Speaking with Bill Maher last Friday, Dana Carvey told of how he got a call in late 1992 from President Bush – the man he had mercilessly imitated on Saturday Night Live – asking him to come down to Washington to “cheer up the troops,” meaning, as Carvey explained, the White House staff (Bush had recently lost his bid for reelection to Bill Clinton). Carvey said that he immediately thought of booking a hotel; he stayed, of course, at the White House. It was the beginning of a 26-year friendship.
Then this week, reading Jan Morris’s diary Thinking Again, I came across her thoughts on hearing of Bush’s death in 2018:
“I shall be sneered at for saying it, but the values I respected in him were the traditional values of the American Gentleman, and alas they no longer govern his nation and so set some standard for the Western world. He was, everyone seems to agree, straight, frank, brave, kind and friendly – in short, gentlemanly American, and I wish to God he was with us still. Don’t you?”
