The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

GEORGE BUSH WAS SHAPED AND TEMPERED BY HIS mother's nature. His was a soul finally formed by strata of love and discipline relentlessly laid down. Bush was lucky, so very lucky, to be rooted in a woman like Dorothy Walker Bush, who died last week at 91. But her death is added anguish in the President's season of political rejection, a burden few men have known. His steady goodwill in handing the White House over to Bill Clinton is a measure of a mother's implanted strength and a final tribute from a son.

Dorothy Bush was of another era, and her sense of propriety and modesty and self-control was cast in iron. Never trendy. It was forever. That armored her second son for the rough reaches of politics. Hindered him too, in a fuzzy and formless era of national debate.

Oh, yes, son George strayed from the Dorothy doctrine during the political campaigns of his long public life. He began to talk about his virtuosities and his great record, but he was never comfortable doing it. He had the angel of that remarkable woman hovering over him. And his father, a stately tower of a man who used to walk the Senate chamber with mirth on his lips and a deep love of country. So much of George Bush is family.

So when George entered the killing field of presidential politics, he gave it a good amateur's try, but he never went the full distance. And when the returns came in on that soft November night and told him he had lost, he emerged from his profound disappointment and made a special effort to honor his conquerors.

Those who watch Bush know he is pondering the meaning of existence on this planet as never before. Here and there he has muttered a phrase or two about the transience of political power and wondering what is left when it passes. He has answered his own question. What is left is the infinite tenderness and love within a caring family. He had the best. And there is irony in the fact that he may never have understood that so many others were not so blessed by Providence, and that is one of the reasons he lost this election.

What is it in the stars that piles one tragedy on another? Perhaps what is happening to Bush now is his ultimate test, and his response will be his final statement in his stewardship. It is fascinating how these men who climb to the heights of power almost always at some point pause and look back and truly understand what they owe their mothers. There was a night in the long past when John Kennedy, so heralded as a son of the grasping, determined Joe Kennedy, lowered his voice and mused how his sense of history and understanding of this nation began with his mother Rose, not his father. "She was the one who told us about the founding fathers, who read history to us, who took us to Plymouth Rock and the Old North Church," he said.

Almost anytime, anywhere, Lyndon Johnson would tell you about Rebekah Baines Johnson, who pounded it into him that his way out of the hard life on the Texas plains was through education. Along the Pedernales River on the old family ranch one night when the moon was rising, he recalled to a friend the terrible times his mother went through trying to hold her family together and keep her dignity while living on the edge of poverty and uncertainty. She broke into tears one evening at the water pump, nearly overwhelmed with fatigue. Johnson, a small boy, put his arms around her legs and said he would take care of her. He always did. And she cared for him through that ethereal bond of motherhood.

It was the idea of obligation to others, as preached by Dorothy Bush, that drove the President into a life of service, now winding down in bittersweet days. His presidential record was better than anybody in this dismal campaign ever admitted, and better than he could articulate. And there was something more that could never be fitted into the strictures of raucous electronic politics. The sheer decency of the son of Prescott and Dorothy Bush, obscured by his style of campaigning. Now that link is finally severed.

All last week as his mother faded from this world, Bush toasted his friends and adversaries in elegant farewells. The battle was over, he told those who had marched along that journey with him or against him. He did not believe in continuing hatred or grudges. Speaker Tom Foley laughed and joked about old skirmishes, shared goals. Once or twice Bush's voice broke and his eyes misted over. There was one night, after the ceremony ended and the guests were departing, when there was a glimpse of the 41st President of this enduring republic standing in the corridor of the mansion: he was sending Republicans and Democrats off into the night with one of his atrocious neckties flapping and his crooked grin playing across his face and his basic goodness asserting itself above all hurt and pain. History will remember.