Barbara Bush: Remembering the matriarch of most powerful US first family in recent times

Barbara Bush, who has died aged 92, was never quite what she seemed. The image of her etched in American minds is of everybody’s dream grandmother: unaffected, devoted to her family to the exclusion of all else, in her own words “the nester” – about as far from politics as the wife of one president, and the mother of another, could get.

The image was artfully cultivated by such devices as 1990’s Millie’s Book, a first-person account of life in the White House from the perspective of the Bush family dog. But the reality was rather different.

Within the Bush dynasty, she was the uncontested matriarch. Behind the halo of permed white hair and the signature multi-strand artificial pearl necklace lurked a tough mind, a cutting tongue and a domestic political grasp on occasion more acute than that of her sometimes out-of-touch husband. She passed on many of these characteristics to George W Bush. the 43rd president, who was always much more his mother’s boy than his father’s.

In an interview late in the 2000 campaign, she was asked about her son’s intellectual qualifications for the White House: “Is he dumb?” She answered rhetorically: “Yes, he’s dumb as a fox.” The reply applied almost no less to herself.

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Barbara Bush’s popularity owed much to the comparison with her immediate predecessor and successor. Her comfy normality and lack of pretensions were a relief after Nancy Reagan’s sharp shouldered aspirations to royalty. They were rendered if anything more attractive by her successor Hillary Clinton, a career woman and feminist whose intellectual wattage scared many an ordinary American stiff.

“If Barbara were running this year she’d be elected,” noted her rueful husband at one of the many low points of the 1992 campaign. But she wasn’t, he lost – and once the immediate shock of rejection receded, his wife was quietly delighted.

For Barbara Pierce Bush, the White House and the role of first lady were less opportunities to savour than crosses to be borne. She disliked the sense of confinement and the loss of privacy. She detested the endless scrutiny and criticism of her husband’s performance in office (just as she would later detest it when her son received similar treatment a decade later). Indeed, after George Sr’s brush with diabetic fibrillosis in 1991, she tried to persuade him not to seek a second term.

Having lost the argument, however, she did her duty and proved arguably the most effective Republican campaigner in 1992 – though that was not saying much. Her views on social issues were at odds with the harsh doctrines imposed by the party’s increasingly powerful social conservative wing and uneasily embraced by her husband. On abortion, for example, she made clear that while she disapproved of the practice, it was solely the business of the woman involved, and that the state had no right to interfere. The majority of Americans, if not the Republican right, agreed with her.

The future first lady, the second daughter of Marvin Pierce, a senior executive at the McCall publishing group, grew up in a wealthy New York suburb. She led a sheltered childhood, culminating in two years at the exclusive Ashley Hall boarding school in Charleston, South Carolina. It was there that during a dance during the Christmas holidays of 1941 that she met a 17-year-old high school senior called George Herbert Walker Bush.

He was, she said later, “the handsomest boy I’d ever seen”, and it was love at almost first sight. Barbara enrolled at the prestigious Smith College for Women where she captained the first year soccer team. But by then the main thing on her mind was George Bush, by now a Navy pilot flying combat missions in the Pacific war against Japan. She married “the first man I ever kissed” on 6 January 1945 in Rye, New York, weeks after he returned to the US. Their first son, the future president George Walker Bush, was born in July 1946 while her husband was at Yale.

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“Stick with me, and I’ll show you the world,” George Sr told her early on, and he was as good as his word. His career took him from Yale to the Texas oil industry, from Houston to Washington when her her husband was elected to Congress in 1966. In 1971 he was named US ambassador to the United Nations in New York, before serving successively as chairman of the Republican party, head of the US diplomatic mission in Peking, and director of the CIA in the Ford administration.

Three years later he ran for the White House, only to finish with the consolation prize of the vice presidency under Ronald Reagan. But in 1988 George Bush went all the way, and Barbara became an instantly recognisable national and international celebrity in her own right, with her faux pearls, bright blue dresses and straightforward grandmotherly manner.

Throughout her life, however, her priority and consuming interest was the family. Three sons John Ellis (Jeb), Neil and Marvin, and a daughter, Dorothy, followed George Jr. Another daughter, Robin, died at the age of three of leukaemia in 1953. For Barbara it was a devastating blow, blunted only gradually by the unending demands of stay-at-home motherhood in 1950s and 1960s America – of “long days and short years”, she said in a speech decades later, “of diapers, earaches, runny noses, more Little League games than you ever thought possible, visits to hospital emergency rooms, Sunday school and church”.

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But, in terms of personal satisfaction as well as political achievement, the effort was worthwhile. The Bushes supplanted the Kennedys as the most successful dynasty in US politics. Barbara’s father-in-law had been US senator from Connecticut, her husband was the 41st president and her eldest son was twice elected governor of Texas, in 1994 and 1998, before serving two terms as the 43rd president, elected in 2000 and 2004. Jeb, who had been considered the brightest star of his generation of Bushes, was a highly successful two-term governor of Florida, while even younger Bushes were taking their first steps in the political arena in the first decade of the 21st century.

In 2016, at the age of 90, she came out in support of her son Jeb’s bid to become the Republican’s presidential campaign. She said of his rival Donald Trump: “He doesn’t give many answers to how he would solve problems. He sort of makes faces and says insulting things ... I’m sick of him.”

As first lady, her popularity was matched only in recent times by her daughter-in-law, Laura. More importantly for her, though, by the time she left the White House in January 1993 she had a dozen grandchildren of her own. That was the legacy she valued most.

Barbara Pierce Bush, born 8 June 1925, died 17 April 2018

Rupert Cornwell died in 2017