The office of former President George H.W. Bush has announced the official schedule of President Bush’s state funeral and the related services and ceremonies scheduled in Houston, Texas; Washington, D.C.; Spring, and College Station, Texas.
Click HERE to read and download the schedule.
The schedule consists of three stages.
Stage one is on Monday, when former President Bush’s remains will depart Ellington Field in Houston and will be flown to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland.
Stage two is in and around Washington, D.C.:
Monday, December 3, 3:30 p.m. EST Arrival Ceremony Joint Base Andrews
Monday, December 3, 4:45 p.m. EST Arrival Ceremony U.S. Capitol
Monday, December 3, 5:00 p.m. EST Lie in State* U.S. Capitol
Wednesday, December 5, 10:00 a.m. EST Departure Ceremony U.S. Capitol
Wednesday, December 5, 11:00 a.m. EST Arrival and Funeral Washington National Cathedral
Wednesday, December 5, 12:30 p.m. EST Departure Ceremony Washington National Cathedral
Wednesday, December 5, 1:15 p.m. EST Departure Ceremony Joint Base Andrews
*Following a short service, former President Bush’s remains will lie in state in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol, Monday, December 3, at 7:30 p.m. until Wednesday, December 5, at 8:45 a.m. with a guard of honor in attendance.
** Former President Bush’s remains will depart Joint Base Andrews, Maryland and will be flown to Ellington Field, Houston, Texas. **
Stage three is in Texas:
Wednesday, December 5, 4:30 p.m. CST Arrival Ceremony Ellington Field
Wednesday December 5, 5:45 p.m. CST Arrival Ceremony St. Martin’s Episcopal Church
Wednesday December 5, 6:45 p.m. CST Lie in Repose* St. Martin’s Episcopal Church
Thursday, December 6, 10:00 a.m. CST Funeral Service St. Martin’s Episcopal Church
Thursday, December 6, 11:15 a.m. CST Departure Ceremony St. Martin’s Episcopal Church
Thursday, December 6, 12:30 p.m. CST Departure Ceremony Union Pacific Railroad Westfield Auto Facility
Thursday, December 6, 3:45 p.m. CST Arrival Ceremony Texas A&M University
Thursday, December 6, 4:15 p.m. CST Arrival and Interment George Bush Presidential Library & Museum
*Former President Bush’s remains will lie in repose at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Wednesday, December 5, at 6:45 p.m. until Thursday, December 6, at 6:00 a.m. with a guard of honor in attendance.
** Former President Bush’s remains will depart St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Houston, and be transported by motorcade to Union Pacific Railroad Westfield Auto Facility, Spring, Texas. President Bush’s remains will then be transported by funeral car (train) to College Station. **
From Texas A&M:
George H.W. Bush, 41st President of the United States, will be laid to rest Thursday, Dec. 6 on the grounds of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum at Texas A&M University.
President Bush will be buried in his family plot, located behind the Bush Library, alongside his wife, Barbara, who died seven months ago, and daughter, Robin, who passed away in 1953 at the age of three. Although he didn’t attend the university, in 1991 Bush chose Texas A&M as the site of his presidential library, which opened to the public on Nov. 6, 1997.
The Bush School of Government and Public Service opened two months earlier, providing opportunities for Texas A&M students to follow in the president’s footsteps, dedicating their lives to public service.
Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp said Bush’s legacy will forever be remembered in Aggieland.
“Not only was George H.W. Bush one of the greatest presidents in our nation’s history, he also was one of the finest men to serve our country in so many ways,” Sharp said. “We are proud to call him a son of Texas A&M University and will do everything in our power, through his presidential library, to keep his memory and accomplishments alive for all time.”
Texas A&M University President Michael K. Young echoed Sharp’s sentiments, saying the Bush family’s lifelong dedication to public service will be proudly carried forward by the university’s students, former students, faculty and staff.
“The underlying themes that ran through the Bush administration are so consistent with Texas A&M’s values – love of country, love of one another and public service as a noble calling,” Young said. “Every policy, every action, every position was based on those fundamental values. This shared ethos began and solidified the wonderful relationship between the university and President Bush, one which will continue in perpetuity through the Bush School, Bush Foundation and Bush Presidential Library & Museum.”
Almost 100 people — including many students from the Bush School of Government and Public Service — gathered outside Bush’s library and museum for an impromptu vigil just after midnight after hearing news of his death.
The dean of the Bush School, Gen. Mark A. Welsh III, put into words what many were feeling.
“This is a terribly sad day for the Bush School and for our nation. We’ve lost a great leader, a great patriot and a great role model. Our thoughts and prayers are with the entire Bush family. They’ve lost someone who can never be replaced.”
Ryan Crocker served as dean of the Bush School prior to Welsh and as an ambassador to six Middle East countries over his career in public service.
He said during Bush’s presidency, the world changed completely.
“We witnessed the collapse of the East Bloc, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, and the end of the Soviet Union. Under less able leadership, we could have run aground on any of these. His knowledge, experience, judgment and understanding ensured that we did not. America and the world owe him a debt that can never be repaid.
“As the Irish say, his like will not be seen here again,” Crocker said.
Warren Finch, director of the Bush Library, said the former president put his faith in the library staff to create a library and museum befitting his legacy, and they were honored to oblige.
“President Bush was intimately involved in the Presidential Library and local community, from attending exhibit openings and forums, to frequently being seen in the museum and surrounding grounds,” Finch said. “So many people here have been touched by his life and knowing him personally. Through his Presidential Library and Museum we will continue to honor his life and legacy with our utmost reverence.”
“Even as his fellow citizens mourn the loss of this great and good man, we also celebrate with gratitude that George Bush’s life of high purpose and meaning helped to shape the world in which we now live,” said David B. Jones, CEO of the George H.W. Bush Library Foundation. “Our 41st President leaves behind a sterling example of service – public service, selfless service, honorable service. The Bush Foundation, Bush Library and the Bush School are dedicated to preserving and keeping alive this legacy of service, as we tell the remarkable story of George and Barbara Bush and prepare tomorrow’s leaders for careers in public service.”
On Thursday, the president’s casket will arrive in College Station by train, accompanied by Bush family members and close friends. The train will unload at the railroad stop at Wellborn Road and George Bush Drive.
The funeral procession will travel on George Bush Drive toward the Bush Library Complex.
Texas A&M students, faculty and staff, and the community are invited to view the procession. The interment ceremony will be closed to public viewing.
Some areas of campus will be closed in the days leading up to the burial. All of campus will be closed on the day of the burial.
Information related to President Bush’s connection to Texas A&M and updates regarding facility and road closures, parking and viewing areas, maps and more are available at http://honoring41.tamu.edu.
Remembrances from those who knew him, details of his longstanding relationship with Texas A&M, and more are at www.georgehwbush.com, and on Texas A&M Today.
From Blinn College:
The Bryan and RELLIS campuses, the Health Science Center, the Central Administrative Services Building at the Tejas Center, the Post Office Campus, and the Highway 60 Workforce Training Center each will be closed on Thursday, December 6th. All Blinn events and activities in Bryan/College Station will be cancelled, and normal operations will resume on Friday, December 7th. Dual credit courses hosted at the Blinn-Bryan Campus or at high schools located in Bryan/College Station also will be cancelled Thursday.
From Bush family spokesman Jim McGrath:
From the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum:
Our heartfelt condolences go out to the family of President Bush on his passing. President Bush spent most of his life serving the public and had a long career in both domestic politics and foreign affairs. He was also a devoted husband and dedicated father, grandfather and great-grandfather.
President Bush was intimately involved in the Presidential Library and local community from attending exhibit openings and forums to frequently being seen in the museum and surrounding grounds. So many people here have been touched by his life and knowing him personally. Through his Presidential Library and Museum we will continue to honor his life and legacy with our utmost reverence.
The Bush family is partnering with the Department of Defense’s Joint Taks Force-National National Capitol Region (JTF-NCR) to carry out President Bush’s wishes as it relates to his state funeral plan. At the appropriate time, relevant details will be announced and posted both to www.bush41.org and the website maintained by the JTF-NCR. Please monitor www.bush41.org for further details.
Holidays in the Rotunda scheduled for Saturday, December 1st has been cancelled.
From The Associated Press:
HOUSTON (AP) — 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 at his Houston home, 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.
