LIFE First Ladies: Remembering Barbara Bush, 1925 - 2018

By The Editors of LIFE

Americans have always been fascinated with the women who have held the title First Lady. But just who were these people, behind their official portraits? Did you know that one won an Emmy and another held regular radio addresses? LIFE takes a close look at all of these women and their legacy in a volume that's guaranteed to delight and surprise. Highlights include:

• Firsts, such as the first First Lady to wear pants publicly and the first to drive a car
• How Dolley Madison set the stage
• Unanswered questions: Did one First Lady poison her husband? Did another serve as unofficial commander in chief?
• Presidential spouses around the world and how their roles differ from the U.S. First Lady
• Eleanor Roosevelt's achievements are well-known, but others quietly accomplished great things in politics

• Language: English
• Publisher: Life
• Release date: May 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781547844241

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House

TRIBUTE

Remembering Barbara Bush

1925—2018

Known for her candor and authenticity, the matriarch of one of the nation’s most enduring political dynasties earned admiration from across the political spectrum

BY MARGARET CARLSON

SETH POPPEL/YEARBOOK LIBRARY

Barbara Pierce, a distant descendant of 14th U.S. President Franklin Pierce, in 1943.

Barbara Bush was as grounded as any First Lady, a down-to-earth realist planted firmly between two high-flying stars: Nancy Reagan of the rail-thin coiffed good looks, rarely seen children and adoring gaze, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the two-for-the-price-of-one lawyer who let it be known that she wouldn’t be staying home baking cookies. Yet Barbara Bush proved to be a national force, worth every penny we didn’t pay her.

Inside the White House of her husband, George H.W. Bush, the country’s 41st president, she had her own signatures: an acerbic wit, an outgoing personality and the intimidating raised eyebrow that froze those who worked for him. She didn’t have an office in the West Wing or attend cabinet meetings, but, as her son’s chief of staff Andy Card remembers, her presence was everywhere—in the speech that came back in the morning better for her edits, in the shots she took that the president didn’t have to, in the fortress she built around him that gave him the strength to do the job. Skeptical where he was trusting and as outspoken as he was diplomatic, she had his back at every turn: if you slighted him, you would answer to her.

For the country, Barbara Bush offered something else. She never promised us a Rose Garden, photo-ready perfection or perfection at all. She was honest about her size (14), her hair (white since she gave up dyeing it in her 30s), her weight (always a few pounds over the ideal) and her pearls. Those were $90 fakes, but there wasn’t much else that was false about her. Her wardrobe ran to exercise clothes when she had no intention of doing more than walking Millie, her English spaniel and co-author of their No. 1 best-seller, Millie’s Book (proceeds went to combat illiteracy).

As she prepared to move to the White House from the vice president’s mansion after her husband’s 1988 presidential win, she acknowledged to me, in an interview for a Time cover story, that she had gotten away with murder: advising Nancy Reagan to replace the East Room china one plate at a time, suggesting that her husband strip down to disprove rumors that he was wounded during a tryst, calling Geraldine Ferraro a word that rhymes with rich. She told me she would henceforth be more careful about the words coming out of her mouth, adding, after a pause, slightly.

She is the only woman besides Abigail Adams to be the wife of one president and mother of another (George W. Bush, or 43, as he became known). And if it hadn’t been for a tsunami named Donald Trump, she might have made history as the mother of yet one more. During the South Carolina Republican presidential primary in 2016, she joined the one-time GOP favorite, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who she had famously said was the most qualified man for the job after initially resisting his campaign in 2013. By then, Jeb’s was likely a losing cause. Already ill, she took the trip anyway, cheering him on, chin pointed upward, eyes shining, smile full.

That was her final campaign. Barbara Bush died at 92 on April 17, 2018. She left this world the way we all want to, peacefully at home, free of code blues and intubations, surrounded by family and her husband, George H.W. Bush, whom she married in 1945. They survived 73 years of marriage, a long wartime separation, the death of a child, 30 moves and the ups and down of leading a very public life with all the satisfactions and disappointments that came with it. In her class note for her alumnae magazine in 2017, Barbara wrote that she’d gotten so many new body parts that she was hardly recognizable, but life was good. I’m still old, she wrote, and still in love with the man I married. Her husband recently described their marriage as the process of two people becoming one.

Barbara Bush was born in affluent Rye, New York, in 1925, the third of four children of a father who had worked his way up to become president of the McCall Corp. and a mother happy to keep house. During Christmas break her senior year at Ashley Hall, an all-girls boarding school, Barbara Pierce met George Bush, just out of Andover. He asked her to sit out a waltz. They found two chairs and fell in love, getting secretly engaged just before he shipped out to the Pacific, where his plane would be shot down. Shortly after his rescue, he returned home on leave, and they wed immediately, with Barbara dropping out of Smith her sophomore year. I married the first man I ever kissed, she once said. When I tell this to my children, they just about throw up.

That first kiss led them west to seek fortune in the oil fields of Texas. After George finished his service and graduated from Yale in 1948, they packed up the Studebaker for a one-bedroom apartment in Odessa, Texas, where they shared a bathroom with a mother-daughter team of prostitutes before heading to Midland and then Houston, where George sold his stake in Zapata Off-Shore in 1966 for $1 million.

During those years, Barbara suffered her biggest losses. In 1949 her mother died when her father lost control of the car while trying to keep a cup of coffee from spilling. In 1953 the Bushes’ 3-year-old daughter, Robin—their first child after having George W. in 1946—woke up feeling tired. They were shocked when she was diagnosed with leukemia. She held on for eight months, with Barbara, whose hair turned prematurely gray, sitting bedside at Memorial Hospital in New York City and George coming on weekends. Many couples are torn apart by the loss of a child. Bush says it welded them ever more tightly together. There would be three more children, Neil, Marvin and Dorothy, planned, she often joked to telegraph her support for Planned Parenthood.

Despite being a pillar of the community, Barbara was shy. Sunk deep in diapers and dishes,