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By Root 888 0

the charging bronze figure of Ulysses S. Grant, beyond the granite lined pools of water which imperfectly connect the sloping Capitol grounds to the adjoining Mall. The moonlit dome, rushed to completion as a symbol of national unity amidst a brutal civil war, provided the perfect backdrop for a National Review Woodstock. By the time I walked into the rotunda, shortly before two in the morning, I had conversed with dozens of strangers, many barely old enough to have personal recollections of a presidency that had ended fifteen years before. There were families with strollers and military personnel in uniform; a carload of college kids who had driven from New Jersey; a woman from Missouri, who hadn’t slept since leaving home an indeterminate number of hours earlier. Periodically cameramen and microphone-wielding journalists invaded our ranks. Reagan stories were told. Old recordings of speeches drifted on the soft spring night. A friend’s cell phone allowed us to share the experience with the randomly called.

Nancy Reagan is presented with an American flag at her husband’s funeral

It was one of those increasingly rare water cooler moments, a mélange of patriotic pride and spirituality and the humbling perspective that comes with confronting our mortality. But if politics were briefly adjourned, democracy was not. Even now, angry, sometimes profane dissents were being registered online and via that defining instrument of electronic populism, the call-in show. Appearing the next day on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal I received a couple such jabs myself. Would similar abuse, I wondered, albeit from the opposite end of the political spectrum, have greeted the demise of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton? Probably. For in the über partisan climate of recent years—wherein adversaries are routinely treated as enemies, and the clash of ideas can all too easily morph into ideological jihad—death itself cannot instill good manners, let along the unity of grief.

—RNS

George Bush

Forty-first President - 1989-1993

Born: June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts

Presidential library and museum: The George Bush

Presidential Library and Museum,

College Station, Texas

Admission to George Bush Presidential

Library and Museum: $7.00

On January 20, 1989, George Herbert Walker Bush became the first incumbent vice president to ascend to the presidency since Martin Van Buren in 1836. Mr. Bush continued to follow in Van Buren’s footsteps by losing his bid for a second term. On January 20, 1993, George Bush watched Bill Clinton take the oath of office and then retired to his adopted hometown of Houston, Texas. “It’s been one hell of a ride,” he told a crowd of five hundred people who arrived at the airport to welcome him home.

Since retiring, Mr. Bush has taken a few flying leaps—out of a plane. On March 25, 1997, George Bush began celebrating milestone birthdays by parachuting out of an airplane—this jump over the Arizona desert. After reaching the ground safely, he told reporters, “It was wonderful. I’m a new man. I go home exhilarated.” He jumped again, over his presidential library, for his eightieth birthday, and marked his eighty-fifth birthday, on June 12, 2009, with a jump over Maine.

As a World War II navy pilot, he had been forced to bail out of his crippled bomber, badly cutting himself and tearing his chute. The two crewmen with him died.

The George Bush Presidential Library and Museum is located on the grounds of Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas

The parachute Mr. Bush used for his jump during World War II can be seen, along with exhibits chronicling the life and times of the forty-first president, in the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, Texas. The library and museum, located on ninety acres of the Texas A&M University campus, was dedicated on November 6, 1997. The library contains more than 40 million of President Bush’s papers. The museum features a model of George Bush’s Camp David office, displays some of the eighty thousand gifts received by the Bushes,