The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty

by Susan Page

She used her unique position to act at times as their protector, at times as their conscience.

She kept scores. Her words could sting and leave scars, even with those she loved.

Robin’s illness and her death six brutal months later would forever change Barbara Bush. The experience would steel her resolve and broaden her understanding of the ways the innocent can be caught and crushed by the unfairness of life.

With Robin’s death, Barbara was the one who collapsed into sorrow, and George became her rock. The pattern of one stepping up when the other was struggling—and of being able to switch those roles between them—would sustain the couple during times of political defeat and personal pain.

A study in the 1970s estimated that as many as 90 percent of bereaved couples found themselves in serious marital difficulty within months after the death

The end of this sentence is ,”of a child.”

“It scarred her in a way that’s benefited many, many people. I shouldn’t say scarred—it’s tenderized her in a way that has benefited so many people.”

“It taught me that when someone dies you ought to talk about them.

On June 8, 1925, Barbara was born at Booth Memorial Hospital, then on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

This was The Salvation Army’s hospital, named after the founder, William Booth.

“In wartime, the rules change. You don’t wait until tomorrow to do anything,”

What struck some was that she was drawn primarily not to children who were learning to read but to adults who had missed their chance, many of them living on the margins of society, a fair number of them immigrants.

“When Ben Franklin was dining in Paris, one of his companions posed the question: ‘What condition of man most deserves pity?’ Each guest proposed an example. When Franklin’s turn came, he offered: ‘a lonesome man on a rainy day who does not know how to read.’”

since Eleanor Roosevelt, no modern First Lady had been more persistent on behalf of a cause—devoting more time or raising more money—than Barbara Bush was on literacy. “There were a lot of other splashy things she could have done,” said Sharon Darling. “She always said, ‘No, I’m talking about people who can’t read and their children.’ She was always so clear on the focus and the mission.”

Missiom focus

Barbara Pierce Bush helped found the Global Health Corps, a nonprofit organization that recruited professionals to work on international health issues, including HIV/AIDS. “I work with a ton of AIDS activists and a lot of people living with AIDS that were those that marched in the street in the ’80s and ’90s to make sure that they could get the drugs they needed,” she told me. “I had so many that emailed me about their memory of my grandmother going to the AIDS home for children living with AIDS. Then one said so beautifully, he said, ‘Your grandmother showed other people that we were fighting a disease, not people.’”

The importance of loving people and helping. “We battle not against flesh and blood…”

“I firmly believe that we cannot tolerate discrimination against any individuals or groups in our country. Such treatment always brings with it pain and perpetuates hate and intolerance.

For some reason this is a lesson we keep failing to learn from history.

“At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict, or not closing one more deal,” she told them. “You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, or a parent.”

Priorities

When her body lay in repose at St. Martin’s, the Secret Service agents who had been on the Bushes’ detail had stood vigil beside her casket. After she was buried in College Station, they remained on duty at the gravesite through the night, though that was no longer required for any security reason. When everyone else had gone, the Secret Service team sent out a message, as they always did at the close of day. They used the code name Barbara Bush had been known by for decades, ever since that long-ago presidential campaign in 1980. “Tranquility has reached her final destination.”

There is more to life than this world.