George H.W. Bush; 41st US president who saw the end of Cold War, dies at 94
George Herbert Walker Bush, the linchpin of an American political dynasty and 41st president of the United States, who rode foreign policy triumphs to high popularity at the end of the Cold War only to suffer a revolt in his own party and a painful defeat for re-election, has died. He was 94.
During his single term in the White House, the Berlin Wall fell, newly democratic states sprang up across Central and Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union came to an end. And in the Middle East, the U.S. military launched its most successful offensive since World War II.
But the end of the Cold War also signaled the end of an era of American bipartisanship that the long conflict with the Soviets had fostered. Bush, the product of an earlier era, seemed out of phase with a younger, harder-edged generation of conservatives rising in his party.
When he broke a pledge not to raise taxes, they turned against him. He would end up humbled, buffeted by economic decline, then defeated for re-election in 1992, receiving less support than any incumbent president in 80 years.
The chasm between Bush's achievements and his standing with the American public is a paradox that defines but doesn't fully explain the legacy of the 41st president of the United States.
That legacy would, however, live on in part through his son George W. Bush, who in 2000 would be elected president and go on to win the second term that had eluded his father. The son's own trials - and key decisions in which he departed from his father's course - resulted in a more generous reappraisal of the elder Bush's tenure.
The two were the second father and son to share the presidency, after John and John Quincy Adams. In 2016, his second son, John Ellis, known as Jeb, sought the Republican presidential nomination but was badly beaten by the eventual winner, Donald Trump.
Bush was the last in a remarkable line of eight American presidents, beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose lives had been shaped by World War II and the rivalry with the Soviets that followed. His tenure marked a dual transition - from
