Barbara Bush was as grounded as any First Lady, a down-to-earth realist planted firmly between two high-flying stars: Nancy Reagan of the rail-thin coiffed good looks, rarely seen children, and adoring gaze; and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the two-for-the-price-of-one lawyer who let it be known she wouldn’t be staying home and baking cookies. But she proved to be a national force, worth every penny we didn’t pay her.
Inside the White House of her husband George H. W. Bush, the country’s 41st president, she had her own signatures: an acerbic wit, an outgoing personality, and the intimidating raised eyebrow that froze those who worked for him. She didn’t have an office in the West Wing or attend Cabinet meetings, but as chief of staff Andy Card remembers, her presence was everywhere — in the speech that came back in the morning better for her edits, the shots she took that the president didn’t have to, the fortress she built around him that gave him the strength to do the job. Skeptical where he was trusting and as outspoken as he was diplomatic, she had his back at every turn: if you slighted him, you would answer to her.
For the country, she offered something else. She never promised us a Rose Garden, photo-ready perfection, or perfection at all. She was honest about her size (14), her hair (white since she gave up dying it in her 30s), her weight (always a few pounds over the ideal) and her pearls ($90 fakes). But there wasn’t much else that was false about her. Her wardrobe ran to exercise clothes when she had no intention of doing more than walking Millie, her English spaniel and co-author of their best selling book. She didn’t play the designer game until pushed into flogging for Seventh Avenue when she became Second Lady. When I interviewed her for her a TIME cover story as she prepared to move to the White House from the Vice President’s mansion after her husband’s 1988 presidential win, she acknowledged that she’d gotten away with murder — advising Nancy Reagan to replace the East Room china one plate at a time, suggesting that her husband strip down to disprove rumors that he was wounded during a tryst, calling Geraldine Ferraro a word that rhymes with rich — but that she would henceforth be more careful about the words coming out of her mouth, adding, after a pause, “slightly.”
As she aged, America got more of the same from the only woman since Abigail Adams to be the wife of one president and mother to another (George W. Bush, or 43 as he became known). And if it weren’t for a tsunami named Donald Trump, she might have made history as the mother of yet one more. In South Carolina in 2016, she joined the one-time GOP-favorite, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, whom she famously said was the son she had expected to be the president in the next generation. By then, Jeb’s was likely a losing cause. Already ill, she took the trip anyway, cheering him on, chin pointed upward, eyes shining, smile full. Her husband’s reelection loss to Bill Clinton in 1992 was heartbreaking, she wrote, but there is no wound so stinging as those endured by a child.
That would be her final campaign. Barbara Bush died at age 92 on April 17, 2018. She left this world the way we all want to, peacefully at home, free of code blues and intubations, surrounded by family and her husband, George H. W. Bush, whom she married in 1945. They survived 73 years of marriage, a long wartime separation, the death of a child, 30 moves, and the ups and down of leading a very public life with all the satisfactions and disappointments that come with it. In her class note for her alumnae magazine last spring, Bush wrote that she’d gotten so many new body parts she was hardly recognizable but life was good. “I’m still old,” she wrote, “and still in love with the man I married.” Her husband recently described their marriage as the process of “two people becoming one.”
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04.23.2024