![]() ![]() One of my colleagues was staffing Bush, basically shepherding him through various wickets and serving as a gofer I was staffing the gofer. I was a junior staffer on an all-hands-on-deck event that brought back multiple dignitaries, including former President Bush (and others)-I think it was probably the famous Yasser Arafat-Yitzhak Rabin handshake event on the South Lawn on Sept. Second, I served in the White House early in the Bill Clinton administration, when memories of that campaign were still fresh. Bush into a grotesque caricature, why not embrace the caricature and go with someone who can dish it out in equal measure? Bush) actually paved the way for the politics of President Donald Trump: If the left is going to turn someone as decent as George H.W. I cannot help but wonder if the overdone critique of Bush (and, for that matter Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. But comparison and contrast with our current era is obvious and instructive. Of course, politics ain’t beanbag, and he occasionally threw a sharp elbow himself. My students today are surprised when they learn about the hyperbolic critiques leveled at Bush in the heat of the 1992 presidential campaign. First, he was mocked and vilified by partisan elites all out of proportion to any real defects-and he bore it with greater grace and decency than any other president in our modern era. Bush administration, but when I reflect on his life of service, three remembrances loom large. As is often the case, it was best revealed when almost no one was looking. It was a different conception of leadership, where power was coupled with grace, responsibility, and a sense of noblesse oblige. If memory serves, that particular evening party was one of 17 held that season. They, meanwhile, warmly greeted the next in line and smiled for the camera, again and again. We all left our brief encounters beaming, with a story to tell family and a picture to place on our parents’ mantels. The photo line was something the Bushes endured because they knew how much it would mean to the staff. I was so lowly at that point that I actually had “junior” in my job description-a barbaric practice since abandoned in the modern age of title inflation. This was not something they did just for the great and the powerful. While my moment captured on film was a brief one, for them it was a single click in an evening of an endless receiving line and countless firings of the camera flash. The most powerful man on earth! Leader of the free world! But even at that callow stage, it dawned on me that the act of taking that photo said a great deal more about the president and Barbara Bush. It was my first chance to meet a president of the United States in the White House, and I was awestruck. ![]() In it, a much younger version of myself stands posed, grinning, between President and Mrs. Bush is summoned up by a photograph from nearly 27 years ago. ![]()
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