Bush Sr. Dies at 94: Cold War President Remembered

George H. W. Bush was the last American president to have flown in combat: 58 combat missions as a Navy pilot in World War II, shot down once over Chichi Jima, rescued from the Pacific by a submarine. He served as CIA director, vice president for eight years, and then president from 1989 to 1993. He managed the end of the Cold War, the Gulf War, and German reunification. He lost to Bill Clinton in 1992 running for re-election during a recession. He died in November 2018 at 94. Bush was born on June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts, into a prominent Connecticut family. His father, Prescott Bush, served as a United States senator. On his 18th birthday, Bush enlisted in the Navy and became one of its youngest aviators. He flew torpedo bombers in the Pacific, and on September 2, 1944, his aircraft was hit by antiaircraft fire during a bombing run on Chichi Jima. He completed the attack, then bailed out over the ocean and was rescued by the submarine USS Finback. After the war, he attended Yale, then moved to Texas to work in the oil industry. His political career spanned three decades: congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, envoy to China, CIA director, and eight years as Ronald Reagan's vice president. His presidency coincided with the Soviet Union's dissolution, and his diplomatic management of German reunification and the peaceful end of the Cold War is considered among the most skilled exercises of American foreign policy. The Gulf War, in which a US-led coalition expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait in a hundred hours of ground combat, was a military triumph. But a domestic recession and his broken "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge cost him the 1992 election. His son George W. Bush became the 43rd president in 2001.