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Just one day after his wife was buried, former president George H.W. Bush contracted an infection that spread to his blood and was hospitalized. On Monday, a family spokesman said Bush is responding to treatments and appears to be recovering.
The 93-year-old’s health has been in decline for years, yet on Saturday, Bush sat front and center at Barbara’s funeral in Houston. Confined to a wheelchair, Bush sat steadfastly as family and friends highlighted his 73-year marriage to the former first lady and her remarkable life.
[George H.W. Bush hospitalized the day after funeral for his wife, Barbara]
Included in those tributes was a brief account of one of the first times George Bush — now America’s oldest living president — faced his own mortality. More than seven decades ago, Bush confronted death not from an intensive care unit or at his dying wife’s bedside, but floating alone in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean.
A high school senior on Dec. 7, 1941, Bush was walking the campus of Phillips Academy Andover when he first heard the news that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. According to Bush biographer and presidential historian Jon Meacham, Bush’s immediate reaction was to serve.
“After Pearl Harbor, it was a different world altogether,” Bush would later recall for Meacham’s biography, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush. “It was a red, white, and blue thing. Your country’s attacked, you’d better get in there and try to help.”
Bush initially decided he wanted to become a pilot — and fast. He briefly considered enlisting in the Royal Air Force in Canada because, as Bush told Meacham, he “could get through much faster.” But Bush was lured by naval service, inspired by the grandeur of the Navy’s power, and its reputation for camaraderie and purpose. A combination of flying and the Navy fit just right.
That winter, Bush was not yet 18 years old. He’d go home for his last Christmas out of uniform. And at a Christmas dance, he’d set his eyes on Barbara.
[‘You were the reason’: Barbara and George Bush’s love story remembered at her funeral]
On June 12, 1942, Bush turned 18 and graduated from Andover. After commencement, he left for Boston to be sworn into the Navy. Nearly one year later, Bush became an officer of the United States Naval Reserve and earned his wings as a naval aviator. Meacham speculates that Bush was likely the Navy’s youngest flying officer just days shy of his 19th birthday. He was assigned to fly torpedo bombers off aircraft carriers in the Pacific theater.
At dawn on Sept. 2, 1944, Bush was slated to fly in a strike over Chichi Jima, a Japanese island about 500 miles from the mainland. The island was a stronghold for communications and supplies for the Japanese, and it was heavily guarded. Bush’s precise target was a radio tower.
At about 7:15 that morning, Bush took off through clear skies along with William G. White, known as “Ted,” and John “Del” Delaney. Just over an hour later, their plane was hit. Meacham wrote that smoke filled the cockpit and flames swallowed the wings. Bush radioed White and Delaney to put on their parachutes.
“My God,” Bush thought to himself, “this thing is going to blow up.”
Choking on the smoke, Bush continued to steer the plane, dropping bombs and hitting the radio tower. He told White and Delaney to parachute out of the plane, then climbed through his open hatch to maneuver out of the cockpit.
“The wind struck him full force, essentially lifting him out the rest of the way and propelling him backward into the tail,” Meacham wrote. “He gashed his head and bruised his eye on the tail as he flew through the sky and the burning plane hurtled toward the sea.”
As Bush floated out of the sky, he saw his plane crash into the water and disappear below. Then he hit the waves, fighting his way back up to the surface and kicking off his shoes to lighten his load.
“His khaki flight suit was soaked and heavy, his head was bleeding, his eyes were burning from the cockpit smoke, and his mouth and throat were raw from the rush of salt water,” Meacham wrote.
Fifty feet away bobbed a life raft that Bush managed to inflate and flop onto. But the wind was carrying him towards Chichi Jima, so Bush began paddling in the opposite direction with his arms. Bush would later learn of horrific war crimes committed against American captives at Chichi Jima, including cannibalism.
[‘We knew the ship was doomed’: USS Indianapolis survivor recalls four days in shark-filled sea]
“For a while there I thought I was done,” Bush told Meacham.
He was alone, vomiting over the side of the life raft and slowly grasping that White and Delaney were gone. Hours passed. He cried and thought of home. Barbara would soon receive a letter from him saying “all was well,” but she had no true way of knowing. The letter was dated before George’s plane had been hit.
Bush thought he was delirious when suddenly, a 311-foot submarine rose from the depths to rescue him.
“Welcome aboard, sir,” greeted a torpedoman second class.
“Happy to be aboard,” replied the future commander in chief.
Read more:
‘One last time’: Barbara Bush had already faced a death more painful than her own
Why Melania Trump, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton attended Barbara Bush’s funeral
‘Find the joy’: The day Barbara Bush wowed Wellesley’s feminist protesters with a graduation speech
Gen. George Patton’s wife put a Hawaiian curse on his ex-mistress. She was dead within days.
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Update: Minutes before the Senate’s foreign relations committee was set to vote, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) announced he has changed his mind and will support CIA Director Mike Pompeo to be President Trump’s secretary of state. That means, instead of making history for the opposition to his nomination, Pompeo is expected to get approval from the committee and be confirmed by the full Senate later this week.
It has been more than 70 years since a cabinet nominee had such a hard time making it out of the Senate while still being confirmed.
In at least one way, no secretary of state nominee has had as much trouble as CIA Director Mike Pompeo is having getting confirmed: By the end of the day Monday, he’s expected to become the first secretary of state nominee to fail to get voted out of a Senate committee. But by the end of the week, he could be the first Cabinet member since 1945 to get a vote in the full Senate anyway.
There are a couple of factors that play off each other, making life hard for Pompeo and President Trump, but they mainly boil down to one: partisanship.
On Monday afternoon, Pompeo’s committee approval vote is expected to fall short by one vote, as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) will join all 10 Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to vote against Pompeo.
That’s the first time that has ever happened to a secretary of state, said Matt Green, a political-science professor at Catholic University. While Cabinet nominations like the attorney general tend to have partisan confirmation processes, secretaries of state have generally received broad bipartisan support in the Senate, Green said.
That doesn’t mean Trump has to go back to the drawing board. Senate GOP leaders are expected to bend procedural rules and bring Pompeo’s nomination up for a full vote in the Senate, anyway, later this week.
There, with more votes in play, Pompeo is expected to narrowly gain confirmation, thanks to two Democrats who will make up for Paul’s defection: Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) and Joe Manchin III (W.Va.).
Heitkamp and Manchin are running for reelection in states that Trump won by double digits in 2016, so they have an incentive to be seen as working with the president. (Even though, notably, neither voted for Trump’s premiere legislative accomplishment, the GOP tax overhaul, last year.)
Anyway. Back to our history lesson. If/when Pompeo does finally get confirmed by the Senate, he’ll have done it in such a roundabout way as to make history again.
Green and Senate records say Pompeo is on the cusp of becoming the first Cabinet nominee to fail a committee vote since 1945. That time, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s former vice president, Henry Wallace, couldn’t get enough support from conservative Southerners in his own party to get through a committee vote to be commerce secretary, but he did get through the full Senate.
There are a couple of similarities between now and then that are instructive to understanding Pompeo’s historic struggles:
Wallace was a Democrat who didn’t make it out of a Democratic-controlled committee, thanks to factions within the party, Green pointed out. Pompeo is a Republican who probably won’t make it out of a Republican-controlled committee for some of the same reasons. Paul represents a relatively small but vocal noninterventionist wing of the party.
It’s like deja vu for Trump, who was extremely frustrated in the summer when an effort to repeal Obamacare failed by one vote in a Republican-controlled Congress because the party was so divided.
Pompeo also doesn’t have the traditional résumé of a secretary of state. A congressman before he became CIA director, Pompeo doesn’t have the relationship with senators or diplomatic experience on which most secretaries of state have been able to rely, Green pointed out.
That has led to skepticism among Democrats in particular that Pompeo may be swayed by Trump’s controversial views on Russia and more nationalistic tendencies. At his confirmation hearing, he refused to explicitly say whether Trump asked him to get the FBI to back off an aspect of the Russia investigation.
[How Mike Pompeo went from one of Trump’s biggest critics to one of his biggest fans]
It’s also one reason many of Trump’s nominees have struggled to get confirmed: They’re often novices in the job. The secretary of state Trump fired for Pompeo, Rex Tillerson, had no government experience. He got approved by a 13-vote margin, which would be big for Pompeo but is remarkably tight, compared with previous secretaries of state. Green calculated that going back to the Carter era, secretaries of state were approved by an average margin of 91 votes.
There’s a dynamic factoring into Pompeo’s nomination that is uniquely 2018: hyperpartisanship when it comes to the president. Democrats voting against Pompeo have their policy reasons, but it’s undeniable that the politics of sticking it to Trump are a winner among their base.
Opposing Trump is popular among Democrats because Trump is so extremely unpopular. His approval ratings have risen slightly, but he’s still one of the most unpopular presidents in history at this moment in his presidency.
All of that combined makes Trump’s life extremely difficult. His party has such a narrow majority in the Senate that losing one or two senators is all it takes to sink a key vote. He’s nominating people for the Cabinet who would be controversial even in calmer times. And the Senate is so partisan right now that even the historically bipartisan secretary of state position is getting caught up in it.
“Need more Republicans!” Trump tweeted in frustration on Monday morning about the makeup of the Senate. On that, he’s partially right. Pompeo’s Senate snub will make history, but let’s not forget it’s happening, in part thanks to a Republican senator.
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