George H.W. Bush (1924-2018)

The death of an American President is always an occasion for historical retrospectives in the media. Some obviously better than others.

For better or worse, such retrospectives tend to be heavy on hagiography and light on critique. For older people who have been public figures, the media can prepare most of the obituary reports far in advance.

American Presidents are also symbols, both national and political. And their administrations represent historical periods that are identified with their image.

Here are some of the mainstream retrospectives.

The first 15 minutes of the PBS NewsHour Weekend full episode Dec. 1, 2018 is devoted to Bush:

Remembering George H.W. Bush | NYT News 12/01/2018:

NBC News provides 54 minutes of their initial coverage, President George H.W. Bush Dies at 94 11/30/2018. It begins with Joe Scarbrough gushing over the departed President.

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks gives an initial retrospective on Bush that stresses the positive, BREAKING NEWS: George H.W. Bush Has Died. Four Amazing Facts About Him 11/30/2018:

Jared Gilmour and Steve Thomma provide one of many general sketches of Bush in  41, Former President George H.W. Bush dies at 94 McClatchy News 12/01/2018. George H.W. Bush is often referred to as Bush 41, his number in the line of Presidents, to distinguish him from his son, George W. Bush, aka, Bush 43.

David Greenberg in Is History Being Too Kind to George H.W. Bush? Politico Magazine 12/01/2018 takes a more critically reflective view: "My friend the historian Tim Naftali has called Bush the most underrated president of our times. I would say that what we’re now seeing proves the opposite: Bush was the most overrated president since Dwight Eisenhower, and possibly of all time."

He mentions a incident from 1992 that I've recalled more than once in the context of the "Russiagate" issues. The largest difference being that many of the criticisms of Trump's and his supporters' dealings with the Russians are well-founded, while George H.W. Bush's accusation against Bill Clinton was entirely frivolous and dishonest:

Bush’s 1992 campaign against Bill Clinton was almost as scurrilous. The sitting president trashed his opponent for protesting the Vietnam War while at graduate school in England and made unwholesome insinuations about Clinton’s motives for visiting Moscow while backpacking. Clinton shot back in a debate: “When Joe McCarthy went around this country attacking people’s patriotism, he was wrong. And a senator from Connecticut stood up to him named Prescott Bush. Your father was right to stand up to Joe McCarthy. You were wrong to attack my patriotism.”

Greenberg also recalls an important but very bad decision on Old Man Bush's part, "Perhaps the worst act of Bush’s career came at the end of his presidency when he pardoned a bevy of Iran-Contra defendants—including Caspar Weinberger, Robert MacFarlane and Elliot Abrams—to protect himself from further investigation."

The Persian Gulf War of 1991 is a tremendous part of the elder Bush's Presidential legacy. Bush was generally an adherent of a "realist" approach to evaluting foreign policy. Although, as Jeffey Record observes in Dark Victory: America's Second War Against Iraq (2004), "the George H. W. Bush administration, like virtually every one of its predecessors, cloaked its military interventions in the rhetoric of a moral crusade." The chronic American assumption of our own moral superiority and mission to remake the world in our image has been one of the most dangerous assumptions of US foreign policy but has had a huge effect on how wars are perceived by the voters.

His foreign policy also included the invasion of Panama in 1989 with the capture of the de facto Panamanian head of government, Manuel Noriega, who was taken to the US and convicted in American courts of charges related to drug trafficking and money laundering. Noriega served in US federal prison until 2010, when he was extradited to France, convicted there, and sent to prison until he was extradited to Panama in 2011. Now he is serving three 20-year prison terms there. Despite the fact that Noriega was demonstrably a criminal, the method of his removal set a dubious precedent, although of course it was justified by the usual rhetoric of human rights and international law. One in a long set of US military interventions in Latin America. A stereotypical question in America about foreign Muslim terrorist attacks has been, "Why do they hate us?" Nobody seems to bother to ask that question about Latin America. Perhaps because the answer is so well known?

Bush is rightly remembered in the various media retrospectives for a pragmatic, sensibly cautious approach to the fall of the East Bloc and then the Soviet Union. But the "shock therapy" conversion of the former Communist economies to "free-market" ones has to be judged on what we know about it's results now. Which are certainly not unambiguously beneficial. And that approach was supported by Old Man Bush's Administraition.

Here are some useful critical looks at Bush and especially his foreign policy.

Charlie Pierce looks at Bush 41's role in the continuing radicalization of the Republican Party and takes a very dim view of his role in the Iran-Contra affair, another giant step toward unaccountability for Presidents in foreign policy. (George H.W. Bush Couldn't Fight His Own Ambition Esquire Politics Blog 12/02/2018))

Robert Scheer also has quite an interesting take from his interactions with Bush on the campaign trail in 1980. (George H.W. Bush’s Entitlement Cool Truthdig 12/01/2018; the piece is an excerpt from a 2006 book of Scheer's)

Mehdi Hasan is distinctly underwhelmed by various aspect of Bush 41 and his Presidency (George H.W. Bush Couldn't Fight His Own Ambition The Intercept 12/01/2018)

The invaluable Juan Cole gives a very good descriptions of how Bush's Persian Gulf War was part of an unfortunate series of US policy decisions in the Middle East. He gives an especially good brief account of how the engagement against Iraq in 1991 created a situation that led to his son's far more disastrous Iraq War. (The Pivotal GHW Bush Presidency: How the US became Mired in the Mideast Informed Comment 12/02/2018) This process is described in much more detail by the also invaluable Andrew Bacevich in his book, America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (2016).