“She called her style a ‘benevolent dictatorship’, ” Barbara Pierce Bush’s son Jeb, the former governor of Florida, said at her funeral in 2018. “But honestly it wasn’t always benevolent.”
The feisty “First Lady of the Greatest Generation” always knew her mind — and never hesitated to speak it. As the wife of one American president and mother of another, Barbara Bush presided over one of America’s most accomplished political dynasties in her trademark white hair and pearls. The “Silver Fox” had a spine of steel as President George H.W. Bush’s closest adviser and foremost defender during his single term in office, and she campaigned just as hard for their son George W.
“She’s the reason the Bush family took the White House twice,” as novelist Brad Meltzer puts it.
In “Pearls of Wisdom” (Twelve Books), Bush’s longtime speechwriter Jean Becker gathered 80 of Bush’s friends, colleagues, children and grandchildren to reflect on the lessons she taught (or drilled into) them during her long and very public life.
