Advertisement

newsPolitics

George Bush’s admirers lament loss of civility, hope it comes back into fashion in politics

The late president’s instinct for civility extended beyond the personal touch, also guiding his geopolitical moves -- much to the nation’s benefit.

WASHINGTON - Consider the grace of the letter George H.W. Bush left for Bill Clinton on Inauguration Day of 1993.

“There will be very tough times, made even more difficult by criticism you may not think is fair,” read the letter, left in the Oval Office in a tradition spanning generations. “Don't let the critics discourage you or push you off course....Your success now is our country's success. I am rooting hard for you.”

Only three months had passed since Clinton brought Bush’s stellar career to an abrupt halt. Yet Bush, who died Friday night at age 94, mustered a quantum of civility largely absent from today’s political life.

Advertisement

Public debate has grown coarse in the last quarter century. Jeering is commonplace. Bush was no saint but even his sharpest elbows don't compare to the current president's regular tweet storms. As the nation contemplated the death of the 41st president on Saturday, thoughts naturally turned to the causes of this widely lamented evolution.

Political Points

Get the latest politics news from North Texas and beyond.

Or with:

"Trump is a symptom of the culture, not the cause of it, but he has worsened it," said Steve Schmidt, top strategist for the late Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. "He has normalized the profoundly abnormal. In this moment, the comparisons are inevitable, but profoundly inappropriate. How can you conceivably compare a man so small to a man so great?"

Advertisement

Bush was the last president of the World War II generation, and the last, Schmidt said, to fundamentally embody values “that were celebrated and expected and admired and aspired to at a different era in the nation’s history.”

The late president’s instinct for civility extended beyond the personal touch, also guiding his geopolitical moves -- much to the nation’s benefit.

When the Berlin Wall fell, Schmidt recalled “He didn’t tap dance on the grave of the Soviet empire. He had the wisdom to understand that humiliation wouldn’t make the world a safer place.”

Advertisement

Bush has been called Washington’s last gentleman president, noted Jeffrey Engel, founding director of Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.

“He really took to heart that you could be political adversaries without being personal rivals. He understood that we’re all Americans. We’re all pulling in the same direction. We have different ideas, but we want to get to the same place.”

Washington was plenty rancorous in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In World War II, Americans of all creeds and social strata joined the fight against fascism, returning with a sense of common purpose that has faded.

Add that Bush was raised in a blue-blood New England family, with impeccable manners and an ethos of noblesse oblige.

“Combine that with just a natural, ingrained sense of human generosity - being willing to think about people other than himself, unlike the current president, and you couple that great politeness with a great sense of empathy, and you end up with someone who is very gracious,” Engel said.

That’s not to say that Bush lacked a fierce competitive streak. It served him as a fighter pilot, as captain of the Yale University baseball team, as a wildcatter in the Permian Basin, and in politics.

“But he really believed in old fashioned gentlemanly rules,” Engel said. “We have to concede that those are from an era that has passed because what that means is white privilege, Ivy League, male rules and notions of responsibility and chivalry whose time has come and gone.”

Advertisement

Like Schmidt, Engel’s thoughts turned to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and to the Chinese uprising at Tiananmen Square, and other crises.

“His greatest attribute as a diplomat was his ability to keep his mouth shut and not make things worse. He was a practitioner of `Hippocratic diplomacy,’ ” Engel said, alluding to the physician’s oath that begins, “First, do no harm.”

Not just about Trump

Trump’s defenders reject the idea that he’s responsible for all the bickering and pettiness in American politics.

Advertisement

“The nastiness shown to Trump and his family is bad behavior,” said Cathie Adams, a social conservative who has chaired the Texas Republican Party and led the Texas Eagle Forum, a group founded by the late Phyllis Schlafly.

She has her differences with Trump, and had some with Bush, though she said, “He was a very honorable man and we had a mainstream media at that time that recognized that and they reciprocated that ... That’s not true today.”

Adams made the case that disrespect of Trump is prevalent and corrosive.

“President Trump is the first Republican who has stood up and said, ‘You want to dish it out? I can return the favor,’ ” she said. “Which came first, the insult or the return? I don’t think that you would see him doing this if he didn’t have reason to push back.”

Advertisement

Patriarch within an elite club

Trump is not known to have reached out to any of his predecessors for advice.

Clinton, by contrast, regularly called Bush, seeking input from the man he’d ousted.

Advertisement

Bush willingly gave it, recalled Paul Begala, a close advisor and friend to Bill Clinton for 27 years. Bush returned to Washington to help sell NAFTA, a major free trade deal they’d both worked on, once it was finalized, Begala noted.

"George H.W. Bush was a model of class, dignity, and patriotism," Begala said in an email to The Dallas Morning News.

After Clinton left office, the relationship deepened.

“The Bushes invited the Clintons to Kennebunkport every summer. They became so close Barbara used to call [Clinton] `my fifth son.’ The affection was real,” Begala said, and it was mutual. “President Clinton, who never knew his own dad, especially looked up to and admired President Bush.”

Advertisement

They worked together on disaster relief and other causes.

“What a far cry from the man who currently occupies the Oval Office,” Begala said, citing “the deep patriotism they shared; the sense that country comes before party or self. Trump puts nothing ahead of himself.”

Begala is optimistic that this phase will pass. “Voters,” he predicted, “will demand a return to decency and dignity and class.”

Mark McKinnon, a former adviser to Bush’s son, former President George W. Bush, agreed that the sort of civility and gentility the elder Bush embodied is no longer a norm.

Advertisement

“You just don’t see that anymore in politics, or anywhere, really,” McKinnon said. “He was kind of a symbol of a kinder and gentler politics, a kinder and gentler time in our politics. It’s so completely the polar opposite of what we have today.”

With that came a humility that both presidents Bush share.

“He hated the word 'I,’ ” McKinnon said. “He reflected the maxim that it’s amazing how much you can get done when you don’t care who gets the credit.”

Pendulum swing

The midterm elections last month represented a pendulum swing. And just as power shifts back and forth in Washington, so do national mores also evolve. Those dismayed by the current state of affairs are also generally optimistic that at some point, hopefully soon, the electorate will demand better, and leadership will emerge to deliver it.

Advertisement

Juleanna Glover, a former GOP operative who served as Vice President Dick Cheney’s press secretary and as a top aide on a number of presidential campaigns, has made no secret of her disdain for Trump’s approach to the presidency.

“Trump is an exaggerated iteration of the value of winning above all,” she said Saturday.

She worked on Bush’s winning campaign for the White House.

“He was a considered leader, always with an eye toward history. He always held himself to the ideal of a humble, modest servant of the people. That juxtaposed against the current leadership - it’s certainly a dramatic contrast,” she said.

Advertisement

After McCain, a POW during the Vietnam War, had criticized him, Trump famously took issue with his status as a war hero. “I like people who weren’t captured,” the president said.

In June, Schmidt renounced his Republican Party membership because it has become, he said, the party of Trump.

“Courage, valor, sacrifice, selflessness, decency, love, loyalty - these are all virtues that are not only admirable in an individual but utterly necessary in the life of a great nation,” he said.

Advertisement

“There’s no question that our culture has become disgusting, and coarsened, and the idea that these virtues draw an eye roll or a snicker in our anything goes society, where it seems that nothing is too outrageous to be outraged about -- it represents in a fundamental way, a passing of a period of time.”

In coming days, as Bush is eulogized, Schmidt hopes to see parents seize the chance to instill some of those values.

“There. Look. That’s what a president is supposed to be. Be like him,” he said, adding, “So few Americans have a legitimate possibility to be proclaimed at the hour of their death to be the greatest living American. I think he certainly was.”

Staff writer Beth Frerking in Dallas contributed to this report.