Page - Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty

T he congregation that filled St. Martins Episcopal Church in Houston for Barbara Bushs memorial service on April 21, 2018, was invitation-only. Seated in the pews were family, friends, and dignitaries, four former presidents, and the current First Lady. Television networks broadcast the service live; cable news channels featured retrospectives; world leaders issued tributes.

But most remarkable was what happened outside the spotlight. A day before the memorial service, thousands of mourners had stood in line to file past her silver casket and pay their respects. For a time, her widowed husband, former president George H. W. Bush, insisted on being there in his wheelchair to thank them. After the service, when the hearse pulled away for the one-hundred-mile drive to her burial site at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, the roads along the route were lined with regular folks saying farewell. Some held aloft signs they had written. Welcome Home Barbara, one read. Pearls & Grace: Her Legacy Lives On! said another. Many of the women wore pearls, real and fake, as an affectionate salute.

Two months later, her oldest son, George W. Bush, marveled at the memory. It was unbelievable, an unbelievable outpouring of affection, the nations forty-third president told me in an interview in his Dallas office. His mother had been largely out of the public eye for a quarter century, he noted. What caused her, the wife of a one-term president, to be not only heralded as a great First Lady but loved? I dont think there have been many of them like that.

What made Barbara Pierce Bush resonate so with Americans?

She wasnt a charismatic speaker or a classic beauty. Indeed, her self-deprecating humor about her cloud of white hair and her endless efforts to lose a few pounds were part of her signature. She never held public office.

But she was formidable, and she was fearless.

In the spring of 2000, billionaire financier and philanthropist David Rubenstein accompanied a group that included the former First Lady and two of her granddaughters, Lauren and Ashley, on safari in Africa. At one point during their stay at the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya, a hippopotamus emerged from a watering hole in a way that looked threatening. The Secret Service is saying, Its heading to Mrs. Bush. What do we do? Do we shoot it? Rubenstein told me.

Amid the fuss, Barbara Bush stood her ground.

She didnt seem to worry about a hippopotamus that might be charging at her, Rubenstein recalled. I think she felt she could out-intimidate the hippopotamus.

Indeed, the hippo retreated.

Throughout her life, Barbara Bush spoke with strength, passion, and authority about both uncontroversial topics such as literacy and controversial ones including HIV/AIDS. She was quick with a quipNever ask anyone over seventy how they are feeling, she cautioned, adding, Theyll tell youand had a tongue that sometimes got ahead of her. With all that, she emerged as one of the most authentic voices of her era. She also became one of the more influential women in American history, though her role often went unrecognized.

Her death came at a time when many Americans were worried about the nations embattled politics, which were becoming so fiercely partisan that few people in the public arena were by consensus deemed to be decent, honorable, and worthy of respect. Barbara Pierce Bush was clearly one of those few. One sign of the countrys poisonous climate was the quiet relief among many who loved her when President Donald Trump announced he wouldnt attend the memorial service, citing a desire to avoid the disruptions of the added security, though First Lady Melania Trump was there.

Also seated in a front pew was Bill Clinton, a political foe who had become a family friend.

The Democratic opponent who ousted George H. W. Bush from the White House became an annual visitor to their summer home in Maine, although he acknowledged that Barbara Bush took more time to win over than her husband. She was a person with a strong sense of right and wrong, not so much about political issues but about how to live a life, how to organize a family, how to persevere in the face of adversity, how to deal with the things that come to everyone, Clinton told me. She had a sense of how it ought to be done.

Barbara Pierce was born to privilege in a tony New York City suburb, an indifferent student despite a high IQ, happily dropping out of college to marry the first boy she ever kissed. She followed George Bush to West Texas, where she was the parent who stayed home to raise their sizable family while her husband set off to make a name for himself. She was his essential partner as he built an oil business, won a seat in Congress, served as the top US diplomat at the United Nations and in China, was named director of the CIA, was elected vice president, and then ran for and won the White House. She would become only the second woman in history to be both the wife and the mother of presidents, and the only woman to live to see both her husband and a son in that high office.

Her life spanned a revolution in the roles of and opportunities for women. Her marriage, like many of its time, wasnt a partnership of equals. She ran the household; he called the shots everywhere else. But over time she emerged from being a helpmate, willing to follow her husbands decisions on where they would live and what he should do, to becoming a crucial adviserperhaps his most crucial. Shes about the only voice that he 100 percent trusted, one of his closest White House aides said.

Most of those who knew them best say George Bush would have been unlikely to accomplish all he did, including becoming president, if he hadnt married Barbara Pierce. There is no George H. W. Bush without Barbara Bush, grandson Pierce Bush told me. Really, I dont see my grandfather being able to attain what he did in life without my grandmother being there.

Beyond the achievements, few knew about the grief Barbara Bush also suffered. The social bloodlines and the affluence and the political position were no protection from pain.