In Funeral of Pomp and Pageantry, Nation Bids Farewell to George Bush - nytimes

WASHINGTON — The nation bade farewell on Wednesday to George Herbert Walker Bush, the patriarch of one of the most consequential political dynasties of modern times and the president who presided over the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a new era of American dominance in the world.

As bells tolled and choirs sang and an honor guard accompanied the coffin, the nation’s 41st president was remembered as a “kinder and gentler” leader at a tumultuous moment whose fortitude steered the country through storms at home and abroad and whose essential decency set a standard for others to meet.

“When the history books are written,” his son, former President George W. Bush, said in a eulogy at Washington National Cathedral, “they will say that George H.W. Bush was a great president of the United States, a diplomat of unmatched skill, a commander in chief of formidable accomplishments and a gentleman who executed the duties of his office with dignity and honor.”

Mr. Bush, like his father an emotional man given to tearing up over family, struggled to make it through his eulogy, his eyes watery, his face etched with emotion. He held on until the very end, when he choked up as he called the former president “the best father a son or daughter could ever have.”

President Trump joined all the living former presidents as well as foreign leaders, lawmakers, Supreme Court justices and diplomats at the service but in a nod to tensions with the Bush family he had no speaking role. There was less of an overt sense of rebuke to Mr. Trump than there was at the funeral for Senator John McCain in September, but the unspoken contrasts between the former and current presidents were hard to miss.

“To us,” the younger Mr. Bush said, “his was the brightest of the thousand points of light.”

The elder Mr. Bush died on Friday at age 94 after years of struggling with a form of Parkinson’s disease. His coffin, draped in a flag, was headed after the service to Joint Base Andrews outside Washington, where it will be loaded aboard one of the blue-and-white presidential jets for a final flight home to Texas.

But with the passage of time, Mr. Bush has become one of the most admired occupants of the Oval Office, often described as the best one-term president, at least in modern times. He helped bring the Cold War to a peaceful end, paved the way for the reunification of Germany, launched the Gulf War to expel Iraqi invaders from Kuwait and bolstered America’s standing around the world. 

Jon Meacham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who became close to Mr. Bush as his biographer, called him “America’s last great soldier-statesman, a 20th-century founding father.” 

“Abraham Lincoln’s better angels of our nature and George H.W. Bush’s thousand points of light are companion verses in America’s national hymn,” Mr. Meacham said. “For Lincoln and Bush both called on us to choose the right over the convenient, to hope rather than to fear and to heed not our worst impulses but our best instincts.”

By now, Mr. Bush’s storied life is well known. A son of privilege and product of an elite education at Greenwich Country Day School, Phillips Academy and Yale. One of the youngest navy combat pilots in World War II, shot down over the Pacific and rescued by a submarine. Texas oilman. Congressman. Ambassador to the United Nations. Republican Party chairman. Envoy to China. C.I.A. director. Vice president. President. - Read More

In Funeral of Pomp and Pageantry, Nation Bids Farewell to George Bush