Dear Commons Community,

Special Counsel Robert Mueller praised Michael Flynn for his cooperation in the Russian investigation and recommended he served very little jail time in a memorandum to the presiding judge.  The news media have been patiently awaiting for this memorandum all day and although heavily redacted it provides interesting insights into the Mueller investigation.  Here is an initial report from the New York Times.

“Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser, helped substantially with the special counsel’s investigation and should receive little to no prison time for lying to federal investigators, according to court documents filed on Tuesday.

Prosecutors for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, described Mr. Flynn as a key cooperator who helped the Justice Department with several investigations, sitting for 19 interviews with Mr. Mueller’s office and other prosecutors and handing over documents and communications.

“His early cooperation was particularly valuable because he was one of the few people with long-term and firsthand insight” into the subject of Mr. Mueller’s investigation — Russia’s election interference and whether any Trump associates conspired, prosecutors wrote in a sentencing recommendation memorandum and an addendum that was heavily blacked out.

In particular, they wrote, he may have prompted others to cooperate with the inquiry. “The defendant’s decision to plead guilty and cooperate likely affected the decisions of related firsthand witnesses to be forthcoming,” prosecutors said.

They also indicated that Mr. Flynn helped with other investigations without revealing details about them.

Mr. Flynn, who served briefly as the president’s national security adviser, is the only White House aide and the first person from the president’s inner circle to strike a cooperation deal with the special counsel’s office in exchange for a more lenient penalty. He pleaded guilty a year ago to lying to the F.B.I. about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time, Sergey I. Kislyak.

“The defendant deserves credit for accepting responsibility in a timely fashion and substantially assisting the government,” prosecutors wrote.”

For the next several days, this memorandum and its addendum will be analyzed and reviewed extensively by the media.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

It appears that Hungary is returning to the Cold War years when as a satellite of the Soviet Union the government controlled the news media and used it as a propaganda machine for the totalitarian Communist Party.  A New York Times editorial  (see below) is reporting how the news media including Internet sites are systematically being turned over to an ultra-nationalistic  foundation that functions under the control of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.  Even pro-democracy organizations and institutions like the Central European University, created to foster democracy by the Hungarian-American investor George Soros is being forced out and moving to Austria.

Tony

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No News is Bad News for Hungary!

By The Editorial Board

Dec. 3, 2018

The world’s growing ranks of would-be autocrats should study Viktor Orban. Steadily, systematically, relentlessly, he has disabled any criticism or honest accounting of his imposition of right-wing, nativist, nationalist politics on all spheres of Hungarian life. His latest feat is breathtaking in its audacity.

Acting as if on a signal, more than a dozen owners handed over more than 400 news websites, newspapers, television channels and radio stations to a foundation formed and run by Orban loyalists. Most of the owners said they “donated” their outlets.

Obviously, it wasn’t philanthropy. The owners are pro-government oligarchs and allies of Mr. Orban. Some of them have been buying up independent media outlets in recent years and turning them into pro-government mouthpieces. It’s not hard to presume that the business owners were happy to do Mr. Orban and his party, Fidesz, a little favor, especially since their news outlets depended on government advertising and were making little money.

What Mr. Orban has managed to create is a media juggernaut that closely resembles Communist propaganda machines of old. The consolidation, if that’s the word, still needs to be approved by regulatory authorities, but they’re led by officials appointed by Mr. Orban. So is the Constitutional Court, should anybody consider challenging the transfers in the courts.

The nonprofit foundation that has suddenly become an enormously powerful government mouthpiece, the Central European Press and Media Foundation, was formed in August by staunch allies of Mr. Orban. In an email to The Times, a board member, Miklos Szantho, echoed a line from Fox News, claiming that the foundation would work to create a “balanced” media environment in Hungary by serving as a counterweight to “progressive” news outlets.

That’s a curious notion of balance, since more than 500 news outlets in Hungary today are pro-government, compared with 31 in 2015. Independent media organizations have been denied state advertising for years, often rendering them targets for acquisition by Mr. Orban’s friends. The most widely read opposition newspaper, Nepszabadsag, was shut down in 2016. Many of its staff members charged that the shutdown was the work of Mr. Orban.

Hungary is not alone in its assault on media freedoms — Poland’s nationalist Law and Justice Party is also trying to bring the media under its control. But Mr. Orban has been the trendsetter in his effort to build what he proudly describes as an “illiberal state.” His efforts have included active measures to spread his far-right ideology to the theater and other arts, to universities and other schools, and even to religion.

They have also included a crackdown on pro-democracy organizations and institutions like the Central European University, created to foster democracy by the Hungarian-American investor George Soros — a bête noire of Hungarian government propaganda — that is now being forced out to Austria, with a shrug from the Trump administration.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with academic freedom,” the American ambassador David Cornstein said last week of the showdown, advising Mr. Soros, “It would pay to work with the government.”

Mr. Orban’s behavior prompted the European Parliament last September to begin a process that in theory could ultimately strip Hungary of European Union voting rights for posing a “systematic threat” to the union’s core values. It will take a lot more than that to make Mr. Orban care.

Dear Commons Community,

George H.W. Bush, who died on Friday, is not generally regarded as having had a major influence on higher education. However, during his term as president (1989-93), he was involved with legislation and other developments that were important to this sector. Here is a sample courtesy of The Chronicle of Higher Education:

• The reauthorization of the Higher Education Act in 1992. Among the key provisions were the creation of a direct-loan pilot program, a toughening of the path for student borrowers seeking to discharge their loans in bankruptcy, and the enactment of the 85/15 rule (which would later become the 90/10 rule) , which specified that colleges could receive no more than 85 percent of their revenue from federal student aid. (Efforts by the first Bush administration — spearheaded by then-Education Secretary Lamar Alexander — to rein in for-profit collegesare largely forgotten in higher-ed lore.
• The crackdown on the Overlap Group. The Justice Department investigated a group of admissions officers from elite colleges who gathered annually to compare and adjust financial-aid awards being offered to prospective students with the intention of making aid dollars go further.
• Supreme Court nominations. The Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings heralded the #MeToo movement, and David Souter proved to be a key advocate of academic and intellectual freedom.
• The subdued reaction to the Tiananmen Square massacre. China’s student-led pro-democracy movement electrified the world. Then came the slaughter of an untold number of protesters. Bush, who had embraced China’s people as the chief U.S. envoy in the mid-1970s, made diplomatic overturesto the country even as the rest of the Western world was seeking to isolate it.
• Passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act. In George Bush’s most enduring legacy for higher education, he signed legislation expanding protections for college applicants and students with disabilities.

Bush’s state funeral will take place Wednesday at Washington National Cathedral. A graduate of Yale, he will be interred Thursday at his presidential library at Texas A&M University, which is also home to the Bush School of Government and Public Service. 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times this morning has an article (see below) describing the culture of lying that surrounds Donald Trump.  Anyone who follows cable news especially either CNN or MSNBC knows that the President’s lying is frequent and unabashed.  The article reviews key characters in the Robert Mueller investigation who were close to Trump such as Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Roger Stone, Jerome Corsi, and Michael Flynn, all of whom have been exposed as lying or twisting the truth at one time or another.  The article goes on to mention that lying to protect or support Trump’s own lack of veracity is a requirement or loyalty test for working with him.  This is a sad state of affairs for the country. Thank God we have Robert Mueller leading the investigation as Trump, his sycophants, Fox News and others try desperately to muddy reality.

Tony

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New York Times

Mueller Exposes the Culture of Lying That Surrounds Trump

By Sharon LaFranie

Dec. 1, 2018

WASHINGTON — When Michael D. Cohen admitted this past week to lying to Congress about a Russian business deal, he said he had testified falsely out of loyalty to President Trump. When he admitted this summer to lying on campaign finance records about payments to cover up a sex scandal during the campaign, he said it was at Mr. Trump’s direction.

Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, former senior Trump campaign officials, lied to cover up financial fraud. George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign aide, lied in hopes of landing an administration job. And Michael T. Flynn, another adviser, lied about his interactions with a Russian official and about other matters for reasons that remain unclear.

If the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has proved anything in his 18-month-long investigation — besides how intensely Russia meddled in an American presidential election — it is that Mr. Trump surrounded himself throughout 2016 and early 2017 with people to whom lying seemed to be second nature.

They lied to federal authorities even when they had lawyers advising them, even when the risk of getting caught was high and even when the consequences for them were dire.

Even more Trump associates are under investigation for the same offense. They are part of a group of people surrounding Mr. Trump — including some White House and cabinet officials — who contribute to a culture of bending, if not outright breaking, the truth, and whose leading exemplar is Mr. Trump himself.

Mr. Trump looks for people who share his disregard for the truth and are willing to parrot him, “even if it’s a lie, even if they know it’s a lie, and even if he said the opposite the day before,” said Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer. They must be “loyal to what he is saying right now,” she said, or he sees them as “a traitor.”

Campaign aides often echoed Mr. Trump’s pronouncements knowing they were false. People joined the top levels of his administration with the realization that they would be expected to embrace what Mr. Trump said, no matter how far from the truth or how much their reputations suffered.

For Sean Spicer, the first White House press secretary, that included falsely insisting, on Mr. Trump’s first day in office, that his inaugural crowd was the biggest in history. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who replaced him, dialed back once-daily news briefings to once every few weeks as her credibility was increasingly battered.

For decades, such behavior was relatively free of consequence for those who aligned with Mr. Trump. The stakes in the real estate world were lower, and deceptive statements could be dismissed as hardball business tactics or just efforts to cultivate the Trump mystique.

But in Mr. Mueller, those in Mr. Trump’s orbit now confront a big-league adversary with little tolerance for what one top White House adviser once called “alternative facts.” He leads a team of prosecutors and F.B.I. agents who are methodically and purposefully examining their words and deeds.

Mr. Trump’s own lawyers, wary of how frequently their client engages in falsehoods, are trying to hold the special counsel at bay. Jay Sekulow, one of the president’s lawyers, has already been forced to pull back his own public remarks about an issue of concern to Mr. Mueller.

In a confidential memo to the special counsel, Mr. Trump’s legal team admitted that the president, not his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., drafted a misleading statement about a Trump Tower meeting in 2016 between a Kremlin-tied lawyer and campaign officials. That statement could figure in the special counsel’s scrutiny of whether the president obstructed justice.

Fearful of more deceptions, the president’s legal team has insisted that Mr. Trump answer questions only in writing. They delivered replies to some of the special counsel’s queries on Nov. 20 after months of negotiation. If unsatisfied, Mr. Mueller could try to subpoena the president to testify.

But the new acting attorney general, Matthew G. Whitaker, a vocal critic of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry who now supervises it, would have to sign off. And even if he did, the White House could still mount a legal battle to squash it.

Many witnesses or subjects of the inquiry lack the president’s negotiating power or resources. Some have been stunned by their encounters with prosecutors, who arrive armed with thick binders documenting their text messages, emails and whereabouts on any given date.

Sam Nunberg, a former longtime adviser to Mr. Trump, said he feared that the special counsel was creating the impression of a wide-ranging conspiracy among liars, when witnesses could have dispelled much of the suspicion simply by testifying truthfully.

“People are conspiring against themselves, and they are playing right into Mueller’s hands,” he said. “If Flynn had said he discussed sanctions, he could very well be national security adviser today,” he added. Instead, Mr. Flynn awaits sentencing for lying to F.B.I. agents about various matters, including his talks with the Russian ambassador over whether the new administration would lift sanctions against Russia.

The reasons for the lies vary, but, not surprisingly, people were most often trying to protect themselves. Mr. Cohen, Mr. Trump’s longtime fixer, said in federal court this past week that he had misled Congress about the details of a Trump hotel project in Moscow because he did not want to contradict the president’s own false characterizations of his business dealings in Moscow. He specifically cited his loyalty to Mr. Trump, referred to as “Individual 1” in court papers, as the reason for his crime.

“I made these misstatements to be consistent with Individual 1’s political messaging and out of loyalty to Individual 1,” Mr. Cohen told a judge. In a sentencing memo filed late Friday, Mr. Cohen emphasized that in the weeks before he misled Congress about the deal, he remained in “close and regular contact with White House-based staff,” as well as with Mr. Trump’s lawyers.

The special counsel has shown that Mr. Trump surrounded himself during his campaign and in the White House with people to whom lying seemed to be second nature.

While the Moscow hotel was never built, Mr. Cohen’s court filing suggested that Mr. Trump at best minimized his knowledge of the proposed venture, both as a candidate and once he had been elected. Nearly two dozen times, Mr. Trump has publicly insisted that he had no business dealings in Russia.

But Mr. Cohen, who discussed the hotel project with the aide to a key Kremlin official in early 2016, said in Friday’s court filing that he kept Mr. Trump apprised of negotiations that continued through June of that year, just before Mr. Trump formally became the Republican nominee.

Mr. Manafort is accused of lying on top of lying. As part of a September plea deal, he acknowledged that he had lied to the Justice Department about his business dealings and that he had also tried to persuade witnesses to lie to investigators on his behalf. On Monday, prosecutors said that he continued to lie after he had agreed to cooperate with them, breaching his plea deal. His lawyers insist he told the truth.

Mr. Trump has been Mr. Mueller’s most vociferous critic, accusing his team of manufacturing lies by threatening witnesses with severe consequences if they refuse to agree with the special counsel’s narrative.

What prosecutors have called lies, Mr. Trump has insisted is truth. What they called truth, he has framed as lies.

Where all this is headed is unclear, but it appears that more allegations of lying are ahead. The Senate Intelligence Committee, which has also been investigating Russia’s interference in the election, has referred other cases to the special counsel’s office involving witnesses who may have lied.

Prosecutors are investigating whether two or more people, including a longtime friend of Mr. Trump’s, Roger J. Stone Jr., lied about WikiLeaks, the rogue organization that distributed Democratic emails and other documents stolen by Russian intelligence as part of Moscow’s campaign to influence the 2016 election. Mr. Mueller’s team has been trying to determine whether anyone with the Trump campaign conspired with WikiLeaks or the Russian government to bolster Mr. Trump’s chances of winning the White House.

Jerome Corsi, a conservative author, has cast doubt on whether Mr. Stone testified truthfully to Congress about what inspired a Twitter message he posted in the summer of 2016, predicting it would soon be “Podesta’s time in the barrel.”

Mr. Corsi said he had helped Mr. Stone concoct a “cover story” for the message so that it would not appear Mr. Stone had advance knowledge that WikiLeaks planned to undermine Hillary Clinton’s campaign by releasing emails stolen from the computer of her campaign chairman, John D. Podesta. He said Mr. Stone then incorporated those falsehoods into his congressional testimony — an allegation that Mr. Stone vehemently denies.

But in a turnabout, Mr. Corsi said prosecutors had now accused him of lying to them about other communications he had with Mr. Stone regarding WikiLeaks. He claims his only crime is a faulty memory.

He Jiankui

Dear Commons Community,

Earlier this week, He Jiankui, claimed to have created the world’s first genetically edited babies.  Scientists in China and elsewhere have denounced his accomplishment on ethical grounds.  It has raised questions of whether standards are needed to curb the enthusiasm for advanced scientific research especially in countries such as China that lack ethical supervision.  Below is an excerpt from a New York Times article examining this issue. It raises serious i questions that will come to dominate advanced scientific research in the years to come in areas such as genetic engineering, cloning, and artificial intelligence.

Tony

==================================================================

“China has set its sights on becoming a leader in science, pouring millions of dollars into research projects and luring back top Western-educated Chinese talent. The country’s scientists are accustomed to attention-grabbing headlines by their colleagues as they race to dominate their fields.

But when He Jiankui announced on Monday that he had created the world’s first genetically edited babies, Chinese scientists — like those elsewhere — denounced it as a step too far. Now many are asking whether their country’s intense focus on scientific achievement has come at the expense of ethical standards.

“He studied in the United States, why did he only do this in China?” said Wang Yifang, a medical ethics expert with the School of Medical Humanities at Peking University. “It may still be related to the fact that we have a gap in our ethical supervision — it is not very strict, and some people think it’s dispensable.”

More than 100 Chinese scientists have denounced Dr. He’s research — genetically altering embryos that he implanted in a woman who later gave birth to twin girls — as “crazy.” China’s vice minister of science and technology said Thursday that Dr. He’s scientific activities would be suspended, calling his conduct “shocking and unacceptable.”

President Xi Jinping has set a goal of turning China into “a global scientific and technology power” by 2049. Faced with a population that is growing sicker and older, the government is spending millions of dollars specifically on becoming a leader in “genetic manipulation technology.”

To strengthen its position, the government has sought to lure home successful Western-trained Chinese researchers like Dr. He. He was a beneficiary of the Thousand Talents Plan, which gives scientists tens of thousands of dollars in funding and help with housing and schooling for their children.

Ren Xiaoping, an orthopedic surgeon based in Harbin, China, was criticized after proposing what would have been the first transplant of a head to another body.CreditGilles Sabrie for The New York Times

Before he became infamous this week, those who knew of Dr. He saw him as a modern Chinese success story.

He was born to farmers in one of the poorest parts of Hunan Province in southern China. As a high school student, he built a small laboratory at home, believing he could be China’s Einstein, according to an article this week by Jiemian, a Chinese news website. He graduated from the University of Science and Technology of China with a physics degree.

But by the time he arrived in the United States on a Chinese government scholarship, Dr. He felt the golden age of physics was over, according to the article. He switched to biophysics and studied at Rice University in Houston, where he first worked with Crispr, the gene-editing technology he says he used to alter the babies’ genes.

After studying at Rice, Dr. He went on to postdoctoral research at Stanford University. In 2012, he returned to China, basing himself in the booming southern metropolis of Shenzhen, which gave him funding. Dr. He founded two genetic testing companies, Direct Genomics and Vienomics, which aimed to use gene sequencing for medical purposes.

Many scientists in China say the drive to succeed is so strong that they adopt a “do first, debate later” approach. Wang Yue, a professor at the institute of medical humanities of Peking University, said many scientists lacked awareness of medical ethics and of laws and regulations relevant to their fields.

“It is true that many scientists are very bold and think of science as their independent kingdom,” Dr. Wang said. “So they are not willing to listen to the outside world, including ethics committees and administrative agencies that want to supervise and review them.”

In China, clinical trials are vetted for ethical concerns just once, by a hospital’s ethics review committee. Dr. He said his research was approved by the ethics board of the hospital Shenzhen Harmonicare. The hospital denied that, although one of its shareholders had appeared in an Associated Press video talking about Dr. He’s project.

Adding to the confusion, the university to which Dr. He is attached, the Southern University of Science and Technology, said it had had no idea that Dr. He was conducting research on babies, even though he said he got his funding from the university. At the genome editing conference in Hong Kong, Dr. He acknowledged that he had not informed his university about his research.

Dr. He told a genome editing conference in Hong Kong on Wednesday that he was proud of what he had done, saying he intended to engineer babies who would not be vulnerable to H.I.V. infection. He recruited couples for his research in which the man had H.I.V. and the woman did not.

Many scientists have noted that there are simpler ways to protect newborn babies with an infected parent from getting H.I.V. But Chinese couples have less access to such treatments because of a law barring people with “sexual diseases,” including H.I.V., from in vitro fertilization treatment. That suggests that Dr. He would have been more likely to find willing recruits among couples living with H.I.V.

Bai Hua, the head of Baihualin, an AIDS advocacy group that helped Dr. He recruit the couples, said that he now regretted doing so and was deeply worried about the families. In a statement posted on his organization’s official WeChat account, Mr. Bai, who uses a pseudonym, said he felt “deceived, but I don’t want to shirk responsibility.”

“I hope to use this venue to launch a specific appeal,” Mr. Bai wrote. “With the occurrence of this incident, please conduct more ethics-related science and medical training for volunteers in the AIDS community as well as medical workers and staff in these related fields.”

At the conference in Hong Kong this week, Dr. He said the parents of the twins and seven other couples who participated in his research had been fully informed of the risks involved, and that they understood what was being done to their embryos.

But one H.I.V.-infected man Dr. He’s team tried to recruit said he was not told of the ethical concerns about editing human embryos, according to Sanlian Weekly, a Chinese newsmagazine. The man said a researcher had told him that the probability of his having an unhealthy baby was low and that the team had achieved a high success rate in testing with animals.

The man said the researcher left him feeling that the procedure had more potential for benefits than risks. But his wife was concerned that harvesting the eggs would be painful, and the man decided not to sign up, according to the article.

Dr. He’s announcement was a moment of reckoning for gene editing well beyond China. Jennifer Doudna, a co-inventor of Crispr and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said it was “an opportunity to change how we’re regulating scientific use of this technology,” possibly by making the “somewhat vague” guidelines more specific. She said severe consequences could be established for breaking those guidelines, perhaps even involving an international body like the United Nations.

In China, many say an update of the laws governing genetic research is long overdue. A former vice minister of health, Huang Jiefu, called for the establishment of a central body to supervise bioscience experiments, according to the state-run Global Times newspaper. He said the country’s 2003 regulations governing embryo experiments — which the government says Dr. He violated — were outdated.

Wang Yuedan, a professor of immunology at Peking University, said the penalties for violating those regulations were not harsh enough. They are not legally binding and do not detail any punishments.

“What happened this time was an ethics disaster for the world,” Dr. Wang said. “But perhaps it will encourage biomedical research scientists all over the world, including China, to pay more attention to the ethical guidelines regarding the human body.”

Dear Commons Community,

The major news story today is the passing of George H.W. Bush, the 41^st president of the United States.  While only serving one-term, he left a legacy of public service that is difficult to match. One of his touching contributions was the way he supported Bill Clinton who succeed him as president. Rather than bitter as a result of his loss to Clinton, he became a major supporter.  Below is a letter (below) he wrote to Clinton upon leaving the White House.  His obituary courtesy of the Associated Press follows.

May he rest in peace!

Tony

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Letter from George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton

January 20, 1993

Dear Bill,

When I walked into this office just now I felt the same sense of wonder and respect that I felt four years ago. I know you will feel that, too.

I wish you great happiness here. I never felt the loneliness some Presidents have described.

There will be very tough times, made even more difficult by criticism you may not think is fair. I’m not a very good one to give advice; but just don’t let the critics discourage you or push you off course.

You will be our President when you read this note. I wish you well. I wish your family well.

Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you.

Good luck,

George

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George H.W. Bush

Associated Press December 1, 2018

George H.W. Bush, a patrician New Englander whose presidency soared with the coalition victory over Iraq in Kuwait, but then plummeted in the throes of a weak economy that led voters to turn him out of office after a single term, has died. He was 94.

The World War II hero, who also presided during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the final months of the Cold War, died late Friday night, said family spokesman Jim McGrath. His wife of more than 70 years, Barbara Bush, died in April 2018.

The son of a senator and father of a president, Bush was the man with the golden resume who rose through the political ranks: from congressman to U.N. ambassador, Republican Party chairman to envoy to China, CIA director to two-term vice president under the hugely popular Ronald Reagan. The 1991 Gulf War stoked his popularity. But Bush would acknowledge that he had trouble articulating “the vision thing,” and he was haunted by his decision to break a stern, solemn vow he made to voters: “Read my lips. No new taxes.”

He lost his bid for re-election to Bill Clinton in a campaign in which businessman H. Ross Perot took almost 19 percent of the vote as an independent candidate. Still, he lived to see his son, George W., twice elected to the presidency — only the second father-and-son chief executives, following John Adams and John Quincy Adams.

The 43rd president issued a statement Friday following his father’s death, saying the elder Bush “was a man of the highest character.”

“The entire Bush family is deeply grateful for 41’s life and love, for the compassion of those who have cared and prayed for Dad,” the statement read.

After his 1992 defeat, George H.W. Bush complained that media-created “myths” gave voters a mistaken impression that he did not identify with the lives of ordinary Americans. He decided he lost because he “just wasn’t a good enough communicator.”

Once out of office, Bush was content to remain on the sidelines, except for an occasional speech or paid appearance and visits abroad. He backed Clinton on the North American Free Trade Agreement, which had its genesis during his own presidency. He visited the Middle East, where he was revered for his defense of Kuwait. And he returned to China, where he was welcomed as “an old friend” from his days as the U.S. ambassador there.

He later teamed with Clinton to raise tens of millions of dollars for victims of a 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean and Hurricane Katrina, which swamped New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005. During their wide-ranging travels, the political odd couple grew close.

“Who would have thought that I would be working with Bill Clinton, of all people?” Bush quipped in October 2005.

In his post-presidency, Bush’s popularity rebounded with the growth of his reputation as a fundamentally decent and well-meaning leader who, although he was not a stirring orator or a dreamy visionary, was a steadfast humanitarian. Elected officials and celebrities of both parties publicly expressed their fondness.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Bush quickly began building an international military coalition that included other Arab states. After liberating Kuwait, he rejected suggestions that the U.S. carry the offensive to Baghdad, choosing to end the hostilities a mere 100 hours after the start of the ground war.

“That wasn’t our objective,” he told The Associated Press in 2011 from his office just a few blocks from his Houston home. “The good thing about it is there was so much less loss of human life than had been predicted and indeed than we might have feared.”

But the decisive military defeat did not lead to the regime’s downfall, as many in the administration had hoped.

“I miscalculated,” acknowledged Bush. His legacy was dogged for years by doubts about the decision not to remove Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi leader was eventually ousted in 2003, in the war led by Bush’s son that was followed by a long, bloody insurgency.

George H.W. Bush entered the White House in 1989 with a reputation as a man of indecision and indeterminate views. One newsmagazine suggested he was a “wimp.”

But his work-hard, play-hard approach to the presidency won broad public approval. He held more news conferences in most months than Reagan did in most years.

The Iraq crisis of 1990-91 brought out all the skills Bush had honed in a quarter-century of politics and public service.

After winning United Nations support and a green light from a reluctant Congress, Bush unleashed a punishing air war against Iraq and a five-day ground juggernaut that sent Iraqi forces reeling in disarray back to Baghdad. He basked in the biggest outpouring of patriotism and pride in America’s military since World War II, and his approval ratings soared to nearly 90 percent.

The other battles he fought as president, including a war on drugs and a crusade to make American children the best educated in the world, were not so decisively won.

He rode into office pledging to make the United States a “kinder, gentler” nation and calling on Americans to volunteer their time for good causes — an effort he said would create “a thousand points of light.”

It was Bush’s violation of a different pledge, the no-new-taxes promise, that helped sink his bid for a second term. He abandoned the idea in his second year, cutting a deficit-reduction deal that angered many congressional Republicans and contributed to GOP losses in the 1990 midterm elections.

An avid outdoorsman who took Theodore Roosevelt as a model, Bush sought to safeguard the environment and signed the first improvements to the Clean Air Act in more than a decade. It was activism with a Republican cast, allowing polluters to buy others’ clean-air credits and giving industry flexibility on how to meet tougher goals on smog.

He also signed the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act to ban workplace discrimination against people with disabilities and require improved access to public places and transportation.

Bush failed to rein in the deficit, which had tripled to $3 trillion under Reagan and galloped ahead by as much as $300 billion a year under Bush, who put his finger on it in his inauguration speech: “We have more will than wallet.”

Seven years of economic growth ended in mid-1990, just as the Gulf crisis began to unfold. Bush insisted the recession would be “short and shallow,” and lawmakers did not even try to pass a jobs bill or other relief measures.

Bush’s true interests lay elsewhere, outside the realm of nettlesome domestic politics. “I love coping with the problems in foreign affairs,” he told a child who asked what he liked best about being president.

He operated at times like a one-man State Department, on the phone at dawn with his peers — Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union, Francois Mitterrand of France, Germany’s Helmut Kohl.

Communism began to crumble on his watch, with the Berlin Wall coming down, the Warsaw Pact disintegrating and the Soviet satellites falling out of orbit.

He seized leadership of the NATO alliance with a bold and ultimately successful proposal for deep troop and tank cuts in Europe. Huge crowds cheered him on a triumphal tour through Poland and Hungary.

Bush’s invasion of Panama in December 1989 was a military precursor of the Gulf War: a quick operation with a resoundingly superior American force. But in Panama, the troops seized dictator Manuel Noriega and brought him back to the United States in chains to stand trial on drug-trafficking charges.

Months after the Gulf War, Washington became engrossed in a different sort of confrontation over one of Bush’s nominees to the Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas, a little-known federal appeals court judge, was accused of sexual harassment by a former colleague named Anita Hill. His confirmation hearings exploded into a national spectacle, sparking an intense debate over race, gender and the modern workplace. Thomas was eventually confirmed.

In the closing days of the 1992 campaign, Bush fought the impression that he was distant and disconnected, and he seemed to struggle against the younger, more empathetic Clinton.

During a campaign visit to a grocers’ convention, Bush reportedly expressed amazement when shown an electronic checkout scanner. Critics seized on the moment, saying it indicated that the president had become disconnected from voters.

Later at a town-hall style debate, he paused to look at his wristwatch — a seemingly innocent glance that became freighted with deeper meaning because it seemed to reinforce the idea of a bored, impatient incumbent.

In the same debate, Bush became confused by a woman’s question about whether the deficit had affected him personally. Clinton, with apparent ease, left his seat, walked to the edge of the stage to address the woman and offered a sympathetic answer.

Bush said the pain of losing in 1992 was eased by the warm reception he received after leaving office.

“I lost in ’92 because people still thought the economy was in the tank, that I was out of touch and I didn’t understand that,” he said in an AP interview shortly before the dedication of his presidential library in 1997. “The economy wasn’t in the tank, and I wasn’t out of touch, but I lost. I couldn’t get through this hue and cry for ‘change, change, change’ and ‘The economy is horrible, still in recession.’

George Herbert Walker Bush was born June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts, into the New England elite, a world of prep schools, mansions and servants seemingly untouched by the Great Depression.

His father, Prescott Bush, the son of an Ohio steel magnate, made his fortune as an investment banker and later served 10 years as a senator from Connecticut.

George H.W. Bush enlisted in the Navy on his 18th birthday in 1942, right out of prep school. He returned home to marry his 19-year-old sweetheart, Barbara Pierce, daughter of the publisher of McCall’s magazine, in January 1945. They were the longest-married presidential couple in U.S. history. She died on April 17, 2018.

Lean and athletic at 6-foot-2, Bush became a war hero while still a teenager. One of the youngest pilots in the Navy, he flew 58 missions off the carrier USS San Jacinto.

He had to ditch one plane in the Pacific and was shot down on Sept. 2, 1944, while completing a bombing run against a Japanese radio tower. An American submarine rescued Bush. His two crewmates perished. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery.

After the war, Bush took just 2½ years to graduate from Yale, then headed west in 1948 to the oil fields of West Texas. Bush and partners helped found Zapata Petroleum Corp. in 1953. Six years later, he moved to Houston and became active in the Republican Party.

In politics, he showed the same commitment he displayed in business, advancing his career through loyalty and subservience.

He was first elected to Congress in 1966 and served two terms. President Richard Nixon appointed him ambassador to the United Nations, and after the 1972 election, named him chairman of the Republican National Committee. Bush struggled to hold the party together as Watergate destroyed the Nixon presidency, then became ambassador to China and CIA chief in the Ford administration.

Bush made his first bid for president in 1980 and won the Iowa caucuses, but Reagan went on to win the nomination.

In the 1988 presidential race, Bush trailed the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, by as many as 17 points that summer. He did little to help himself by picking Dan Quayle, a lightly regarded junior senator from Indiana, as a running mate.

But Bush soon became an aggressor, stressing patriotic themes and flailing Dukakis as an out-of-touch liberal. He carried 40 states, becoming the first sitting vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836.

He took office with the humility that was his hallmark.

“Some see leadership as high drama, and the sound of trumpets calling, and sometimes it is that,” he said at his inauguration. “But I see history as a book with many pages, and each day we fill a page with acts of hopefulness and meaning. The new breeze blows, a page turns, the story unfolds.”

Bush approached old age with gusto, celebrating his 75th and 80th birthdays by skydiving over College Station, Texas, the home of his presidential library. He did it again on his 85th birthday in 2009, parachuting near his oceanfront home in Kennebunkport, Maine. He used his presidential library at Texas A&M University as a base for keeping active in civic life.

He became the patriarch of one of the nation’s most prominent political families. In addition to George W. becoming president, another son, Jeb, was elected Florida governor in 1998 and made an unsuccessful run for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.

The other Bush children are sons Neil and Marvin and daughter Dorothy Bush LeBlond. Another daughter, Robin, died of leukemia in 1953, a few weeks before her fourth birthday.

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See AP’s complete coverage of George H.W. Bush here: https://www.apnews.com/tag/GeorgeHWBush