George H. W. Bush(1924–2018)

George Herbert Walker Bush was born at Milton in Massachusetts on the twelfth of June 1924, second son of Prescott Sheldon Bush (Wall Street investment banker, Brown Brothers Harriman partner, US Senator for Connecticut 1952 to 1963) and Dorothy Walker. He was raised at Greenwich, Connecticut, and at the family summer house at Walker's Point on the Maine coast, was schooled at Greenwich Country Day School and at Phillips Academy Andover, and on his eighteenth birthday in June 1942 enlisted in the United States Navy as a Seaman Second Class. He took the naval aviation training programme at Corpus Christi, Texas, was commissioned as an ensign in June 1943 in his nineteenth year, and was at that point the youngest naval aviator in the United States Navy.

He served fifty-eight combat missions in the Pacific Theatre with Torpedo Squadron VT-51 aboard the light carrier USS San Jacinto, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for the operations of the Marianas campaign of June and July 1944, and on the second of September 1944 over Chichi Jima in the Bonin Islands was shot down by Japanese anti-aircraft fire while pressing home an attack on the Japanese communications station; he completed the bomb run despite the fire and bailed out at sea, was picked up by the submarine USS Finback after four hours in the water, and returned to combat duty within days. He completed his combat tour, married Barbara Pierce in January 1945, and took his BA in economics at Yale (Phi Beta Kappa, captain of the Yale baseball team) in 1948 in his twenty-fifth year. He moved to West Texas the same year, took an oil-field-equipment salesman's job with Dresser Industries, and through the 1950s built the independent Texas oil-exploration company Zapata Petroleum (founded 1953) and its offshore drilling subsidiary Zapata Off-Shore (1954).

He entered Republican politics as Harris County Republican Chairman in 1963, sat as US Representative for the 7th Texas Congressional District from January 1967 to January 1971, was appointed by President Nixon as US Ambassador to the United Nations (1971 to 1973), as Chairman of the Republican National Committee through the Watergate crisis (1973 to 1974), as Chief of the US Liaison Office in Beijing (the de facto US ambassador to the People's Republic of China through the Mao-to-Deng transition, 1974 to 1975), and as Director of Central Intelligence (1976 to 1977), the post in which he reorganised the CIA in the aftermath of the Church Committee disclosures. He was elected Vice President under Ronald Reagan in 1980, served two terms 1981 to 1989, and on the eighth of November 1988 was elected 41st President of the United States, the first sitting Vice President to be elected to the presidency since Martin Van Buren in 1836.

His four-year presidency from January 1989 to January 1993 covered the central single transformation of the international system since the Second World War: the constitutional dissolution of the Cold War. The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989; the German reunification settled under NATO in October 1990; the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991; the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Bush conducted the personal diplomacy with Mikhail Gorbachev (the September 1989 Wyoming meeting, the December 1989 Malta summit, the START-I Treaty of 1991) and the parallel personal diplomacy with Helmut Kohl that produced the Two-Plus-Four Agreement of September 1990 on German reunification, the most consequential single peaceful constitutional settlement of the post-war century. In August 1990, on Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, he assembled the thirty-four-nation Coalition under United Nations authority that liberated Kuwait in Operation Desert Storm of January and February 1991, the largest international military coalition assembled since the Korean War.

He signed at home the Americans with Disabilities Act (July 1990), the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, the Civil Rights Act of 1991, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (November 1992, signed but not ratified by his administration). He lost the 1992 presidential election to Bill Clinton in a three-way race with Ross Perot, returned to private life at Houston and Walker's Point, founded the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum at Texas A&M University (opened 1997), and through his retirement years worked extensively with President Clinton on the Indian Ocean Tsunami relief (2005) and the Hurricane Katrina relief (2005). His son George W. Bush was elected 43rd President in 2000 (the second father-and-son presidency in American history after John Adams and John Quincy Adams). He died at his Houston home on the thirtieth of November 2018 in his ninety-fifth year and was buried at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum beside his wife Barbara. The Bush name in modern American political history carries the weight of the constitutional management of the end of the Cold War.