George H. W. Bush Was a Man Summoned by Events

At the beginning of his long and well-lived life, George Herbert Walker Bush, who in politics was always prosaic, acquired, by way of a grandfather, the name of a British poet and priest (George Herbert, 1593-1633). The future 41st president was descended from a governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland — from financier George Herbert Walker, whose name is on golf’s Walker Cup — and from a U.S. senator — his father Prescott, of Brown Brothers Harriman, the Wall Street investment house whose partners included Robert Lovett, a future secretary of defense. This was the world from which Bush came into a life whose trajectory often left him caught between the worlds of the old East Coast Republicanism of banks, railroads, and good works of noblesse oblige, and the New Right Republicanism of the Sun Belt.