George H.W. Bush, Icon of the WASP Establishment—and of Brutal US Repression in the Third World

By Greg Grandin

The Nation

Obituaries have transformed the terror that Bush inflicted, depicting it as heroism.

George H.W. Bush is sworn in as director of the CIA on January 30, 1976. (dpa via AP Photo)

George Herbert Walker Bush represented a ruling class in decay. His WASP awkwardness, his famous syntactical struggles—described in obituaries as an ah-shucks genuineness, a goofy, “irreducible niceness”—was symptomatic of an Establishment in crisis. Franklin Foer, writing in The Atlantic, notes the nostalgia of the encomiums. The public apparently yearns for a time when politics were less coarse, when the country’s clubby elites were well-bred, well-voweled (compare the pleasantly rolling i’s and o’s found in the Harrimans and Roosevelts with the guttural u of today’s ruling clan), and well-mannered, their grasping and groping kept out of the press, for the most part.

What Foer doesn’t mention, and what is perhaps the single most important through-line in Bush’s life, is the way the extension of the national-security state, and easy recourse to political violence in the world’s poorer, darker precincts, allowed Anglo-Saxon men like Bush to stem the decomposition and to sharpen their class and status consciousness.

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Obituaries have transformed the terror that Bush inflicted, depicting it as heroism.

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