Final Thoughts – Goodbye, Mrs. Bush 41
By Dwight Patel, 1stVice Chairman, MCGOP
On behalf of the entire Montgomery County MD Central Committee, I’d like to express my deepest sympathy to President Bush and his family.
I met former First Lady Barbara Bush at an event during the fall of 1989 while I was at George Washington University. She was a very classy and gracious lady. In retrospect, it was obvious that she truly believed in her cause of eliminating illiteracy and wasn’t just giving it lip service.
For her, this wasn’t a political issue to gain leverage against the other side or assign blame to the other side for the high illiteracy rate in the inner cities. She saw it as a problem and wanted to solve it. She didn’t do it to score political points – she did it because it was the right thing to do.
As the long-reigning matriarch of a political dynasty, her dedication to her family stood the test of time. In 1990, amid the onslaught of feminism, Mrs. Bush noted in a highly publicized commencement address at Wellesley College that “At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a child, a friend or a parent.”
We will all miss the former First Lady.