If the history of this country were a musical composition, it might be written in counterpoint to the biographies of its first ladies.
In the case of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, every word and indeed every syllable was in perfect place, whether she was speaking in English or her finishing-school French. Nancy Reagan was a political insider and infighter to the nth degree, but one might never have suspected as much from her utterances for public consumption.
Barbara Bush, however, was quite the opposite. She may have been the last straight-shooter in this country's ever more convoluted presidential politics.
"What you see with me is what you get," she told the Republican National Convention in 1988, when her husband was nominated to succeed Ronald Reagan as president of the United States.
Oh, the way we were! The Bushes were married Jan. 6, 1945, and would go on to enjoy the longest marriage of any presidential couple in American history. Barbara was one of only two of the country's first ladies to have a child who was elected president. The other was Abigail Adams, the wife of John Quincy Adams. "I had the best job in America," Barbara Bush wrote back in 1994. "Every single day was interesting, rewarding, and sometimes just plain fun."
Barbara Bush relished this life and could ride it like a bucking bronco while she stayed in the saddle, but she also knew when it was time to go. She had been hospitalized off and on these past few years in Houston, one of the country's great medical centers, and diagnosed with congestive heart failure, among other conditions. In 2009, she'd had a heart valve replaced. And there was her long history of treatment for Graves' disease, a thyroid condition. She leaves behind not just a distinguished family but a close-knit one.
"My dear mother has passed on at age 92," her son and former president George W. Bush announced at her death. "Laura, Barbara, Jenna and I are sad, but our souls are settled because we know hers was. Barbara Bush was a fabulous First Lady and a woman unlike any other who brought levity, love, and literacy to millions. To us, she was so much more. Mom kept us on our toes and kept us laughing until the end. I'm a lucky man that Barbara Bush was my mother."
According to a press release, her now bereaved husband held Mrs. Bush's hand and was at her side when she died, just as he'd been throughout their rich life together. Barbara Bush might be sharp-tongued in private, but she maintained a public posture as a wife who never failed to call her husband her hero. In the White House, she once explained, a president needs "a friend, someone who's going to say, 'You are great,'" She certainly was, even if her husband might not always live up to the description she was always ready to give him.
Barbara Bush came by her calling as a public figure honestly. Daughter of a publisher and wife of an oilman, she was savvy about the division of labor that good marriages represent. "I don't fool around with his office," she once explained, "and he doesn't fool around with my household."
Every marriage has its own unique characteristics, and if Barbara Bush could be quick to criticize as the political wars engulfed man and wife, she could also be quick to apologize when even she recognized that she'd gone too far. Or as her daughter-in-law Laura Bush noted in her 2010 book Spoken from the Heart, Barbara Bush could be "ferociously tart-tongued. She's never shied away from saying what she thinks . . . She's managed to insult nearly all of my friends with one or another perfectly timed acerbic comment."
She even begged to differ with her husband's political stances now and then, as on abortion and gun-control laws. But she kept all that to herself in the heat of presidential campaigns. As she would put it, "I honestly felt, and still feel, the elected person's opinion is the one the public has the right to know."
Ordinarily we'd end an editorial like this one with the wish that the dead might rest in peace, but somehow that doesn't feel right in Barbara Bush's always restless case. Wherever she is now, you just know her zestful spirit is still marching on.
Editorial on 04/22/2018