If you think political incivility originated in Donald Trump’s oafish White House, you forget too much — notably a scene at the 1988 Democratic Convention whose target was George H.W. Bush. A Texas politican of that era brought the house down when she jibed that Bush “was born with a silver foot in his mouth,” echoing the notion that he was oddly inarticulate for a patrician graduate of Andover and Yale.
The Democrats relished her sneer of class envy — an envy that lurks just beneath the American political surface, a frequent indulgence at the expense of the supposedly well born.
The elder President Bush (nicknamed “41” by his less competent son, the 43rd) qualified as such a target. He was the son of a wealthy U.S. senator from Connecticut and inherited a New England mansion by the sea from his father, although he made his own fortune in the Texas oil patch.
Alone among the presidents in my time in Washington, I had no personal acquaintance with him. The question for me was whether he lived up to his patrician billing. His willingness at the outbreak of the Pacific war in 1941 to pass up college and his parents’ pleas to go straight from his boarding school to active service as a naval aviator had elements of noblesse oblige, as did his readiness to seek personal affinities with political foes.
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As a working politician, however, he occasionally recalled the French king who converted to Catholicism for a crown and offered the rationale that “Paris is worth a Mass” — cynicism when called for. As a GOP spokesman as the Watergate crisis deepened, he offered the airy excuse for Nixon that a silly millimeter of criminality was no big deal.
In his campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988 he — or his advertising agency hacks — insinuated that Dukakis as governor of Massachusetts had recklessly furloughed a prisoner who, once released, killed again. Campaigns are saturated with TV ads of elusive sponsorship and I can’t be sure that the mendacious ads were of his personal design. They certainly were his responsibility.
Occasional political expediencies notwithstanding, however, there was about Bush 41 a quality, illustrated by his warm partnership with Clinton — a generosity rare in the party skirmishing today. Republicans like Pat Buchanan and third-party insurgents sank Bush’s re-election prospects in 1992 (poetic justice, some might argue, given the tricky “Read my lips, no new taxes” pledge he was forced to repudiate).
It was more consequential that he and James Baker, his admirable Houston friend and secretary of state, reached out in response to Mikhail Gorbachev’s bid to liquidate the Cold War, even if the “new world order” they envisioned did not materialize. The world owes Bush 41 a debt, even if his hopes fell short, and there was statesmanlike vision in them. I like to think that was his authentic self.
As farewells are spoken at his bier this week, we shall have occasion to note that that the breeding of a gentleman by birth — even one “born with a silver spoon in his mouth” — is never out of place in the chair of George Washington. The present dearth of those qualities in the White House emphasizes, as does the 41st president’s memory, how very crucial they are.
Contributing columnist Edwin M. Yoder Jr. of Chapel Hill is a former editor and columnist in Washington, D.C.
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