PORTLAND, Maine — Two years ago Jean Becker was talking with her editor, the man who had guided her 2021 book about her longtime boss, George H. W. Bush. That volume, "The Man I Knew," offered a warm and personal portrait of Bush from the nearly 25 years that Becker spent with him as his chief of staff after he left the White House.
The editor suggested the world needed another book about Bush. Becker was skeptical. “You do know he died at the end of the last book?” she told him.
They talked some more, and she turned the idea over in her mind, and eventually, she decided it was an excellent suggestion. She got to work, and her second book, "Character Matters and Other Life Lessons from George H. W. Bush," has just been published. It is a guide to leading a good life, a life built on friendship and fun, kindness and service to others.
"Let’s be honest," she writes. "Our beloved country is not in a good place. Our partisan divide gets worse almost every day. We get angry at even the hint of a slight."
Most readers will nod their heads in agreement.
"It wasn’t always this way," Becker continues. "It doesn’t have to be this way now. I know someone who can help. Our forty-first President left us a blueprint on how to get back to a more civil society that respects the rule of law; that respects and even likes one another; that looks to the future with optimism and hope."
For George Bush, compromise was not a dirty word. In fact, a willingness to compromise—to put the good of the country before his own political fortunes—quite possibly cost him a second term.
In 1990, with the federal budget deficit growing to alarming levels, Bush went back on his no-new-taxes pledge and cut a deal with Democrats in Congress. He knew he would take a tremendous political hit, but he felt it was imperative to address the deficit.
A week or so before Congress approved the agreement, Becker says, "He literally wrote in his diary, 'I think I just made myself a one-term president.'"
She pauses thoughtfully and asks a question: "Who in Congress can write something like that today?"
Bush’s selflessness on that issue, according to Becker, led the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation to later present him with its Profiles in Courage award and prompted President Obama to award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
"I just wish we could get back to that place where Republicans and Democrats understand nobody’s right all the time and usually the answer’s in the middle," Becker says. "Put your country first. And that is one of the biggest lessons he left behind for us."