I arrived at the Bayou Club in Houston to talk to President Bush about the CEO job at Points of Light, the organization he created during his presidency to support and lift up "all the individuals and community organizations ... spread like stars through the nation, doing good."
I was appropriately nervous -- as a candidate for a big job, as someone about to spend two hours at lunch with a former President, and as a lifelong Democrat meeting with a man whose family had come to define mainstream Republicans.
President Bush's warmth, charm and graciousness immediately put me at ease. He charmed the doorman, the waiters and those in the restaurant eager to meet him. He told stories and asked questions. He drank a glass of wine with lunch and ordered dessert, enlisting all of us to enjoy the same. I think it speaks well of a man to order dessert at lunch.
Since that lunch, I had the privilege of leading and representing Points of Light, now the largest organization in the world dedicated to volunteer service. And I have been lucky to interact with President Bush and his friends and family many times. He may be, as some have said before me, the only man who got to be President by being nice.
As people attempt in the coming days to define President Bush, they will characterize him as wise, gracious and committed to civility. And they will speak of his courage, from his days as a fighter pilot to his birthday celebrations jumping out of airplanes.
But I hope they don't miss what I see as the real hallmark of President Bush's life -- his unyielding commitment to public and community service. It was his true north.
George H. W. Bush's record of service to his country is well known. He enlisted in the armed forces on his 18th birthday. He flew 58 combat missions before he was shot down over the Pacific during World War II. He served as a congressman, Ambassador to the United Nations, U.S. envoy to China, director of the CIA, Vice President and President.
As President, he broke new ground when he signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, giving tens of millions of people new rights, and launched the modern volunteer service movement by signing the National and Community Service Act of 1990, the first piece of federal service legislation in almost 20 years. He started the Daily Point of Light Award to honor extraordinary volunteers in 1989 and honored its 5,000th recipients with the Obamas at the White House in the summer of 2013. For decades, he signed every award certificate himself.
But most people don't know that George Bush was a volunteer leader long before he got involved in politics: starting the United Negro College Fund on the Yale campus; helping to launch the YMCA in Midland, Texas; coaching an inner-city baseball team in Houston.
When his young daughter Robin died, he and his wife Barbara started the Bright Star Foundation to aid in leukemia research. After he left office, the President and Mrs. Bush helped to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for cancer research, supporting the MD Anderson Cancer Center and founding a group called C-Change.
In the wake of disaster, President Bush joined with former President Bill Clinton many times -- in some of the greatest across-the-aisle moments of 20th-century politics -- to help those affected by hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis.
Behind this resume of public service was a record of great private kindness. People who loved George Bush long before he became President tell stories of him standing up for a bullied young boy, sending a handwritten note to a friend who was suffering and breaking down the boundaries of a country club by inviting a Jewish friend to play tennis.
In 2013, he shaved his head in solidarity with a 2-year-old leukemia patient who is the son of a Secret Service agent assigned to his detail in Maine.
President Bush's grandson Pierce told those gathered at Points of Light's 2012 Conference on Volunteering and Service in Chicago that his grandfather "has just this special quality about him. When you look at his time in the world, he has led this amazing life serving others.... When I look at my life, I aspire to be like my grandfather because he has this humbleness, and he is a centered human being, and it's encouraged me to get out and serve."
George H. W. Bush lived a life of service. He made service a family tradition passed from generation to generation. And he made the call to service a centerpiece of his presidency.
His vision of "a thousand points of light" has endured for more than 20 years not just because it was an evocative phrase, but because it so well captures the President's core belief about this nation and about life.
As he wrote in a letter to journalist Carl Cannon in 2001, "Some of my happiness still comes from trying to be in my own small way a true 'point of light.' I believe I was right when I said, as President, there can be no definition of a successful life that does not include service to others."
As president, George H. W. Bush was one of the most powerful individuals on earth. But he knew that it was in the humble acts of serving others that he demonstrated his own -- and America's -- greatest strength.
Bagikan Berita Ini
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