Free Republic

HOUSTON — Few people outside of the family knew President George H.W. Bush as well as Jean Becker, his longtime chief of staff. She is sharing stories from her new book, "Character Matters," calling it a roadmap to civility in our polarizing political climate. Becker is a journalist who became deputy press secretary for Barbara Bush in the White House, then was asked by the president to become his chief of staff once he left office ."I told him I didn't know how to be a chief of staff," Becker said. "I didn't know how to be a boss, do...

In the years since former President George H. W. Bush and his wife Barbara's deaths, a number of books have come out about the couple's lives and political careers. But Rev. Russell Levenson, Jr. believed one large part of the couple's lives was missing: their faith. Levenson serves as the rector at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Houston and got to know the couple over more than a decade, as the Bushes regularly attended Sunday services. He has reflected a lot on his relationship with them and decided to chronicle not only their lives and deaths but also what he...

WHEN 46 STARTS TO EQUAL 41 — It won’t be long before “George Herbert Walker Biden” creeps into the vernacular, given the parallels surfacing between the 41st president and the 46th. Like the first President Bush, President Joe Biden is viewed by much of Washington as fundamentally decent — good at democracy and foreign policy but bamboozled by an economy that, apart from inflation, he keeps suggesting is fine. People didn’t feel that way in 1992, and despite job growth and low unemployment, they certainly don’t now. The price for Bush was a second term. Looking back 20 years, Time...

President George H-W Bush's longtime chief of staff has now documented Bush's life after his term in the White House. She'll be in Tallahassee to discuss the process Tuesday, Nov. 16. Jean Becker's personal relationship with George Herbert Walker Bush spanned more than a quarter of a century. Her first encounter was with the then vice-president-running-for-president Bush in 1987. Seven years later, she would become President Bush's chief of staff. She would keep that title until his death in late 2018. It was the post-presidency years, following Bush's loss to Bill Clinton in the 1992 election, that Becker writes about...