George H Bush Quotes

I have opinions of my own - strong opinions - but I don't always agree with them.

When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved…

There is but one just use of power, and it is to serve people.

Nine times out of 10, the most charming thing to say in any given situation will be the exact opposite of what one really feels.

I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history... The overt reversal of America's basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.

It's striking how many of the world's biggest problems, and many of the small ones too. are eliminated by the simplest of solutions – having women around.

It's a very good question, very direct, and I'm not going to answer it.

Four years of Jimmy Carter gave us two titanic Reagan landslides, peace and prosperity for eight blessed years - and even a third term for his feckless vice president, George H.W. Bush.

I always like to be in the presence of people who are good at and love their jobs, Irrespective of their jobs.

A volunteer is a person who can see what others cannot see; who can feel what most do not feel. Often, such gifted persons do not think of themselves as volunteers, but as citizens - citizens in the fullest sense: partners in civilization.

The military was providing him (George H.W. Bush) with an education that was not available at Andover or Yale.

We're enjoying sluggish times, and not enjoying them very much.

I find it significant that most of the people who believe in just war have never fought in one; examples: Barack W. Bush and George H. Obama.

And I want to be there for you if you get a bad bounce in life, and no doubt you will for the seas do indeed get rough.

We can find meaning and reward by serving some higher purpose than ourselves, a shining purpose, the illumination of a thousand points of light.

Just as George H. W. Bush, Leon Panetta, and Mike Pompeo were still in the CIA after ending their stints as CIA Director, Brennan was still in the CIA after he ended his stint as CIA Director in January 2017.

We must be sure we don't inflame the passions of unthinking men to garner a vote

If you help them (the crew) create good memories, they'll forget all the bad stuff

There was something very American about this ability to dwell constantly in the realm of the improvable superlative.

He was the subject of a little respectful ribbing. But he was, of course, the captain, which meant he had to do lots of the ribbing himself.

Never forget that friends, true friends, get pleasure - pure selfish pleasure - from being around when they are needed.

although I was as zealous in my anti-faith as Paul was in his belief I would be lying if I did not confess to a slight chink in my armour of nonbelief.

If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us.

I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.

We don't want an America that is closed to the world. What we want is a world that is open to America.

I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I'm President of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli.

...My advice to young people might be as follows: 1. Don't get down when your life takes a bad turn. Out of adversity comes challenge and often success. 2. Don't blame others for your setbacks. 3. When things go well, always give credit to others. 4. Don't talk all the time. Listen to your friends and mentors and learn from them. 5. Don't brag about yourself. Let others point out your virtues, your strong points. 6. Give someone else a hand. When a friend is hurting, show that friend you care. 7. Nobody likes an overbearing big shot. 8. As you succeed, be kind to people. Thank those who help you along the way. 9. Don't be afraid to shed a tear when your heart is broken because a friend is hurting. 10. Say your prayers!!

You know, you should think about getting in touch with Gabriel, he's your half-brother and also a really good guy.” Delilah looks at me cynically. “Gabriel despises me.” “He despises Ethan, you I think he might just have some time for. After all, you're both dhamphirs.” “That's like me telling you you'll get along with George Bush because you're both human.” Delilah replies snidely. I get her point, but still I grin and respond. “You're right, we would definitely get along. He'd make me feel all intelligent and shit.

To this day, George H.W. Bush remains the only real-life president to congratulate superheroes in videogames for a job well done.

Jim Baker, chief of staff for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and almost everybody’s model for managing the West Wing, advised Priebus not to take the job.

Anyone who (dis)likes G. W. Bush, but (dis)likes B. H. Obama, is either completely delusional or a complete idiot.

Read my lips: no new taxes.

Together Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush increased it from $75 billion to $300 billion. Under Clinton it fell to zero. The second President Bush pushed it to $1.2 trillion.

I will never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don't care what the facts are.

Old guys can still do fun things

I’ve always been intimidated by gyms, have never been able to enjoy the towel-round-the-shoulder confidence of somebody who knows he can bench-press 250 pounds, or even knows what that means or how much 250 pounds weighs. I just know I don’t like lifting heavy things, especially since I had this wrist injury which stopped me playing tennis and which means that I’ve gone from being fit and thin-looking to just a feeble streak of unshouldered manhood whose only saving grace is that he doesn’t take up much space, who leaves plenty of room for others—especially now that I was several days into a quasi-hunger strike.

President George W. Bush. He worked directly under CIA “asset” James Comey, who held the position of Deputy Attorney General, and Comey worked directly under CIA officer John Ashcroft, the Attorney General of the United States. As FBI Director, Wray worked directly under Attorney General William Barr, who, like Wray, is a CIA officer who used an “official cover.” Barr was “officially” in the CIA in the 1970s, first with the CIA’s Intelligence Directorate from 1973 to 1975 and then with the CIA’s Office of Legislative Counsel from 1975 to 1977.[357] Shortly after CIA officer George H. W. Bush became President, he appointed Barr to be an Assistant

Looking back on his adolescence from the vantage point of his mid-eighties, George H.W. Bush candidly admitted, "I might have been obsessed with bodies – boobs they are now called. But what seventeen-year-old kid was not? Guilty am I.

Americans unhappy with the reflexively polarized politics of the first decades of the twenty-first century will find the presidency of George H. W. Bush refreshing, even quaint. He embraced compromise as a necessary element of public life, engaged his political foes in the passage of important legislation, and was willing to break with the base of his own party in order to do what he thought was right, whatever the price. Quaint, yes: But it happened, in America, only a quarter of a century ago.

But most accounts agree that the residence workers’ devotion to President George H. W. Bush was more than customary—it was genuine, almost profound. The Bushes were generally easy to please, and the residence workers found themselves quickly at ease with them.

There would be, in other words, one chief of staff in name—the unimportant one—and various others, more important, in practice, ensuring both chaos and Trump’s own undisputed independence. Jim Baker, chief of staff for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and almost everybody’s model for managing the West Wing, advised Priebus not to take the job.

On November 9, 1989, while CIA experts on Soviet and East German politics were briefing President George H. W. Bush on why the Berlin Wall was not likely to come down any time soon, a National Security Council staff member politely entered the Oval Office and urged the president to turn on his television set—to see both East and West Germans battering away at the Wall.

The boar held a VCR reote control and cackled maliciously as he watched a video of U.S. politicians grinning with their one-time budy Saddam--Dick Cheney, Gulf War-era Secretary of State James Baker, Rev. Jesse Jackson, Bob Dole, George H.W. Bush, to the tune of "Taking Care of Business." And then the viewers saw themselves in a mirror emblazoned with the words "You are a witness.

During the 1980s, however, the Court came under increasing pressure to repudiate Roe v. Wade. First the Reagan administration and then the administration of President George H. W. Bush asked the Court to overturn the decision, on five separate occasions. In 1980 the Republican party’s platform had called for the first time for the appointment of judges “who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life.

The Muslim world in general, the Arab world in particular was confirmed in its grievances, particularly that the West was prepared to use its overwhelming military superiority to keep Muslims subordinate. 'Europe', the Europe of the Franco-German plan to create a federal union strong enough to stand on terms of equality with the United States as a world power, had been humiliated by the failure of its efforts to avert the war. Liberal opinion, dominant throughout the European media and academia, strong also in their American equivalents, was outraged by the spectacle of raw military force supplanting reason and legality as the means by which relations between states were ordered. Reality is an uncomfortable companion, particularly to people of good will. George H.W. Bush's proclamation of a new world order had persuaded too many in the West that the world's future could be managed within a legal framework, by discussion and conciliation. The warning uttered by his son that the United States was determined to bring other enemies of nuclear and regional stability to book - Iran, North Korea - was founded by his political opponents profoundly unsettling. The reality of the Iraq campaign of March - April 2003 is, however, a better guide to what needs to be done to secure the safety of our world than any amount of law-making or treaty-writing can offer.

For extra measure, [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan put another 'hold' on two other GOP favorites for federal courts of appeals, prompting White House counsel [Boyden] Gray made sure that [George H.] Bush knew that Moynihan had been blocking action on the appeals court nominations 'to extract a district court judge from us,' and he advised the president to sign the Sotomayor nomination but hold off making it official until the administration had gotten word that the two appeals court nominees were confirmed.

I believe very sincerely that we were extremely fortunate to have the recent recession while George Bush was President, just as we were very lucky that the recession of 1990 was under George H.W. Bush's presidency and the recession of 1981 was under Ronald Reagan. I think the fact that recessions tend to happen when Republicans are in the White House is a perfect example of God's divine providence. I've heard it said that the good Lord doesn't give you anything you can't handle, and maybe that's why he tries to always have us running things during economic downturns.

The conservative policies and principles that had once defined what it meant to be a Republican were being replaced by complete allegiance to one man—who wasn’t actually a conservative. One of the clearest manifestations of this was the lack of any platform for the Republican Party in 2020. In place of the extensive policy document that each party normally adopts every four years, the Republican Party adopted a resolution that simply affirmed, “The Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” I talked to Condoleezza Rice in the spring of 2021. I had served as deputy assistant secretary of state for the Near East when Condi was secretary of state, and I’d known her since she served on the National Security Council staff during George H. W. Bush’s administration. She was an expert on the Soviet Union and a student of history. We discussed the cult of personality that had captured our party. This was something America had never experienced before. I asked Condi if she could think of any historic examples of countries successfully throwing off cults of personality. “Not without great violence and upheaval,” she said.

The atmosphere in Washington was different. President Reagan remained popular, despite having committed crimes far worse than those that had brought Nixon down: financing terrorism in Nicaragua, trading weapons for hostages with Iran, and turning women and girls into mangled corpses on the streets of Beirut. Reagan’s collaborator Vice President George H. W. Bush looked likely to become the next president. Somehow—and Jasper could not figure out how this trick had been worked—people who challenged the president and caught him out cheating and lying were no longer heroes, as they had been in the seventies, but instead were considered disloyal and even anti-American.

From 1960 to 1970, as the New Deal expanded into the Great Society, the number of Americans in poverty declined from 40 million to under 25 million. During the 1970s, after the rise of dog whistle politics but before its full hijacking by rightwing oligarchs, the numbers in poverty remained steady. During the 1980s, as Reagan and then George H.W. Bush reigned, those in poverty soared to 35 million. At the end of Clinton’s second term in 2000, those mired in poverty had fallen to just above 30 million. But following the Great Recession that marked the end George W. Bush’s presidency, over 46 million Americans were in poverty.63 That’s an additional 16 million good folks pushed into the material and emotional hardship of destitution in just one decade.

In 1940, Fabian socialist H. G. Wells wrote his own The New World Order, popularizing the phrase. The book advocated unification of the nations of the world to end war and bring global peace. Since the late eighteenth century, when the Illuminati first called for the New World Order, many globalists have openly advocated its creation, including President Woodrow Wilson, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, President George H. W. Bush, British prime minister Tony Blair, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, banker David Rockefeller, and Vice President Joe Biden. “The world’s elite deal in only one commodity—power,” Marrs wrote in The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies That Threaten to Take Over America. “They seek

Angered by his quick recovery, commentators sought to recast the triumphant scene of his return to the White House. When Trump appeared on the White House balcony after his return from Walter Reed, NBC News’s presidential historian Michael Beschloss tweeted, “In America, our Presidents have generally avoided strongman balcony scenes—that’s for other countries with authoritarian systems.”61 While the tweet was amplified by Beschloss’s fellow Resistance members, Americans with better knowledge of presidential history responded with pictures of every other president pictured at the balcony, be it President Barack Obama (many, many times—once with communist dictator Xi Jinping, no less), President George W. Bush, President George H. W. Bush, President Ronald Reagan, President Jimmy Carter, President Richard Nixon, on back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.62

And George H. W. Bush did it. He delivered the message to Senator Glenn Beall, who then relayed that pressure to his brother George. George Beall donated his papers to Frostburg State University in Maryland. In those records is an official “memo to file” from July 1973, acknowledging the attempted intervention. “With respect to conversations with my brother Glenn,” Beall writes, “the discussions were most superficial and very guarded. He occasionally mentioned to me the names of persons who had been to see him or who had called him with respect to the Baltimore County investigation. Names of persons that I remember him telling me about included Vice President Agnew, [the engineer] Allen Greene [sic] and George Bush….The only specific information that he passed along to me that I can recall related to a complaint that he had heard from Bush to the effect that attorneys in this office were said to be harassing persons who had been questioned by us in the Baltimore County investigation.

In 1940, Fabian socialist H. G. Wells wrote his own The New World Order, popularizing the phrase. The book advocated unification of the nations of the world to end war and bring global peace. Since the late eighteenth century, when the Illuminati first called for the New World Order, many globalists have openly advocated its creation, including President Woodrow Wilson, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, President George H. W. Bush, British prime minister Tony Blair, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, banker David Rockefeller, and Vice President Joe Biden. “The world’s elite deal in only one commodity—power,” Marrs wrote in The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies That Threaten to Take Over America. “They seek to gain and maintain the controlling power that comes from great wealth, usually gained through the monopoly of ownership over basic resources. Politics and social issues matter little to the globalist ruling elite, who move smoothly between corporate business and government service… It is this unswerving attention to commerce and banking that lies behind nearly all modern events. It is the basis for a ‘New World Order’ mentioned by both Hitler and former President George H. W. Bush.”19 Over the last century, the elite have engaged in a massive, covert campaign to prepare humanity for the New World Order.

The Sputnik moment for the Open Classroom movement came in 1983, when a blue-ribbon commission appointed by Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, T. H. Bell, delivered a scathing report, entitled, A Nation at Risk, whose famously ominous conclusion warned that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” The response this time was a fervent and growing bipartisan campaign for more accountability from schools, mostly in the form of more of those standardized tests. And by 2001, “accountability” had become a buzzword. Under President George W. Bush that year, the “No Child Left Behind” Act tied federal funding to students’ performance on tests. Eight years later, President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” program sought similar results, although this time using carrots instead of sticks. However the federal policy was constructed, the message was becoming clear: for schools to survive, their students would have to score high on mandated tests. Teachers consequently understood that to preserve their own jobs, they’d have to spend more time and energy on memorization and drills. The classrooms of the so-called Third Industrial Revolution began to look ever more like the dreary common schools of the turn of the twentieth century, and the spirit of Emile retreated once again.

The one thing that seemed to be on our side, however, was the reality on the streets of Egypt. Day after day, the protests spread and Mubarak’s regime seemed to crumble around him. On February 11, I woke to the news that Mubarak had fled to the resort town of Sharm el Sheikh and resigned. It was, it seemed, a happy ending. Jubilant crowds celebrated in the streets of Cairo. I drafted a statement for Obama that drew comparisons between what had just taken place and some of the iconic movements of the past several decades—Germans tearing down a wall, Indonesians upending a dictatorship, Indians marching nonviolently for independence. I went up to the Oval Office that morning to review the statement with Obama. “You should feel good about this,” he said. “I do,” I replied. “Though I’m not sure all of the principals do.” “You know,” he said, “one of the things that made it easier for me is that I didn’t really know Mubarak.” He mentioned that George H. W. Bush had called Mubarak at the height of the protests to express his support. “But it’s not just Bush. The Clintons, Gates, Biden—they’ve known Mubarak[…] “for decades.” I thought of Biden’s perennial line: All foreign policy is an “extension of personal relationships. “If it had been King Abdullah,” Obama said, referring to the young Jordanian monarch with whom he’d struck up a friendship, “I don’t know if I could have done the same thing.” As Obama delivered a statement to a smattering of press, it seemed that history might at last be breaking in a positive direction in the Middle East. His tribute to the protests was unabashed. Yet our own government was still wired to defer to the Egyptian military, and ill equipped to support a transition to democracy once the president had spoken.

In the fall of 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait, and in the run-up to the Gulf War, Americans were sickened by a story that emerged. On October 10, 1990, a fifteen-year-old refugee from Kuwait appeared before a congressional Human Rights Caucus.23 The girl—she would give only her first name, Nayirah—had volunteered in a hospital in Kuwait City. She tearfully testified that Iraqi soldiers had stolen incubators to ship home as plunder, leaving over three hundred premature infants to die. Our collective breath was taken away—“These people leave babies to die on the cold floor; they are hardly human.” The testimony was seen on the news by approximately 45 million Americans, was cited by seven senators when justifying their support of war (a resolution that passed by five votes), and was cited more than ten times by George H. W. Bush in arguing for U.S. military involvement. And we went to war with a 92 percent approval rating of the president’s decision. In the words of Representative John Porter (R-Illinois), who chaired the committee, after Nayirah’s testimony, “we have never heard, in all this time, in all circumstances, a record of inhumanity, and brutality, and sadism, as the ones that [Nayirah had] given us today.” Much later it emerged that the incubator story was a pseudospeciating lie. The refugee was no refugee. She was Nayirah al-Sabah, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The incubator story was fabricated by the public relations firm Hill + Knowlton, hired by the Kuwaiti government with the help of Porter and cochair Representative Tom Lantos (D-California). Research by the firm indicated that people would be particularly responsive to stories about atrocities against babies (ya think?), so the incubator tale was concocted, the witness coached. The story was disavowed by human rights groups (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch) and the media, and the testimony was withdrawn from the Congressional Record—long after the war.

During the Russia-NATO Council session in Bucharest in April 2008, Putin called Ukraine “a complex state formation. If the NATO issue is added there,” he said, “along with other problems, this may bring Ukraine to the verge of existence as a sovereign state.” Later during the same summit, in a discussion with U.S. President George Bush, Putin said that Ukraine was “not a real country.” This is clearly light-years away from the “common principles” laid down in the Founding Act, signed by Russia and the members of NATO in 1997, in which Russia had recognized the inherent right of all countries “to choose the means to ensure their own security.” Putin’s declaration was a scarcely veiled threat that Russia would intervene if Ukraine decided to join NATO. Doubts on Ukraine’s viability as a sovereign state were expressed on many occasions by leading Russians. On March 16, 2009, the Kremlin ideologue Gleb Pavlovsky wrote in the Russkiy Zhurnal, a Russian online magazine of which he is the owner, an article titled: “Will Ukraine Lose Its Sovereignty?” This article was followed four days later by an interview with Sergey Karaganov, the éminence grise of the Russian foreign policy community and head of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. This article had the title: “No One Needs Monsters. Desovereignization of Ukraine.” Karaganov depicted Ukraine as a failed state that was in a process of “passive desovereignization.” The process was, however, not only “passive.” Karaganov warned that “Russia will not want to see absolutely ungovernable territories close by.” Yuriy Shcherbak, former Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, wrote in response: “In military language it is called the ideological-propagandistic support of the future operation on capturing the territory of a sovereign state.” In fact, Russian politicians continued to denounce Ukraine as an “artificial” country that had no right to exist. At the height of the financial crisis Valery Fadeyev, editor of the political journal Ekspert, wrote: “Ukraine is cheap, we can buy it.” It sounded less aggressive, almost as a joke, but it expressed the same contempt for Russia’s neighbor and its status as an independent, sovereign state [239―40].

American DEWAR FAMILY Cameron Dewar Ursula “Beep” Dewar, his sister Woody Dewar, his father Bella Dewar, his mother PESHKOV-JAKES FAMILY George Jakes Jacky Jakes, his mother Greg Peshkov, his father Lev Peshkov, his grandfather Marga, his grandmother MARQUAND FAMILY Verena Marquand Percy Marquand, her father Babe Lee, her mother CIA Florence Geary Tony Savino Tim Tedder, semiretired Keith Dorset OTHERS Maria Summers Joseph Hugo, FBI Larry Mawhinney, Pentagon Nelly Fordham, old flame of Greg Peshkov Dennis Wilson, aide to Bobby Kennedy Skip Dickerson, aide to Lyndon Johnson Leopold “Lee” Montgomery, reporter Herb Gould, television journalist on This Day Suzy Cannon, gossip reporter Frank Lindeman, television network owner REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth U.S. president Jackie, his wife Bobby Kennedy, his brother Dave Powers, assistant to President Kennedy Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press officer Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Lyndon B. Johnson, thirty-sixth U.S. president Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh U.S. president Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth U.S. president Ronald Reagan, fortieth U.S. president George H. W. Bush, forty-first U.S. president British LECKWITH-WILLIAMS FAMILY Dave Williams Evie Williams, his sister Daisy Williams, his mother Lloyd Williams, M.P., his father Eth Leckwith, Dave’s grandmother MURRAY FAMILY Jasper Murray Anna Murray, his sister Eva Murray, his mother MUSICIANS IN THE GUARDSMEN AND PLUM NELLIE Lenny, Dave Williams’s cousin Lew, drummer Buzz, bass player Geoffrey, lead guitarist OTHERS Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz Sam Cakebread, friend of Jasper Murray Byron Chesterfield (real name Brian Chesnowitz), music agent Hank Remington (real name Harry Riley), pop star Eric Chapman, record company executive German FRANCK FAMILY Rebecca Hoffmann Carla Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive mother Werner Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive father Walli Franck, son of Carla Lili Franck, daughter of Werner and Carla Maud von Ulrich, née Fitzherbert, Carla’s mother Hans Hoffmann, Rebecca’s husband OTHERS Bernd Held, schoolteacher Karolin Koontz, folksinger Odo Vossler, clergyman REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (Communist) Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor Egon Krenz, successor to Honecker Polish Stanislaw “Staz” Pawlak, army officer Lidka, girlfriend of Cam Dewar Danuta Gorski, Solidarity activist REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver Lech Wałesa, leader of the trade union Solidarity General Jaruzelski, prime minister Russian DVORKIN-PESHKOV FAMILY Tanya Dvorkin, journalist Dimka Dvorkin, Kremlin aide, Tanya’s twin brother Anya Dvorkin, their mother Grigori Peshkov, their grandfather Katerina Peshkov, their grandmother Vladimir, always called Volodya, their uncle Zoya, Volodya’s wife Nina, Dimka’s girlfriend OTHERS Daniil Antonov, features editor at TASS Pyotr Opotkin, features editor in chief Vasili Yenkov, dissident Natalya Smotrov, official in the Foreign Ministry

The over-optimism that energized U.S. foreign policy under the George W. Bush administration contributed to an underappreciation of the risks of action, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The pessimism about the efficacy of U.S. engagement abroad that influenced U.S. foreign policy under the Barack Obama administration led to an underappreciation of the risks of inaction, such as the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011 or the decision to forgo military reprisals for the Assad regime’s mass murder of Syrian civilians with chemical weapons in 2013. Both forms of strategic narcissism were based mainly on wishful thinking and the definition of problems as one might like them to be as a way to avoid harsher realities.

In the United States, the top marginal tax rate was above 90 percent from 1951 to 1963. It declined afterward, but remained high. Under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush, top tax rates came down from 70 percent to less than 30 percent. Bill Clinton pushed them back up, but only to 40 percent. Since then they have bounced up and down, as the US presidency passes between Democrats and Republicans, but they have never gone much higher than 40 percent.

Not long ago, during the time of George H.W. Bush, the GOP worked aggressively to confront past incidents of racism, with its leaders even going so far as to offer formal apologies for past practices like the ‘southern strategy.’ However, that push for reckoning and reconciliation was abruptly abandoned in the Trump era and replaced by outright denialism. Rather than apologize for the southern strategy, new voices on the right simply asserted that there had never been a southern strategy and that as a result there was nothing to apologize for (Kevin M. Kruse and Julien M. Zelizer, "Introduction")

RULE NO. 3: AVOID CRITICIZING THE SITTING PRESIDENT AT ALL COSTS Stay the hell out of Dodge. —George H. W. Bush

RULE NO. 6: COME TOGETHER FOR CELEBRATIONS Though we hail from different backgrounds and ideologies, we’re singularly unique, even eternally bound, by our common devotion and service to this wonderful country. —George H. W. Bush

RULE NO. 9: FAMILY COMES FIRST Nothing can ever be written that will drive a wedge between us—nothing at all. —George H. W. Bush, in a 1998 letter to his sons George W. and Jeb

Jimmy Carter did not have the grace of John Kennedy, the congressional wizardry Lyndon Johnston, the strategic vision of Richard Nixon, the charm and clarity of purpose of Ronald Regan, the foreign policy experience of George H. W. Bush, the supreme political skills of Bill Clinton, the toughness of George W. Bush, or the eloquence of Barack Obama. But he brought to the oval office his own unique intellect, inquisitiveness, self discipline, political courage, and resilience in the face of setbacks. He disregarded the political costs of trying to make the nation and the world a better place in ways that transcended his presidency and often did not come to fruition until he left office. It is precisely because of his qualities that he was determined to confront so many difficult challenges and accomplished so much as he pressed ahead.

El mismo presidente George H. W. Bush llamó a la política económica de Reagan de subsidio a la oferta economía vudú. La de Trump es una economía vudú con esteroides.

The supreme goal of the CIA during the cold war was to steal Soviet secrets by recruiting spies, but the CIA never possessed a single one who had deep insight into the workings of the Kremlin. The number of Soviet spies with important information to reveal—all of them volunteers, not recruits—could be counted on the fingers of two hands. And all of them died, captured and executed by Moscow. Almost all had been betrayed by officers of the CIA’s Soviet division who were spying for the other side, under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Under Reagan, the CIA set off on misconceived third-world missions, selling arms to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to finance a war in Central America, breaking the law and squandering what trust remained reposed in it. More grievously, it missed the fatal weakness of its main enemy.

Still, key Democratic interest groups—especially the big industrial unions—resisted any environmental measures that might threaten jobs for their members; and in polls we conducted at the start of my campaign, the average Democratic voter ranked climate change near the bottom of their list of concerns. Republican voters were even more skeptical. There’d been a time when the federal government’s role in protecting the environment enjoyed the support of both parties. Richard Nixon had worked with a Democratic Congress to create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970. George H. W. Bush championed a strengthening of the Clean Air Act in 1990. But those times had passed. As the GOP’s electoral base had shifted to the South and the West, where conservation efforts had long rankled oil drillers, mining interests, developers, and ranchers, the party had turned environmental protection into another front in the partisan culture war.

But one of the reasons everyone had converged on a cap-and-trade proposal was that it had already been successfully tried—and by a Republican president, no less. Back in 1990, George H. W. Bush’s administration had put a cap-and-trade system in place to curb the sulfur dioxide coming out of factory smokestacks and contributing to acid rain, which was destroying lakes and forests across the East Coast. Despite dire predictions that the measure would lead to factory closures and mass layoffs, the offending companies had quickly figured out cost-efficient ways to retrofit their factories, and within a few years, the problem of acid rain had all but disappeared.

Dahmer was a third-shift worker at a chocolate factory and found it difficult to sleep during the day. He remembered reading in the newspaper that President George H. Bush used a new drug called Halcion to help him sleep during the tension of the Gulf War. Jeff went to a doctor and convinced him to give him a prescription for the sleeping pill. It worked like a knockout drug, putting him to sleep quickly. He wondered how these pills might work on his weekend pickups.

George Bush's father (George H.W. Bush) came in as C.I.A. director the month following the Welch assassination. As Director he presided over the agency as they mounted a campaign throughout western Europe trying to make me appear to be a security threat, a traitor, a Soviet agent, a Cuban agent. All those sorts of things which led to my expulsion from five different NATO countries in the late 1970s. In fact it was all based on lies, and to think that I was responsible for the death of any C.I.A. people for their exposure is absolutely false. No one, as far as I know, of all those people who were exposed as C.I.A. people along with their operations, was ever even harassed or threatened. What happened was, their operations were disrupted and that was the purpose of what we were doing. We were right to do it then because the U.S. policy at the time, executed by the C.I.A., was to support murderous dictatorships around the world as in Vietnam, as in Greece, as in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil; and that's only to name a few. We opposed that use of the U.S. intelligence service for those dirty operations- and I'm talking about regimes now that tortured and disappeared people by the thousands.

I would often surprise people by citing George H. W. Bush as a recent president whose foreign policy I admired. Bush, along with James Baker, Colin Powell, and Brent Scowcroft, had deftly managed the end of the Cold War and the successful prosecution of the Gulf War.

One person’s inflammatory rhetoric is another person’s poetry,

back in Washington, DC, the White House was stunned by what it witnessed on television as East Berliners began pouring through the checkpoints. Secretary of State James Baker recalled that many of President George H. W. Bush’s cabinet were caught unaware.

The Bohemian Grove has held secret meetings for the global elite since 1873 in a redwood forest of northern California. In addition to Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, members have included James Baker, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, David Rockefeller, William Casey, and Henry Kissinger. Each year, the members don red, black, and silver robes and conduct a ritual in which they worship a giant stone owl.

Bush had been warned about using Noriega as an asset by the legendary head of French Intelligence, Count Alexandre de Marenches, who warned him with regard to Noriega, "My own philosophy has always been that when you have something particularly dirty to do, you hire a gentleman to do it. If the gentleman is persuaded that what we are contemplating is an act of war, and by extension an act of patriotism, then we will find some very good people to work for us. By contrast, if we hire a thug, then eventually we will be compelled to kill the thug in one way or another because eventually we would be blackmailed by him.

Widely hailed as the most popular director of Central Intelligence since Allen Dulles, Bush had enormous support within the Agency. As the campaign got under way, Reagan-Bush posters appeared all over CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, many cut in the middle with only the right side, the Bush side, on display.

Should I resign?” he asked Colin Powell, who had been the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993 under President George H. W. Bush. “Fuck no!” Powell said. “I told you never to take the job. You never should have taken the job. Trump’s a fucking maniac.

She's showing people what they can do to protect the environment. Thank you for what you are doing, Pat." President George H. Bush, Take Pride In America Award Ceremony, 1991

George H. W. Bush, had previously served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and no one disqualified him from holding office.

FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS, people from every corner of the planet have flocked to New York City for the reason Frank Sinatra immortalized: to prove they could “make it.” The allure, the prestige, the struggle to survive, breeds a brand, an image of the city that ripples out to the rest of the world. Sinatra sang about proving himself to himself. “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.” New York was the yardstick. New York has indeed become a global yardstick—for artists, businesspeople, and dreamers of all stripes. He was a lawyer in New York? He must be good. Doesn’t matter if he was the worst lawyer in the city. If you can make it in New York, people assume that you can make it anywhere. The yardstick the public uses when judging a presidential candidate, it turns out, is not how much time the candidate has in politics. “It’s leadership qualities,” explains the presidential historian Doug Wead, a former adviser to George H. W. Bush and the author of 30 books on the presidents. Indeed, polls indicate that being “a strong and decisive leader” is the number one characteristic a presidential candidate can have. The fastest-climbing presidents, it turns out, used the Sinatra Principle to convey their leadership cred. What shows leadership like commanding an army (Washington), running a university (Wilson), governing a state for a few years—even if you started out as an actor (Reagan)—or building a new political party and having the humility to put aside your own interests for the good of the whole (Lincoln)? Dwight D. Eisenhower led the United States and its allies to victory against Hitler. He had never held an elected office. He won by a landslide with five times the electoral votes of his rival. “If he can make it there, he can make it anywhere,” US voters decided.

Perhaps it was because George H. W. Bush has no fixed ideology that he was underrated within his own party.

They liked George Bush in the same way they absolutely worshipped Ronald Reagan, not because of the type of America that Reagan actually created for them but because of the type of America he so vividly imagined.

George H. W. Bush said simply, Offutt “has the most sophisticated command-and-control outside Washington.” Offutt

The United States government had no mechanism to punish China for forced abortions, so instead it pummeled UNFPA. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan reduced funding for it. Then George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush both eliminated U.S. funding for the agency. Representative Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, led the fight against UNFPA. He’s a good man who genuinely cared about Chinese women and was horrified by coerced abortions. He wasn’t trying to score cheap political points in criticizing UNFPA, since most New Jersey voters had never heard of the agency. This was an issue that Smith genuinely cared about. The reality, though, was that while the Chinese abuses were real, UNFPA was not a party to them. After giving the gold medal to Qian, the UN turned around and became an important brake on Chinese behavior. A State Department fact-finding mission sent to investigate by the George W. Bush administration reported back: “We find no evidence that UNFPA has knowingly supported or participated in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization in the People’s Republic of China.” In the thirty-two counties in China where UNFPA operates pilot programs, it has reduced abortion rates by 40 percent, to a rate lower than that in the United States.

Baseball held particular significance for father and son. Though football dominated West Texas sports culture, it was baseball that captured young George’s imagination.

Until recently the mass media presented global warming as a raging debate—twelve years after President George H. W. Bush had signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, and twenty-five years after the U.S. National Academy of Sciences first announced that there was no reason to doubt that global warming would occur from man’s use of fossil fuels.

President George H. W. Bush flew to Rio de Janeiro to sign the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which committed its signatories to preventing “dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system.”107 President Bush then pledged to translate the written document into “concrete action to protect the planet.

It was as if after a decade of conservative politics under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Sonic’s combination of speed, attitude, and energy seemed to embody the promise of the 1990s.

Sheldon Adelson, for example, gave more than $53 million to Super PACs, but all eight of the candidates he supported lost.59 Karl Rove, a strategic mastermind who won fame advising George W. Bush, oversaw groups that spent $175 million and still lost twenty-one out of thirty elections.

He’s [G.H.W. Bush] never had to do a day’s work in his life.

I want to salute Reverend Moon, who is the founder of The Washington Times and also of Tiempos del Mundo. A lot of my friends in South America don't know about The Washington Times, but it is an independent voice.

American DEWAR FAMILY Cameron Dewar Ursula “Beep” Dewar, his sister Woody Dewar, his father Bella Dewar, his mother PESHKOV-JAKES FAMILY George Jakes Jacky Jakes, his mother Greg Peshkov, his father Lev Peshkov, his grandfather Marga, his grandmother MARQUAND FAMILY Verena Marquand Percy Marquand, her father Babe Lee, her mother CIA Florence Geary Tony Savino Tim Tedder, semiretired Keith Dorset OTHERS Maria Summers Joseph Hugo, FBI Larry Mawhinney, Pentagon Nelly Fordham, old flame of Greg Peshkov Dennis Wilson, aide to Bobby Kennedy Skip Dickerson, aide to Lyndon Johnson Leopold “Lee” Montgomery, reporter Herb Gould, television journalist on This Day Suzy Cannon, gossip reporter Frank Lindeman, television network owner REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS John F. Kennedy, thirty-fifth U.S. president Jackie, his wife Bobby Kennedy, his brother Dave Powers, assistant to President Kennedy Pierre Salinger, President Kennedy’s press officer Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Lyndon B. Johnson, thirty-sixth U.S. president Richard Nixon, thirty-seventh U.S. president Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth U.S. president Ronald Reagan, fortieth U.S. president George H. W. Bush, forty-first U.S. president British LECKWITH-WILLIAMS FAMILY Dave Williams Evie Williams, his sister Daisy Williams, his mother Lloyd Williams, M.P., his father Eth Leckwith, Dave’s grandmother MURRAY FAMILY Jasper Murray Anna Murray, his sister Eva Murray, his mother MUSICIANS IN THE GUARDSMEN AND PLUM NELLIE Lenny, Dave Williams’s cousin Lew, drummer Buzz, bass player Geoffrey, lead guitarist OTHERS Earl Fitzherbert, called Fitz Sam Cakebread, friend of Jasper Murray Byron Chesterfield (real name Brian Chesnowitz), music agent Hank Remington (real name Harry Riley), pop star Eric Chapman, record company executive German FRANCK FAMILY Rebecca Hoffmann Carla Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive mother Werner Franck, Rebecca’s adoptive father Walli Franck, son of Carla Lili Franck, daughter of Werner and Carla Maud von Ulrich, née Fitzherbert, Carla’s mother Hans Hoffmann, Rebecca’s husband OTHERS Bernd Held, schoolteacher Karolin Koontz, folksinger Odo Vossler, clergyman REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Walter Ulbricht, first secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (Communist) Erich Honecker, Ulbricht’s successor Egon Krenz, successor to Honecker Polish Stanislaw “Staz” Pawlak, army officer Lidka, girlfriend of Cam Dewar Danuta Gorski, Solidarity activist REAL HISTORICAL PEOPLE Anna Walentynowicz, crane driver Lech Wałesa, leader of the trade union Solidarity General Jaruzelski, prime minister Russian DVORKIN-PESHKOV FAMILY Tanya Dvorkin, journalist Dimka Dvorkin, Kremlin aide, Tanya’s twin brother Anya Dvorkin, their mother Grigori Peshkov, their grandfather Katerina Peshkov, their grandmother Vladimir, always called Volodya, their uncle Zoya, Volodya’s wife Nina, Dimka’s girlfriend OTHERS Daniil Antonov, features editor at TASS Pyotr Opotkin, features editor in chief Vasili Yenkov, dissident Natalya Smotrov, official in the Foreign Ministry Nik Smotrov, Natalya’s husband Yevgeny Filipov, aide to Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky Vera Pletner, Dimka’s secretary Valentin, Dimka’s friend Marshal Mikhail Pushnoy REAL HISTORICAL CHARACTERS Nikita Sergeyevitch Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Andrei Gromyko, foreign minister under Khrushchev Rodion Malinovsky, defense minister under Khrushchev Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s successor Yuri Andropov, successor to Brezhnev Konstantin Chernenko, successor to Andropov Mikhail Gorbachev, successor to Chernenko Other Nations Paz Oliva, Cuban general Frederik Bíró, Hungarian politician Enok Andersen, Danish accountant

In the New World Order (a term partially coined by Tri-Lateralist president George H.W. Bush, a bedfellow with dangerous and intolerant Saudi Wahhabists) “political correctness” will increasingly demand “religious correctness.” Opposition to the interfaith and ecumenical agenda (championed in Evangelical circles by Chuck Colson and Rick Warren) will increasingly be legally viewed as a hate crime. This is all being controlled by the spirit of antichrist setting the stage for the arrival of the ultimate Antichrist.

The phone number called during the emergency (9-1-1) likewise matches the date on which the Twin Towers were attacked. But in occult numerology, the number eleven means much more than this. It is the first Master Number and represents a dark vision. When doubled to twenty-two (22), the vision is combined with action. When tripled to thirty-three (33)—the signal of the highest and most important action in Freemasonry—it means vision and action have combined to produce accomplishment in the world. Is it therefore mere coincidence that exactly eleven years to the date following George H. W. Bush’s “New World Order” speech (and eleven years before 2012), on September 11, 2001, Flight 11 crashed into the Twin Towers, whose appearance side by side not only formed a Masonic-like, pillared gateway, but also architecturally depicted the number eleven? Also consider that Flight 11 hit the Twin Towers first, and Flight 11 had eleven crew members; New York was the eleventh state added to the Union; the words, “New York City” have eleven letters; Afghanistan, the first nation the U.S. attacked following 9/11, has eleven letters; the name George W. Bush has eleven letters; the words, “The Pentagon,” which was also attacked on 9/11, have eleven letters; and Flight 77—an additional twin Master Number—hit the Pentagon, which is located on the seventy-seventh (77th) meridian, and the foundation stone for the Pentagon was laid in 1941 on September 11 in a Masonic ceremony.

Until recently the mass media presented global warming as a raging debate—twelve years after President George H. W. Bush had signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, and twenty-five years after the U.S. National Academy of Sciences first announced that there was no reason to doubt that global warming would occur from man’s use of fossil fuels. “Balance” had become a form of bias, whereby the media coverage was biased in favor of minority—in some cases extreme minority—views.

In his 1999 book, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor, Robert B. Stinnett, a navy photographer who served in the same World War II aerial group as former President George H. W. Bush, used documents acquired from a Freedom of Information Act request to demonstrate definitively that FDR knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor in advance and let it go as part of his larger strategy to provoke the Japanese into war.185 The smoking guns included several declassified, U.S.-decoded Japanese naval broadcasts, and spy communiqués which set forth a timetable, a census, and bombing plans for U.S. ships at Pearl Harbor, at least the contents of which were relayed to FDR and his aides.186 In large part, the book discussed a particularly damning piece of evidence called the McCollum Memo, a six-page document written in October 1940—fourteen months before the attack on Pearl Harbor—and addressed to two senior FDR military advisors outlining the steps for provoking the Japanese into making an overt act of war.187

Representatives 1979-89, and as secretary of defense under President George H. W. Bush 1989-93 before assuming the duties of vice president under President George W. Bush. He was a major proponent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

director under George H. W. Bush

International Book Project. In 1966, Miss Harriet placed an ad in an English-speaking newspaper in India offering to send books to whoever needed them. She got responses and began sending books from her basement. Today, IBP sends over 200,000 English-language books overseas annually. Miss Harriet was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and was recognized as a “Partner For Peace” by President George H. W. Bush.

metonymy into dinner-party chat back at London beach. I

In 1990, under the administration of George H. W. Bush, amendments to the Clean Air Act established an emissions trading—or “cap and trade”—system to control acid rain. The system resulted in a 54 percent decline in sulfur dioxide levels between 1990 and 2007, while the inflation-adjusted price of electricity declined during the same period.174 In 2003, the EPA reported to Congress that the overall cost of air pollution control during the previous ten years was between $8 billion and $9 billion, while the benefits were estimated from $101 billion to $119 billion—more than ten times as great.175 Singer’s “billion-dollar solution to a million-dollar problem” was just plain wrong.

The new tactics were evident in the negotiations between Gorbachev and President George H. W. Bush in Malta (November 1989). Gorbachev’s amiability and willingness to make arms concessions was not related so much to a desire to lower the burden of military expenditures. That was strategically important but politically difficult. It would take time for the reduction in military spending to influence the economic situation in the USSR. Something else was of critical significance for the Soviets: the willingness of the United States and its allies to support government loans to the USSR, loans from the IMF and World Bank. For the Soviets, this was fundamental. In order to improve their chances of getting the money, they provided informal assurances that the USSR would not use force to maintain its political control in Eastern Europe.11

Horwitt describes an occasion in the spring of 1972 when Alinsky organized a student protest at Tulane University’s annual lecture week. A group of anti–Vietnam War protesters wanted to disrupt a scheduled speech by George H. W. Bush, then U.S. representative to the United Nations, and an advocate for President Nixon’s Vietnam policies. While the students planned to picket the speech and shout antiwar slogans, Alinsky told them that their approach was wrong because it might get them punished or expelled. Besides, it lacked creativity and imagination. Alinsky advised the students to go hear the speech dressed up as members of the Ku Klux Klan—complete with robes and hoods—and whenever Bush said anything in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and holler and wave signs and banners saying: “The KKK Supports Bush.” This is what the students did, and it proved very successful, getting lots of media attention with no adverse repercussions for the protesters.17 On

Throughout our marriage, an ongoing joke between Chris and me was my succession of pledges to her each time I took on a new, challenging job. I would promise that, if she would let me get through just this next one, we would finally slow down and take time for ourselves. This started while I was working and going to night law school. I promised her, “Just wait till I get law school under my belt.” But after that, it was, “Just wait for me to finish this clerkship.” And then, “Just wait for me to make partner at the law firm.” When President George H. W. Bush came to the Department of Justice in 1991 for my swearing-in as Attorney General, I gave remarks in which I went through the whole litany, and ended with, “So Chris, I promise: once I get this Attorney Generalship under my belt, we will take time to smell the flowers.” Everyone laughed. But I did not keep my word. Instead, I had accepted a demanding corporate job that had me commuting every week for nearly fifteen years to the New York area, while she bore the main burden of raising our three daughters. It was time for me to come through.

candidate George H. W. Bush, who used the racist idea that Black people are a threat, to help win the presidency.

the Republican approach to immigration was, not long ago, 180 degrees different from what it is now. With a stroke of his pen in 1986, Ronald Reagan provided what today would be called amnesty to more than three million immigrants who were in the country illegally. George H. W. Bush worked with Ted Kennedy, the liberal icon from Massachusetts, to expand immigration, culminating in the Immigration Act of 1990. Among other things, that law introduced the lottery system that President Trump would so adamantly denounce a quarter of a century later. Similarly, George W. Bush supported a pathway to citizenship for many undocumented workers as late as 2007.

Intelligence representatives from France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iran met in Kenya at the Safari Club with CIA operatives, including former CIA Director George H. W. Bush, to overcome constraints imposed by Washington. This led to the emergence of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) as the depository of money for off-the-books covert operations and the formation of what Scott calls a supranational deep state.

Relatively cautious policies adopted during the George H. W. Bush administration were amplified and extended during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama until they threatened to damage long-term American interests.

Having arrived in the United States immediately after the June 4 crackdown in China, as a student from Greater China I was eligible, thanks to an Executive Order signed by President George H. W. Bush, for a green card. I passed on the chance.

Mubarak had been a resolute ally, key to peace with Israel and to the 1991 Gulf War coalition (praised by George H. W. Bush as “my wise friend”), and then in the campaign against Al Qaeda. Barack Obama’s senior advisers—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Vice President Joe Biden—urged caution in joining the rush to push Mubarak out. Gates was on the National Security Council in 1979 when, in his view, the United States had pulled the rug out from under the shah, with the expectation that a democratic revolution would follow. The result instead was the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini, U.S. diplomats held hostage for 444 days, and the implacably hostile Islamic Republic.

Both the American and Chinese militaries acknowledge that the US has lost, or at least failed to win, four of the five major wars it has entered since World War II.21 (Korea was at best a draw, Vietnam a loss, and Iraq and Afghanistan unlikely to turn out well. Only President George H. W. Bush’s war in 1991 to force Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to retreat from Kuwait counts as a clear win.) Reflecting on that record, former secretary of defense Robert Gates stated the obvious: “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”22

Express Empathy When Bill Clinton delivered his now-famous line “I feel your pain” in 1992, he did more than just clinch a victory over George H. W. Bush; he positioned himself as the guide in the American voters’ story. A guide expresses an understanding of the pain and frustration of their hero. In fact, many pundits believe Clinton locked up the election during a town hall debate in which Bush gave a rambling answer to a young woman when she asked what the national debt meant to the average American. Clinton countered Bush’s linear, cerebral answer by asking the woman if she knew anybody who’d lost their job. He asked whether it pained her that she had friends out of work, and when the woman said yes, he went on to explain how the national debt is tied to the well-being of every American, even her and her friends.5 That’s empathy. When we empathize with our customers’ dilemma, we create a bond of trust. People trust those who understand them, and they trust brands that understand them too. Oprah Winfrey, an undeniably successful guide to millions, once explained the three things every human being wants most are to be seen, heard, and understood. This is the essence of empathy. Empathetic statements start with words like, “We understand how it feels to . . .” or “Nobody should have to experience . . .” or “Like you, we are frustrated by . . .” or, in the case of one Toyota commercial inviting Toyota owners to engage their local Toyota service center, simply, “We care about your Toyota.” Expressing empathy isn’t difficult. Once we’ve identified our customers’ internal problems, we simply need to let them know we understand and would like to help them find a resolution. Scan your marketing material and make sure you’ve told your customers that you care. Customers won’t know you care until you tell them.

Later was it revealed that an American submarine had recovered one of the nine downed fliers, thus saving him from a similar fate at the hands of the starving Japanese. The lucky man’s name was Lt. George H. W. Bush.

I take as my guide the hope of a saint: in crucial things, unity; in important things, diversity; in all things, generosity.

The presidency of George H. W. Bush, which lasted from 1989 to 1993, and the presidency of George W. Bush, which lasted from 2001 to 2009, marked a significant period in the history of the United States and the Republican Party.

One fact stands out: When the misery index has been in double figures, during an election year, the incumbent president has lost. This was the case for Carter in 1980; for George H.W. Bush in 1992, when it hit 10.89; and for Donald Trump in 2020, when the pandemic’s impact took the index from 5.21 in September 2019 to 15.03 seven months later. The only president to have survived a double-digit misery index in an election year was Reagan in 1984, but he seems to have been protected by the fact that the number was declining all through the campaign, from 19.93 at his inauguration in 1981 to 11.25 by the time of his reelection in 1984.

One of George H. W. Bush's early teachers at Andover wrote, "At the moment he is intellectually immature for his powers of reasoning are not entirely developed.

Bushes may not be eloquent explaining emotion, but George HW Bush's mother knew enough to be in position with her children were ready to talk. She waited up not just to ensure safety but to make the most of the moment of excited emotions. The next morning, they would congeal into polite, one-word answers.

He has not shown the special interest in reading that we should like to see but he likes shop work. George H. W. Bush's parents on his Andover application

George H. W. Bush, like most political leaders of both parties at the time, accepted the science without dispute. He vowed to protect the environment, promising to fight “the Greenhouse Effect with the White House Effect” and sending his secretary of state, James Baker, to the first international summit of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Although Bush was a Republican, he was not an outlier in his party. For decades, the environmental movement had enjoyed bipartisan support.

And so I trust that it is not too petty to point out that it was George H. W. Bush, not Ronald Reagan, who was president when Boris Yeltsin ended the Cold War.

Eve LaPlante, American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, pp. 238–39. Hutchinson’s many generations of descendants include Thomas Hutchinson, who later became governor of Massachusetts during the pre-Revolutionary days and whose policies incited the Boston Tea Party (see Chapter 4 ). In the twentieth century, her descendants included Franklin D. Roosevelt, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, making this rather extraordinary woman the ancestor of three American presidents.

I AM BASICALLY ALEX JONES’S Simon Cowell. I star-spotted him in the late-1990s. He’d been a locally renowned radio talk show host in Austin, Texas, back then, but I gave him the idea that catapulted him to fame. My idea was for the two of us to sneak into a secretive summer camp in the forests of Northern California called Bohemian Grove, where powerful men like George H.W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger were rumored to undertake an annual ritual in which a human effigy was thrown into the fiery belly of a giant stone owl.

Of course, we are all familiar with politicians who lie, break promises, or obfuscate the truth. President George H. W. Bush’s “Read my lips” promise not to raise taxes went bust. President George W. Bush’s weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were never found. President Barack Obama’s “If you like it, you can keep it” vow about Americans being able to keep the doctors and health insurance plans they liked never held up. Each of these presidents made statements they knew might not prove to be true. Gaslighting is far more aggressive than any of these misguided lies. It’s an elaborate scheme undertaken with the goal of gaining control over people. Trump is an expert gaslighter and what I want you to understand is that there is a very specific method to his madness.

US president George H. W. Bush warned Salih that Yemen was making the wrong choice. Bush wanted to make the Gulf crisis—the first post–Cold War conflict—a showcase for the new world order. To do that, the US needed a broad, multinational coalition. Yemen’s grandstanding and calls for an “Arab” solution to the crisis were ruining the show. Making matters worse, Yemen was scheduled to take over the presidency of the UN Security Council on December 1, 1990.

James A. Baker III, George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff, recalled a day in October 1992 when President Bush was approached by four Republican members of Congress who had an idea for how he could win reelection. “They told him the only way to win was to hammer his challenger Bill Clinton’s patriotism for protesting the Vietnam War while in London and visiting Moscow as a young man,” Baker writes. Bush didn’t reject the idea out of hand; in fact, he thought it might work. But when Baker heard that the only way to reveal this information would be to “contact the Russians or the British,” he realized that the administration “absolutely could not do that.” Why would someone as canny and strategic as Baker be so opposed to the idea of asking a foreign power to help his boss win an election? Because opposition to foreign interference in our elections is as old as America itself.

I recall the old fisherman's prayer: 'The sea is so large, Lord, and my boat is so small . . . ' We face the prospect of being trapped on a boat we have irreparably damaged, not by the cataclysm of war but by the slow neglect of a vessel we believed to be impervious to our abuse.

Representing the apogee of human rights and humanitarian sentiments among post-war U.S. presidents, Carter also rebuffed Iranian demands for an apology from the U.S. for installing the Shah in power since 1953 and the subsequent decades of the S.A.V.A.K. torture that continued well into this ‘soft’ Democrat’s administration: ‘I don’t think we have anything to apologize for,’ assured Henry Kissinger. Ruminating about the United States of Amnesia, Carter’s principal White House aide for Iran throughout the crisis, Mr. Gary Sick, admitted that from the standpoint of U.S. policy-makers ‘anything that happened more than a quarter century before—even an event of singular importance—assumes the pale and distant appearance of ancient history. In Washington, by 1978, the events of 1953 had all the relevance of a pressed flower.’ Barely over a year before the Iranian people toppled this modernizing despot, Carter toasted the Shah’s Iran as ‘an island of stability,’ which he called a ‘great tribute to the respect, admiration and love of your people for you’. A defiant George H.W. Bush announced, after the U.S. shot down a large Iranian airliner filled with 290 civilians, ‘I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are.’25

I take as my guide the hope of a saint: in crucial things, unity—in important things, diversity—in all things, generosity. INAUGURAL ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT GEORGE H. W. BUSH

President George H. W. Bush and later President Bill Clinton authorized a highly classified program that directed the CIA to buy back as many Stingers as it could from anyone who possessed them.

We must develop this position reasonably, prudently, sensitively - we must be sure we don't inflame the passions of unthinking men to garner a vote; yet it is essential that the position I believe in be explained.

As the CEO of a publishing company, I’ve met with many politicians over the years—democratic ones and not so democratic ones. I’ve had many conversations with Helmut Kohl, Gerhard Schröder, Angela Merkel, and Olaf Scholz. And, with the exception of Donald Trump, I’ve met every former American president of the past few decades, starting with George H. W. Bush. The funniest and most surprising encounter I ever had with a head of state was with George W. Bush. Henry Kissinger had suggested that if I would like to meet him, I should get my assistant to pass on my next United States travel dates. Which she did, including a trip to a Time Warner board meeting just two days later. That evening, on the French Atlantic coast, I got an email from the White House: The p resident would be delighted to meet me the day after tomorrow, July 25, 2007, at 9:30 a.m. in the Oval Office. Not only was I amazed at the speed with which the meeting had been scheduled, I was also in the depths of rural France—and logistically challenged. First, there was no connecting flight that could get me to Washington on time. Second, my eleven-year-old son was with me and I had promised that he could come to New York this time. In a cloak-and-dagger operation, my office organized a private plane which picked us up on the runway of Angoulême Airport the following day and dropped us off in Washington nine hours later.

George H. W. Bush summarized U.S. policy toward Chinese democracy as “Trade freely with China and time is on our side.” The idea was that as China traded freely with the West, it would grow, and that growth would bring democracy and better institutions in China, as modernization theory predicted. Yet the rapid increase in U.S.-China trade since the mid-1980s has done little for Chinese democracy, and the even closer integration that is likely to follow during the next decade will do equally little.

Now that the Soviet Union had folded as a foe, all we had to show was the state-of-the-art strengths of our [military] forces. So George [H. W.] Bush used them the first t chance he had. . . We had probably dumped some amount like 200 million pounds of explosive on Iraq and Kuwait, and that came down to 10 pounds virtually per person. . . George Bush went so far as to suggest that the ghosts of Vietnam had been exorcised.” Norman Mailer, “How the Wimp Wan the War,” Mav 1991

Lee Atwater, an advisor to Reagan who would go on to become George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign manager, best articulated during an interview how Republicans could win elections in the future: “You start in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites…. ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’ ”19

George H. W. Bush summarized U.S. policy toward Chinese democracy as “Trade freely with China and time is on our side.” The idea was that as China traded freely with the West, it would grow, and that growth would bring democracy and better institutions in China, as modernization theory predicted.

Redneck, white dudes reppin' blue lives (Fuck you BLAKSWAN) / Put that shit at half staff when your school dies / 'Cause y'all only give a fuck about two rights / Talkin' George H. Bush and Jesus H. Christ // Oh, how I love my goddamn country / And how un-American of me / The old fucks get so upset / 'Cause young bucks go vote for Kanye West