George H.W. Bush was a Texan, a patriot, and an underrated president

George Herbert Walker Bush spent but four years in the Oval Office as America’s president, but as we mourn his passing Friday at age 94, the pain of that loss is leavened by the increasingly shared conviction that his career before, during and after the White House looms as large as that of any public figure in recent memory.

It’s true that Bush lacked the political genius of either his lionized predecessor or the silver-tongued successor with whom he later became close friends. His record as president was mixed, and his campaign for a second term was scuttled by an inability to convince voters he understood the economic and cultural currents in which they were adrift.

Where he succeeded, Bush did so on a grand, and often global, scale. He made history, and much of that history made the world and America with it a better place, as when he led a broad international coalition to push an invading Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. Or when he almost single-handedly stage-managed the creation of a new world order amid the collapse of communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.

These events rocked the world, and Bush calmly sat shotgun to history steering their outcome with a calm that characterized most of his public life.

On the domestic front, despite Democrats controlling both houses of Congress all four years he was president, Bush signed significant, even landmark, legislation, from the Clean Air Act to the Americans with Disabilities Act. He signed legislation that enhanced tax credits for poor families, and banned the importation of most semiautomatic weapons. After a veto, he reluctantly signed a labor standards bill that raised the minimum wage, too.