left the White House. He was not a nonpartisan president; no one can be, especially in this hyperpartisan era. He was, though, likely our age’s least partisan president, and perhaps our most loving, as a final story shows.
In 2001 my wife and I visited Ukraine, a country that Bush, with help from others here and abroad, had helped liberate from the Soviet Union. We adopted two very young children—Travis, nine months old, and Olivia, twenty-one months old—and brought them here—brought them home. The former president found out and, unsolicited, wrote each a letter. His full text is in the photo folio.
“Dear Olivia,” Bush’s letter began.
“Just a few weeks ago, you arrived in your new home, Rochester, New York in the United States of America. Welcome!
“Already you are a lucky little girl—luckier than most—for you have a mother and dad who love you so much.
“And you have friends, too. I want to be your friend. I used to be President of the United States. Now, though, I am a happy, private citizen; but I know something true. Family and friends are what really count.
“All the best to you, Olivia,” he concluded. “I hope your exciting life ahead in your new homeland is full of happiness, and I hope you spend all of it living in a world at peace.
“Sincerely, George Bush.”
Such a letter was not—not meant to be—“Ask not what your country can do for you” or “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” That was poetry of the voice. Bush’s poetry was different, which is not at all to say lesser, invoking what Faulkner called “the old verities and truths . . . [of] love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice”—works, not words.
George Bush’s was, and is, a poetry of the heart, with character at the core.
APPENDIX
Selected Speeches
The text of the first four selected speeches was released the day of each speech by the White House. The text of the final speech was released by President Bush’s office in 2004.
Nixon Library Dedication Speech
Presidential Library Opening
Yorba Linda, California
Thursday, July 19, 1990
I am very proud to be introduced to this gathering by Ronald Reagan. I know how I got here. To President and Mrs. Nixon, Barbara and I are delighted to be with you on this memorable day. My special greetings to be with all my predecessors. [Many other dignitaries were cited, including cabinet members, members of the Nixon family, Reverend Billy Graham and Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, and entertainer Vicky Carr.] Our thanks for the privilege of helping to dedicate this beautiful library of the thirty-seventh president of the United States of the America.
To Lincoln, the presidency played, as he put it, America’s “mystic chords of memory.” To Teddy Roosevelt, it meant the “bully pulpit,” reflecting American values and her ideals. It was Dwight Eisenhower—beloved Ike—who described its power “to proclaim anew our faith,” and summon “lightness against the dark.”
To occupy this office is to feel a kinship with these and other presidents, each of whom, in his own way, sought to do right—and thus achieve good. Each summoned the best from the idea we call America. Each wondered, I suspect, how he could be worthy of God, and man,
This year an estimated one and a half million people will visit presidential museums and libraries, exploring the lives of these presidents, passed down, like oral history, from one generation to another. They will see how each president is like a finely cut prism with many facets—their achievements and their philosophy, their family and their humanity.
For instance, not far from here, visitors will soon see the library of my distinguished predecessor, the fortieth president of the United States, and Mrs. Reagan. President Reagan, we will not soon forget how you truly blessed America.
Look next to Michigan, where a museum and library honor the thirty-eighth president of the United States, Gerald Ford, and Mrs. Ford. An entire nation is grateful for your decency, your leadership, and your love of country.
Finally, tomorrow morning the first visitors will enter our newest presidential library. They will note that only FDR ran as many times as Richard Nixon—five—for national office, each winning four elections, and that more people voted for Richard Nixon as president than any other man in history. They will hear of Horatio Alger and Alger Hiss; of the book Six Crises and the seventh crisis, Watergate. They will think of Checkers, Millie’s role model. And, yes, Mr. President, they will hear again your answer to my “vision thing”—“Let me make this perfectly clear.”
They will read of your times as president—perhaps as tumultuous as any since Lincoln’s—and of your goal as president—a world where peace would link the community of nations. Yet other young visitors will not remember the years 1969 to 1974. They had not been born when Richard Nixon became president. So to help them understand our thirty-seventh president, here is what I would tell those who journey to Yorba Linda.
I would say, first, look at perhaps the truest index of any man—his family. Think of his mother—a gentle Quaker—and his father, who built their small frame house less than a hundred yards from here. Think of his daughters, Tricia and Julie. Any parent would be proud of children with the loyalty and love of these two women. Think finally of a very gracious First Lady, who ranks among the most admired women of postwar America: the woman who we know, and love, as Pat.
As First Lady, Pat Nixon championed the Right to Read program, brought the Parks to People program to the disabled and disadvantaged, and refurbished the White House and opened it to more people than ever before. She believed the White House should be alight like Washington’s other monuments—and so it was. She was our most widely traveled First Lady, visiting five continents and twenty-two nations—overcoming poverty and tragedy to become a mirror of America’s heart, and love.
When, in 1958, foreign mobs stoned the Nixons’ car, she was, an observer said, “stronger than any man.” Yet it was also Pat who moved pianist Duke Ellington, at a White House dinner, to improvise a melody. “I shall pick a name,” he said, “gentle, graceful—like Patricia.” Mrs. Nixon, the Secret Service called you “Starlight,” and your husband has said it best: “You fit that name to a T.” So once again, I won’t ask you to stand up—you’ve already done it. But let us show our appreciation for the grace and beauty that Pat Nixon brought to the White House.
Next, I would say to visitors here: Look at Richard Nixon the man. He had an intellectual’s complexity. (Knowing how you feel about some intellectuals, Mr. President, I don’t mean to offend you.) He was an author of eight books, each composed on his famous yellow legal pads, who, like his favorite author, Tolstoy, admired the dignity of manual labor. He worked in the most pragmatic of arenas, yet insisted that “politics is poetry, not prose.” He believed in love of country, and in God—in loyalty to friends, and protecting loved ones. He was also a soft touch when it came to kids. Believe me, I can empathize.
L
et me repeat a story which President Nixon himself enjoys—I hope he enjoys it. One day, greeting an airport crowd, he heard a young girl shouting, “How is Smokey the Bear?” then living at the Washington National Zoo. The girl kept repeating the question. Not grasping her words, the president was baffled, asking an aide for translation. “Smokey the Bear,” the aide mumbled, pointing to the girl. “Washington National Zoo.” Triumphant, President Nixon walked over, extended his hand, and said, “How do you do, Miss Bear?”
I’d be the last to confuse verbal confusion. After all, some say English is my only foreign language. The point is, President Nixon was merely being kind, just as he mailed those handwritten letters to defeated rivals like his friend Hubert Humphrey—or saw that when the pows returned home in early 1973 to a White House dinner each wife received a corsage. Just as Richard Nixon was extraordinarily controversial, he could also be uncommonly sensitive to the feelings of other people.
This brings me to what I would next tell those who travel to Yorba Linda. What Richard Nixon said of Dwight Eisenhower in a 1969 eulogy was true, also, of himself: “He came from the heart of America”—not geographically, perhaps, but culturally. Richard Nixon was the quintessence of Middle America, and touched deep chords of response in millions of her citizens—as president, upholding what he termed “the Silent Majority” from Dallas to Davenport, and Syracuse to Siler City.
He loved America’s good, quiet, decent people; he spoke for them; he felt, deeply, on their behalf. Theodore White would say: “Middle America had been without a great leader for generations, and in Richard Nixon it . . . elevated a man of talent and ability.” For millions of Americans, this president became something they had rarely known: a voice—speaking loudly and eloquently for their values and their dreams.
Finally, and most importantly, I would say to visitors: Richard Nixon helped change the course not only of America but of the entire world. He believed in returning power to the people—so he created revenue sharing. He believed that young people should be free to choose their future—so he ended the draft. He knew that the great outdoors is precious but fragile—so he created the Environmental Protection Agency: an historic step to help preserve, and wisely use, our natural resources. He helped the United States reach new horizons in space and technology—and began a pioneering cancer initiative that gave hope and life to millions.
All of this Richard Nixon did. Yet future generations will remember him most, in my view, for dedicating his life to the greatest cause offered any president: the cause of peace among nations.
Who can forget how he endured much in his quest for peace with honor in Vietnam? He knew that true peace means the triumph of freedom, not merely the absence of war. As president, he served this country’s special mission to help those around the world for whom America has always been a morning star of liberty—engaging in diplomatic summitry and helping change the postwar bipolar globe.
Who can forget how in Moscow Richard Nixon signed the first agreement to limit strategic nuclear arms, giving new hope to the world for lasting peace, or how he planted the first fragile seeds of peace in the Middle East?
Who can forget how Golda Meir [former prime minister of Israel], whose statue is inside [the Nixon Library and Museum], credited him with saving Israel during the [1973] Yom Kippur War?
Even now, memories resound of President Nixon’s trip to China—the week that revolutionized the world. No American president had ever stood on the soil of the People’s Republic of China. As President Nixon stepped from Air Force One and extended his hand to Zhou Enlai, his vision ended more than two decades of isolation.
“Being president,” he often said, “is nothing compared with what you can do as president.” Mr. President, you worked with every fiber of your being to help achieve a generation of peace. Today, as the movement toward democracy sweeps our globe, you can take great pride that history will say of you: Here was a true architect of peace.
There have been literally millions of words written about Richard Nixon, but let me close with a passage from the president himself. It comes from his first inaugural address—January 20, 1969—where the new president spoke of how the “greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.”
He began by noting that within the lifetime of most present, mankind would celebrate a new year which occurs only once in a thousand years—the start of a new millennium—and that America had the “chance,” he said, “to lead the world onto that high ground of peace that man has dreamed of since the dawn of civilization.”
Finally, Richard Nixon concluded, “if we succeed, generations to come will say of us that we helped make the world safe for mankind. I believe the American people are ready to answer this call.”
Mr. President, you helped America answer what you termed “its summons to greatness.” Thank you for serving the cause of peace. God bless you and your wonderful family. Now it is my honor, as president of the United States, to introduce the thirty-seventh president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon.
Just War Speech
National Religious Broadcasters
Sheraton Hotel, Washington DC
Monday, January 28, 1991
This marks the fifth time I have addressed the annual convention of the National Religious Broadcasters. Once again, it is an honor to be back. Let me begin by congratulating you on your theme of “Declaring His Glory to All Nations.” It is a theme eclipsing denominations—and reflecting many of the eternal teachings in scripture.
I speak, of course, of the teachings which uphold moral values like tolerance, compassion, faith, and courage. They remind us that while God can live without man, man cannot live with God.
His love and His justice inspire in us a yearning for faith and a compassion for the weak and oppressed as well as the courage and conviction to oppose tyranny and injustice. Matthew also reminds us that the meek shall inherit the earth.
At home, these values imbue the policies which you and I support. Like me, you endorse adoption, not abortion—and last year, you helped ensure that the option of religious-based child care will not be restricted or eliminated by the federal government.
I commend your concern on behalf of Americans with disabilities—and your belief that students who go to school to nourish their minds should also be allowed to nourish their souls. I have not lessened my commitment to restoring voluntary prayer in school.
These actions can make America a kinder, gentler place because they reaffirm the values I spoke of earlier—values that must be central to the life of every individual and nation. The clergyman Richard Cecil once said: “There are two classes of the wise: the men who serve God because they have found Him, and the men who seek Him because they have not found Him yet.” Abroad—as in America—our task is to serve and seek wisely through the policies we pursue.
Nowhere is this more true than in the Persian Gulf—where despite the protestations of Saddam Hussein, it is not Iraq against the United States, it’s the regime of Saddam Hussein against the world. Fifty years ago we had the chance to stop another aggressor, and missed it. We will not make that mistake again.
Saddam has tried to cast this conflict as a religious war—but it has nothing to do with religion per se. It has, on the other hand, everything to do with what religion embodies. Good versus evil. Right versus wrong. Human dignity and freedom versus tyranny and oppression.
The war in the Gulf is not a Christian war or a Jewish war—or a Muslim war. It is a Just War—and it is a war in which good will prevail.
I am told that the principles of a “Just War” originated with classical Greek and Roman philosophers like Plato and Cicero. Later, they were expounded by such Christian theologians as Ambrose, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas.
The first principle of a Just War is that it supports a just cause. Our cause could not be more noble. We seek Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait—completely, immediately, and without condition: the restoration of Kuwait’s legitimate governmen
t; and the security and stability of the Gulf. We will see that Kuwait once again is free, the nightmare of Iraq’s brutal occupation is ended, and that naked aggression will not be rewarded.
We seek nothing for ourselves. As I have said, U.S. forces will leave as soon as their mission is over, when they are no longer needed or desired. And let me add, we do not seek the destruction of Iraq. We have respect for the people of Iraq—and importance of Iraq in the region. We do not want a country so destabilized that Iraq itself will be a target for aggression.
A Just War must also be declared by legitimate authority. Operation Desert Storm is supported by unprecedented United Nations’ solidarity—the principle of collective self-defense. Twelve Security Council resolutions and, in the Gulf, twenty-eight nations from six continents united—resolute—that we will not waver and that Saddam’s aggression will not stand.
I salute the aid—economic and military—from countries who have joined in this unprecedented effort—whose courage and sacrifice have inspired the world. We’re not going it alone—but believe me, we are going to see it through.
Every war is fought for a reason. But a Just War is fought for right reasons—moral, not selfish. Let me tell you a story—a tragic story—about a family whose two sons, eighteen and nineteen, reportedly refused to lower the Kuwaiti flag in front of their home. For this crime, they were executed by the Iraqis. Then, unbelievably, their parents were asked to pay the price of the bullets used to kill them.
Some ask whether it is moral to use force to stop the rape, pillage, and plunder of Kuwait. My answer: Extraordinary diplomatic efforts having been used to resolve the matter peacefully, it would be immoral not to use force.
A Just War must be a last resort. As I have often said, we did not want war. But you all know the verse from Ecclesiastes: There is “a time for peace, a time for war.” From August 2, 1990, to January 15, 1991—166 days—we tried to resolve this conflict.