George H. W. Bush: RIP

George H. W. Bush is dead and is being treated to a state-funeral worthy of kings. May he rest in peace. My guess is most people born after 1970 have very little idea of who he was or what his actual political contributions were. Perhaps many Americans will recall events that occurred during his 41^st Presidency. Some might remember him as a funny, loving grandpa. Some might recall his touching relationship with that serial philanderer and charming liar, Bill Clinton. Others might remember his old-age penchant for fondling and pinching the butts of attractive women.

This short composition touches on what many Americans may have forgotten about G. H. W. Bush or never learned. It is sort of an antidote to the fulsome praise you can read online and watch on national TV. In the mid-1960s, when Bush was running for the U.S. House in the state of Texas that had been heavily Democratic but was in the process of making a hard right turn to a newly mean conservatism, he campaigned vigorously to white voters against the very unpopular (in Texas) landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned segregation in public places and employment discrimination.

Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign against his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, is credited as being one of the most racially biased and vicious in modern political history and featured the now infamous Willie Horton ad, which focused on a convicted murderer who raped a woman while out of prison on a furlough program Dukakis had supported as Governor of Massachusetts. The Bush campaign followed up with an ad that featured footage of dangerous looking prisoners going through a revolving door, a strategy that intentionally appealed to the fears and prejudices of white voters.

In 1990, when he was President Bush vetoed a civil rights act that would have expanded job protections for racial minorities, making him and Ronald Reagan the only Presidents to veto civil rights measures since the start of the civil rights era. Bush justified his action by saying the bill would have introduced the “destructive force of quotas into our national employment system.” It seems, like most conservatives, he didn’t believe that black people had suffered from nearly a hundred years of federal and state de jure discrimination and flagrant violations of their most basic property and civil rights and did not merit compensation for the federal and state governments' past bad acts.

No one should forget Bush’s most lasting legacies in race relations: his nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court and his role in escalating the war on drugs. After a public spectacle in which GOP Senators viciously attacked the testimony and character of Anita Hill (Joe Biden should also be excoriated for his abject failure to support Hill), the typically silent, brooding Thomas was confirmed to the Court where he sits today in mute testimony to the long arm of presidential power. The bitter irony is Thomas was nominated by Bush to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall, a giant in the civil rights movement.

In President Bush’s first significant policy speech, on September 5, 1989, he launched a new anti-drug program by lifting up a plastic bag and saying directly to the national news TV cameras: “This is crack cocaine seized a few days ago by Drug Enforcement agents in a park just across the street from the White House. It could easily have been heroin or PCP. It’s as innocent-looking as candy, but it’s turning our cities into battle zones, and it’s murdering our children.”

In that speech, Bush called for a $1.5 billion increase in drug-related federal spending to law enforcement and pushed to “enlarge our criminal justice system across the board, at the local, state and federal levels alike. We need more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors.” It was a key moment in America becoming the world’s leading carceral state.

But how many Americans know that the arrest Bush was referring to was intentionally engineered by undercover federal agents who had to give the reputed drug dealer, who had no prior criminal record, directions as to where the White House was and to where to set up on the street to sell the drugs? The behavior of those federal agents was so egregious that the trial judge, Stanley Sporkin, formerly CIA General Counsel and later appointed by President Reagan to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, advised the guilty defendant to appeal to President Bush to commute his sentence, which he did though commutation, of course, never seriously considered by Bush.

Naturally, I have saved the best for the last. And that would be the infamous Iran-Contra Scandal that forever tarnished the end of the Reagan Administration. For those who know relatively little about that period in American history, I’ve provided a very brief summary. The Iran–Contra affair was a political scandal that occurred in President Reagan’s second term. Senior administration officials facilitated the secret sale of arms to Iran, which was the subject of an official U.S. arms embargo due to its earlier capture of the American Embassy and U.S. personnel during the Iran hostage crisis.

The Administration had intended to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund weapon purchases by right-wing opponents (contra-revolucionarios in Spanish and shortened to Contras) of Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government, and also hoped to negotiate the release of several U.S. hostages then held in Iran. Under the Boland Amendment, funding of the Contras by the U.S. Government had specifically been prohibited by Congress. The scandal is actually a great deal more complex than that and if readers are interested they should investigate on their own. For more detailed information, start with:

https://www.brown.edu/Research/Understanding_the_Iran_Contra_Affair/iran-contra-affairs.php

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/04/us/years-later-questions-remain-about-bush-s-role-in-the-iran-contra-affair.html

Bush always claimed that, even though he served as Reagan’s Vice President, previously was the Director of Central Intelligence, and was wired into the intelligence community through CIA Director William Casey and Deputy National Security Advisor John Poindexter, he was excluded from decision-making in the Iran-Contra affair, a claim difficult to believe on its face. Later analysis of Bush’s comments revealed numerous inconsistencies and outright conflicts between what he said and the mounting body of evidence in the scandal. On numerous occasions Bush claimed he wanted the truth to come out but never provided detailed accounts of how much and what he knew, when he had gained that knowledge, and what actions he took based on that knowledge. Instead, he dodged tough questions from reporters and other investigators, especially those from the office of the Independent Prosecutor, insisting that he had already revealed what he knew.

The kicker is that when Bush’s first and only term as President was about to expire, he pardoned six key Administration officials for their various illegal acts in the Iran-Contra Affair: former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, Robert C. McFarlane, Reagan’s former national security adviser, Elliott Abrams, former assistant Secretary of State for Central America, Clair E. George, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine services, Duane R. Clarridge, former head of the CIA’s European division, and Alan D. Fiers Jr., who had been a key CIA agent involved in the scandal. Bush’s pardon effectively decapitated the investigations of Lawrence E. Walsh, the Independent Prosecutor. It is important to note that Walsh characterized Bush’s failure to turn over material evidence in the Iran-Contra Affair as misconduct.

So, when you mourn the passing of George H. W. Bush, know that he was a human with many faults, like us all. But readers should keep in mind that many of those faults directly and indirectly affected the course of American history. Like most politicians, he had good and bad impluses and acted on both throughout his long career. Our job is to not forget the bad simply because we only want to remember the good.

RIP, G.H.W. Bush.