George H.W. Bush

George H.W. Bush arrived at the presidency with perhaps the deepest foreign policy résumé of any modern president: CIA director, U.N. ambassador, envoy to China, two-term Vice President. He needed every credential. In four years he oversaw the fall of the Berlin Wall, German reunification, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and a coalition war in the Persian Gulf that expelled Iraq from Kuwait in 100 hours of ground combat. The foreign policy record was extraordinary. The domestic record proved fatal to his reelection.

"Read my lips: no new taxes," Bush declared at the 1988 Republican convention. The pledge was his most memorable line and his most damaging one. When budget realities forced him to accept a tax increase in 1990 as part of a deficit reduction deal, the broken promise became a rallying cry for conservatives and a campaign weapon for Bill Clinton. Ross Perot's third-party candidacy split the right, and an economy in recession sealed Bush's defeat — one of the sharpest reversals of political fortune in modern presidential history.

The Gulf War coalition — 34 nations, roughly 700,000 troops — represented the high-water mark of post-Cold War multilateralism. Bush's deliberate decision not to march on Baghdad and topple Saddam Hussein, criticized by some at the time, looked prescient after the 2003 Iraq War. His management of German reunification, conducted through patient diplomacy with a wary Soviet Union, is studied in foreign policy programs as a model of great-power statecraft.

Bush's reputation recovered steadily in the decades after his defeat. His friendship with Bill Clinton — the man who beat him — became one of the more improbable partnerships in American political life, the two appearing together at humanitarian causes and disaster relief efforts. When he died in November 2018 at 94, he was mourned as the last of a generation shaped by World War II, with a sense of duty that felt, by then, genuinely rare.