The Elder statesman: George H. W. Bush in retrospect.

• Author: Brown, Aaron
• Position: George Herbert Walker Bush

More than twenty years after leaving office, George Herbert Walker Bush finally seems to step out of Ronald Reagan's shadow. While Bush the Elder never was a president who could speak to people's hopes and dreams like the likes of Kennedy, Reagan or Obama, America's 41st president had a steady diplomatic hand which served him, American, and the world well. Bush might not have been transformational in his objectives or inspirational in his style, but he presided successfully over one of the most complex and overlapping global evolutions in the twentieth century.

While Jeb Bush seems to be the hottest name in (republican) town and George W. Bush attracts media headlines with his paintings of animals and foreign leaders, George H. W. Bush--America's 41st president--almost seems to have been forgotten. Recently, however, the limelight has shifted and more than two decades after leaving the White House and twenty-five years after his inauguration, the spotlight is back on George Herbert Walker Bush. Benefiting from a wave of historical revisionism, America's 41 st president, once largely portrayed as the biggest incumbent loser since William Howard Taft, is today portrayed as the most popular former president of the past half century, according to Gallup polls.

"History is beginning to recognize that George Bush was the best one-term president in American history," James Baker, the former secretary of state and a friend of Bush the Elder, recently told the New York Times. While much of Bush the Elders rehabilitation previously seems to have been the result of the former president's pleasant personality and personal decency--and, obviously, his funny socks--American academics and journalists are now also starting to reassess the 41st's presidency.

In a time were his son George W. Bush brought the U.S. in a quagmire in Iraq and Barack Obama has to deal with a resurgent Russia and transatlantic tensions, George H. W. Bush's foreign policy stands out as the gold standard of American leadership. Facing one of the most complex and overlapping global evolutions since Franklin D. Roosevelt at the height of World War II, Bush the Elder's administration guided America well through years of global upheaval. Therefore, the presidents' stellar leadership in historic times of upheaval can serve as a role model for future and current American presidents. Any American president would be well advised to ask himself or herself: "What would Bush the Elder do?"

A Steady Hand

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War was the most transformative event of the late 20th century. George H. W. Bush played...