The 41st president was known in caricature as someone who mangled syntax. But in his hundreds of letters, he expressed a quiet and often poignant eloquence.<\/b>
\nWhen the cameras were rolling, President George Bush was fond of saying that he was not the emotional type. But with a pen in his hand, he expansively let out his heartfelt and innermost feelings.
Mr. Bush favored the handwritten letter. He wrote them by the hundreds to family, friends, critics, colleagues and contemporaries. To read them is to take in a brief history of the second half of the 20th century \u2014 stories of war and peace, victory and defeat, musings on culture and sports, and expressions of deeply personal sentiments.
As a public figure, Mr. Bush was rarely given to the kind of introspection that his letters reveal. Rather than write a memoir, as several of his friends had urged, he published a compendium of his letters, \u201cAll the Best,\u201d which became a New York Times best seller.
Here are some highlights from the book that help to tell his life story.
In an undated letter a few months later, while he training in North Carolina, he wrote:
He also wrote critically about the military\u2019s approach to indoctrination:
Mr. Bush was also in throes of romance with his future wife, Barbara Pierce, and he wrote affectionately about her:
And he was ever the dutiful son:
Mr. Bush then began to put dates on his letters, and the young woman whom he kissed by Dec. 12,1943, was his fianc\u00e9e:
The tone was much more somber on Sept., 3,1943, when Mr. Bush told his parents of his plane being shot down over the Pacific. Two of Mr. Bush\u2019s crew members died in the attack.
He wrote to Alexander Haig on June 27,1973:
But a year later, he conveyed a different feeling in a letter to his sons:
But Mr. Bush survived Watergate and became C. I. A. director. In a letter to an old friend on May 4,1976, he wrote:
On March 30,1982, he wrote the actress Audrey Hepburn:
In the 1984 re-election campaign, Mr. Bush would face off against the Democratic presidential nominee, Geraldine Ferraro, a congresswoman from New York. He wrote to her on July 12,1984:
In 1987, the Reagan administration was consumed by the Iran-contra scandal, a controversy that did not go unnoticed by Mr. Bush\u2019s mother, Dorothy. Mr. Bush tried to assure her in a letter dated Jan. 11:
Though his letter writing shows a facility with language, his speeches were not always well received. He turned to the speechwriter Peggy Noonan for help with his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans in 1988. He gave her a staccato list of his traits and what he hoped to do:
As president, Mr. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq after its strike in Kuwait. In his diary on Feb. 14,1991:
After the war had been won, Mr. Bush turned his attention in June 1991 to another matter: his funeral.
His relationship with the news media was at once close and cordial but also had some serious friction. On April 23,1992, he wrote of being concerned about the latest \u201cDevroyism,\u201d a reference to an article by Ann Devroy, who covered the White House for The Washington Post.
But when Ms. Devroy was diagnosed with cancer, Mr. Bush wrote her a long letter of encouragement on July 26,1996:
On Aug. 1,1998, he advised them both to ignore any negative accounts in the news media, especially those that made fun of his own occasional mangling of words:
When George W. Bush\u2019s election was settled by the Supreme Court in 2000, his father wrote a letter to the longtime friend, Time magazine columnist Hugh Sidey:
That new chapter included another war in Iraq, this time ordered by his son, and Mr. Bush wrote him an email on the day that Saddam Hussein fell from power:<\/p>\n