Former President George H. W. Bush Passes Away; Historians Analyze Presidency of George H. W. Bush; President Trump Delays Press Conference on G20 Summit Due to Passing of George H. W. Bush.
GEORGE H. W. BUSH, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: Read my lips, no new taxes.</s>BUSH: I, George Herbert Walker Bush, do solemnly swear --</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States.</s>BUSH: That I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States. Kuwait is liberated. Iraq's army is defeated. Our military objectives are met. Just because you run against someone does not mean you have to be enemies. Politics doesn't have to be mean and ugly. I love you, precious, with all my heart, and to know that you love me means my life. How often I have thought about the immeasurable joy that will be ours someday. Just because you're an old guy, you don't have to sit around drooling in the corner. No regrets about one single thing in my life that I can think of.</s>WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: We want to welcome our viewers in the United States and around the world. This is CNN special coverage of the passing of George H. W. Bush. I am Wolf Blitzer reporting from Buenos Aires. Prayers and words of comfort being offered to the former president's family right now. President Bush worked tirelessly for the American people, as a U.S. Navy pilot, then as a congressman, a diplomat, and as head of the CIA. But he is also remembered as a great family man, survived by five children, more than a dozen grandchildren, and many great grandchildren. He was 94-years-old. His death comes months after his wife Barbara Bush passed. She passed away this past April at the age of 92. They were married for 73 years. Dana, this is a story that all of us are going to remember for a long time, these days as we reflect on this great American leader.</s>DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR: No question, Wolf. It is really remarkable to be here in Houston in the late president's hometown, a place that he loved. He was certainly a member of the community here. But you got to know him, Wolf, covering him as a master on the world stage. Here in Houston right now joining me is someone who edited the president's book on that period "The China Diary, George H. W. Bush, The Making of a Global President." Jeffrey Engel is also the author of "When the World Seemed New, George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War," and he's a founding director of SMU's Center for Presidential History. Thank you for joining me this morning. I want to start with something that struck me in the book I talked about that you wrote about how President Bush handled the end of the cold war. And it is hard, I think, for people to wrap their minds around what he had in front of him, just in one term, even the beginning of his one term. You talk about the Berlin Wall falling, democracy taking root behind the iron curtain, Germany uniting, which had been divided since World War II, the Soviet Union surrendering. And it goes on and on and on. And you note that what he had to deal with, the complexities of it, was only paralleled by what FDR had to deal with during his four terms.</s>JEFFREY ENGEL, HISTORIAN, SOUTHERN METHODIST UNIVERSITY: I was going to say, during a lot longer period in office. It really was an astounding period. We've never seen such tectonic change in the international system over a short period. In fact most of the things you just mentioned really happened in the first half of his first term. So we think about Donald Trump's first term, he is about halfway through. That was the period when we saw the Berlin Wall come down, communism begin to falter, and also Saddam Hussein invade Kuwait. It really was remarkable how many things happened and how much he had to juggle at one time.</s>BASH: And now, looking back, watching what happened as he became president, he was vice president as the cold war was really ending, but when the transformation happened, it was on his watch as president. And it was not a sure thing that it was going to end up that way. It was because he was president that it happened that way.</s>ENGEL: This is really key. We have to remember it has been a long time now. But we have to remember this is really one of the most dangerous periods in the 20th century because we have a global super power, the Soviet Union, which effectively is collapsing. And throughout history, we've never seen a super power collapse without an ensuing great power war. But we've never actually run that experiment globally with nuclear weapons in the mix, 20,000 nuclear weapons on the Soviet side. So what Bush was confronting was something that really could have at any moment, probably should have, if you ran experiments enough times, probably should have exploded into the kinds of ethnic violence or the kinds of civil war that we saw, say, in Yugoslavia. That could have happened throughout the Soviet Union. And Bush's really skill in handling of that was to keep calm in order to keep global leaders while this tectonic change was going on, keep them all focused on not making it worse. Let's keep talking. Let's keep the crisis down, let's keep the emotions down. And that all happened behind the scenes.</s>BASH: Yes, and that is really remarkable because he really was the right man at the right time, because it was his DNA to keep calm, to not be, as we've heard so many times this morning, braggadocious. And that really helped as a guiding light and a guide post for how he handled that remarkable time in history.</s>ENGEL: I like to say that basically he practiced Hippocratic diplomacy, that is to say the first thing you do is make sure you're not making things worse, which is really something that other presidents might want to take note of. One great example of the way he was able to personalize foreign policy and really get to know foreign leaders really occurred at the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was a moment in 1989 that frankly shouldn't have happened. It was a mistake. No one expected it. Bush and General Scowcroft, his national security adviser, didn't expect it basically in their entire lives. Suddenly it happened. And while Bush had to go in front of cameras, in front of the American people to give a statement to explain what was going on, he simultaneously knew people around the world, including in the Soviet Union were watching. So he had to make sure that nothing he said would perhaps provoke violence, even though he knew, he would keep on getting notes passed to him that said Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of Britain, called. Germany's Helmut Kohl called. Mikhail Gorbachev called. And everyone had the same question of the president of the United States, which is do you know what's going on. And he was able to keep things calm and keep things from spinning out of control during that incredibly chaotic moment.</s>BASH: You mentioned all those iconic figures calling him real time as this potential crisis was happening that turned out to be not really a crisis. You learned so much about how he used those relationships to help kind of take this through this period of time in history, particularly with Gorbachev. I am really struck by the bond that the two of them struck.</s>ENGEL: It is really remarkable. And I think the way that Bush managed to strike those relationships with Gorbachev in particular but with other global leaders was because he understood that American power was undisputed but America's relations had to be a two-way street, which is to say he used to call foreign leaders around the world and basically just say what's going on in your country, what do you think of the world, and then listen. In fact, we have transcripts of all of his phone calls now from the Oval Office to foreign leaders. And some of the transcripts are actually quite funny. It would be basically George Bush saying hello, someone else talking for three pages, and Bush saying great, it was great to talk to you. What that says to me as a historian, as a foreign policy analyst, is that Bush was able to listen. And when he needed a favor, when he needed people to listen to him, they were more likely to really hear him out because they knew he had taken time to listen to them.</s>BASH: It is so basic. It is the basic humanity he understood implicitly with everything in his life from the small to the big to the important stuff. Stay with us on that whole notion of humanity. I want to talk about memorial services being planned for President Bush both here in Houston and in Washington. And I want to bring in CNN special correspondent Jamie Gangel to talk about that. What can you tell us, Jamie, about the ceremonies planned in the coming days?</s>JAMIE GANGEL, CNN SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT: So the services have not been publicly announced yet. But we can tell you two things. We have confirmed that the Bush family reached out to President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, and they are invited to the National Cathedral service. And now the White House confirmed that the Trumps will be attending that service. And this should not come as a surprise to anyone who knew former president Bush, because even though we now publicly know that he voted for Hillary Clinton and he had some choice words for Donald Trump, this is about former President Bush respecting the office of the presidency. It would never occur to him not to invite the sitting president of the United States. The other thing we can tell you is that among the eulogists at the National Cathedral will be, no surprise, his son, former president George W. Bush. I think that I can predict pretty accurately that that will be an emotional speech. The Bush men are known for crying. And I am going to guess he's going to struggle to get through it without crying, Dana.</s>BASH: I would tend to agree with you there. You learned about the final moments that the late president spent on this earth and who was around him, obviously his family, but one person that was really striking to me, again not surprising, is his secretary of state but also longtime friend James Baker. So touching and moving that he was there.</s>GANGEL: So there are a lot of people who consider themselves George Bush's best friend, and they were, but James Baker was his best friend. You may remember not too long ago there was a picture of them, I think November 1st, early voting, the two men. If you go on Instagram, you'll see it. They went on voted together. They were so close. And the Bakers spent a tremendous amount of time with former President Bush the last couple of weeks and months especially. And they were there along with many of the family members who live in the Houston area, his son Neil Bush, Neil's wife Maria, some of the children, grandson, Pierce Bush were all around. And then the family members who couldn't be in town, who had already I think said their goodbyes over the last couple of weeks, were calling in all day to talk to him.</s>BASH: Jamie, thank you for that reporting. And you have some incredible exclusive interviews with really everybody, everybody in his family, and people who knew him so well. We're going to be getting to that throughout the day. And Wolf, as I toss it back to you, it is so fitting I think that you are there in Buenos Aires, that the G20 is meeting at this time, a global alliance, the kind that George H. W. Bush called absolutely critical, critical for the kind of world that he saw throughout decades and decades in his public service as important to keep the peace.</s>BLITZER: Absolutely, right. He would have welcomed the opportunity to sit down with all of these world leaders who have gathered here in Buenos Aires for this G20 summit. Dana, I had a chance earlier today to sit down with the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo. We spoke obviously about the passing of President Bush. We also spoke about other sensitive issues on the national security front, including what happened to the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, what's going on with President Putin in Russia. That interview is coming up. We'll have it for our viewers. We'll take a quick break. We'll be right back.</s>GEORGE H. W. BUSH, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: I did my job as president. I just didn't expose my inner feelings. And I think people liked me, I think people were disappointed, I think people wanted change. I think when I said the economy has recovered, look at this guy, he is out of touch. I've got a whole rationale of reasons why I did not get reelected, but maybe if I had been a little more emotional, or more revealing of the person, why, maybe it would have helped. But it never occurred to me then. I mean,</s>I -- UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No regrets then?</s>BUSH: No regrets about anything. No regrets about one single thing in my life that I can think of. Maybe I made mistakes, but they don't measure up to regrets now.