the suggestion, the vice president told his 1988 campaign diary, was <u+201c>strange and unbelievable.<u+201d> twenty-eight years ago, george h. w. bush, fresh from securing the republican presidential nomination to succeed ronald reagan, was about to choose a running mate of his own. his campaign manager, lee atwater, always on the lookout for the unconventional and the unexpected, had apparently had informal talks with donald j. trump, the new york developer. mr. trump, mr. atwater told his boss, was willing to be considered for the second spot on the republican ticket. mr. bush found the thought outlandish and, after reporting the conversation in his diary, promptly forgot about it. now, nearly three decades later, much of america, like the george bush of 1988, finds the possibility of a trump administration <u+201c>strange and unbelievable.<u+201d> unlike mr. bush, however, we don<u+2019>t have the luxury of being able to put the new york mogul out of mind. of all of 2016<u+2019>s many madnesses, large and small, one stands out for the historically minded: in the relatively short span of a quarter century, the republican party has veered so far out of its usual lane that george h. w. bush has privately said that he will be voting for the wife of the man who dispatched him from the white house <u+2014> the 92-year-old<u+2019>s first-ever vote for a democratic nominee. it<u+2019>s worth recalling that the republican party, the party of lincoln, was relatively stable and sane as recently as two decades ago. as henry adams once remarked of the movement from washington to grant, the journey from george h. w. bush to donald j. trump disproves darwin. what happened? surely part of it is culture. while we live in an age of twitter-fed self-promotion and self-assertion, mr. bush believes in reticence and in dignity. bill clinton and ross perot mastered cable tv; mr. bush might well have thought arsenio hall was a building at andover. talk radio was on the rise in the late 1980s and early <u+2019>90s, as was reflexive partisanship. rush limbaugh, who endorsed pat buchanan<u+2019>s primary challenge against mr. bush in 1992, embodied the former; newt gingrich, who broke with mr. bush over the 1990 budget agreement, was the leading example of the latter. mr. bush, who began his political career in texas fighting the john birch society, has never been truly at home in what<u+2019>s become the breitbart universe. in the aftermath of the loss of his first race for office, in 1964, mr. bush wrote a heartfelt letter to an old friend: <u+201c>this mean humorless philosophy which says everybody should agree on absolutely everything is not good.<u+201d> he continued, <u+201c>when the word moderation becomes a dirty word we have some soul searching to do.<u+201d> the words <u+2014> touchingly na<u+00ef>ve and heartfelt <u+2014> seem to come from a vanished world. the product of greenwich country day school, andover and yale, mr. bush was the last president of the world war ii generation. a decorated combat hero, he nevertheless found it incredibly difficult to talk about himself <u+2014> a legacy from his mother, who discouraged self-reference and self-absorption by saying that no one wanted to hear about the great i am. as a child, mr. bush was nicknamed have-half for his tendency to split any treats in two to share with friends. his was an ethos of empathy. mr. bush always wondered about what <u+201c>the other guy<u+201d> was thinking and feeling. that was mr. bush<u+2019>s reality <u+2014> one far removed from mr. trump<u+2019>s hegelian assertions of his own power, prowess and centrality. as temperamentally distinctive as mr. bush is from mr. trump, historians seeking to tell the story of the devolution of the republican party will also find that the forces that gave us 2016 have roots in the first bush administration. mr. atwater and roger ailes, who worked for the bush campaign in 1988, practiced a rough politics of conservative populism. a pragmatist when it came to amassing power, mr. bush was willing to do what it took to defeat gov. michael s. dukakis of massachusetts, running a campaign that painted mr. dukakis as soft on crime for his record of furloughing convicted murderers and criticized his veto of a bill mandating that public schoolchildren recite the pledge of allegiance. the difference between 1988 and 2016, however, is that for mr. bush such attacks were the means to an end: a victory that would enable him to focus on what he truly cared about, which was governance. for mr. trump, the means are the end <u+2014> he is, as jeb bush aptly put it during the 2016 primaries, the chaos candidate. the elder bush used to dismiss campaign posturing with a phrase of mao<u+2019>s, calling such blasts <u+201c>empty cannons of rhetoric.<u+201d> mr. trump can<u+2019>t get enough of such cannon fire. mr. trump<u+2019>s ambition <u+2014> for attention, for power <u+2014> is his defining characteristic. mr. bush tempered his own ambition with empathy and dignity. late in his years as mr. reagan<u+2019>s vice president, mr. bush was shown into a children<u+2019>s leukemia ward in krakow, poland. thirty-five years before, he and his wife, barbara, had lost a child to the disease, a family tragedy of which he rarely spoke in public. in krakow, one patient, a 7- or 8-year-old boy, wanted to greet the american vice president. learning that the child was sick with the cancer that had killed his own daughter, mr. bush began to cry. <u+201c>my eyes flooded with tears,<u+201d> he dictated to his audio diary, <u+201c>and behind me was a bank of television cameras.<u+201d> he told himself, <u+201c>i can<u+2019>t turn around,<u+201d> can<u+2019>t <u+201c>dissolve because of personal tragedy in the face of a host of reporters and our hosts and the nurses who give of themselves every day.<u+201d> so <u+201c>i stood there looking at this little guy, tears running down my cheek<u+201d> <u+2014> <u+201c>hoping he didn<u+2019>t see, but, if he did, hoping he<u+2019>d feel that i loved him.<u+201d> mr. bush<u+2019>s is a voice from a past at once distant and close at hand <u+2014> and a voice we should seek to heed, for we need that grace now, in our own time. jon meacham is the author of <u+201c>destiny and power: the american odyssey of george herbert walker bush.<u+201d> a version of this op-ed appears in print on october 16, 2016, on page sr4 of the new york edition with the headline: the grace of george h.w. bush. today's paper | subscribe
nostalgia for the grace of george h.w. bush
jon meacham