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                                                                                THE PRESIDENCY, Page 38

Tidings of Sadness and Loss


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.