There have been three American presidents who have called Texas home—Lyndon Baines Johnson, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush—or four, if you want to include Dwight Eisenhower, who was born in Texas but moved to Kansas as a boy. George H. W. Bush, who was elected to the nation’s highest office in 1988 after serving two terms as vice president to Ronald Reagan, sometimes seems like the least Texan of all of them.
Bush was born in Massachusetts and raised in Connecticut. His family has deep roots in the East Coast’s political establishment, and his father was a U.S. senator from Connecticut for many years. Bush moved to Texas as an adult, in the late forties, after graduating from Yale, serving as a Navy pilot during World War II, and marrying Barbara Pierce, a similarly blue-blooded girl from New York’s Westchester County.
Even after he launched his political career in Harris County and made a fortune in the oil patches of the Permian Basin, Bush spent much of his time outside of the state. Before becoming vice president, he had held a number of powerful jobs in politics—he represented Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives, he represented the United States as the country’s ambassador to the United Nations, and he served as director of the CIA, among other things. But Bush never served in Austin, and his last job in state politics was as chairman of the Harris County Republican Party. At times, Texans have wondered whether Bush even felt the intense pride for the state that most Texans don’t even bother trying to repress. “Even allowing for the way government has changed in the quarter-century that separates the two Texas presidents, George Bush’s record for helping Texas is spotty at best,” Paul Burka wrote in 1992.
But despite all of that, George H. W. Bush is an exemplar of what is, or used to be, a common type in Texas politics: the pragmatic, business-minded conservative. Both parties have produced plenty of those. In 1970, for example, Bush ran for United States Senate, against the Democrat Lloyd Bentsen. The two men were so similar that pundits were bored to tears. “The only evident difference between them, judging from their own TV spots, seemed to be that Bush loosened his tie a little more and kept one hand in his pocket while strolling,” Al Reinert recalled several years after the election. And incidentally, Bush lost that race. Back in 1970, all things being equal, Texas voters favored the Democratic party.
George and Barbara Bush lived for many years in Houston until their deaths roughly seven months apart from each other in 2018. George H. W. Bush’s legacy as president has been largely obscured by the two Republican presidents who preceded and followed him—his old boss and his eldest son. But as is the case for most people, and most politicians, Bush’s strengths and weaknesses have always looked like two sides of the same coin. As president, he was criticized for being aloof, patrician, and tepid, but he was praised for his dignity, his moderation, his even head, and his even hand. Those may not be the archetypal Texas virtues, but neither are they foreign to us.
In this exclusive excerpt from the forthcoming ‘The Man Who Ran Washington,’ two veteran political correspondents recount how the future Reagan and Bush cabinet member's family legacy, a personal tragedy, and a friendship forged on the Houston Country Club’s tennis courts put a restless middle-aged lawyer on the path to
He built an oil empire, revitalized the state’s Republican party, gave rise to a political dynasty, and forever changed the Lone Star State. Yet the question dogged him his entire life: Was he a real Texan or merely a Yankee transplant?
The grandson of a president. The nephew of a president. And the son of a candidate who’s currently on the stump. Such is the reality for George P. Bush, the state’s first-term land commissioner and the newest face of the family dynasty. But what course is he setting for himself?
Photographer David Valdez is back on familiar turf: on the campaign trail, documenting the public and private moments of a candidate with the surname Bush.
G.B. Trudeau worked the Alamo, SXSW, Bush, Perry, and an Aggie joke into six Doonesbury strips about Texas secession, but unlike his sonogram law series, hardly anybody noticed.
George P. Bush, nephew of Bush 43 and the grandson of Bush 41, is taking a prominent position in the Republican Party of Texas, a move that cements his status as a future political star.
Happy Presidents' Day! Before the three presidents from Texas were politicians they were ... babies. See baby pictures of LBJ, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.
HUTCHISON George H.W. Bush will endorse Hutchison, following Cheney and Baker. The Cheney endorsement was worse than useless; it was self-defeating, because it didn’t help her with conservatives who hate all things Washington, and it hurt her with moderate R’s who saw him as a sinister figure who undermined the
For Sharon Bush, membership in the world's most powerful family had its privileges. But as she discovered after her husband of 23 years—the brother of one president and the son of another—ended their marriage via e-mail, it can be revoked without warning.
In a rare interview, George H.W. Bush—a.k.a. the Former Leader of the Free World—disses Newt and the Dixie Chicks, muses on the restorative powers of Maine, and (who'd have imagined?) has nice things to say about the current occupant of the Oval Office.
Evan Smith is the cofounder of the Texas Tribune, a senior adviser at Emerson Collective, and the former editor in chief and president of Texas Monthly.
When someone says she loves George Bush these days, she’s almost certainly talking about the man William Bennett recently christened “W.” But at least one novelist prefers the ex-president to the presidential hopeful. Next January Simon and Schuster will publish Lydia Millet’s George Bush, Dark Prince of Love, which she
Evan Smith is the cofounder of the Texas Tribune, a senior adviser at Emerson Collective, and the former editor in chief and president of Texas Monthly.
The opening of the George Bush presidential library at Texas A&M is a good occasion to ask two questions on the mind of everyone but Bush himself: How good a president was he? And what sort of ex-president has he been?
Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez has spent most of his 76 years swinging wildly at political heavyweights. Now he’s finally landed a punch—on the president of the United States.
George W. Bush wants to be governor of Texas. He says he’s not following in his father’s footsteps, but his name, his career, and his ideas about politics seem an awful lot like Dad’s.
