Happy 85th Birthday to President George Herbert Walker Bush

America has had many individuals of considerable talent and skill occupy the chief executive’s office at 1600 Pennsylvania.  President George H. W. Bush, the 41st president of the United States, was certainly one of them.  After graduating from high school in 1942, he signed on with the navy and became one of the youngest American pilots to fly in World War II.  Later he attended Yale where he played baseball and participated in the very first (as well as the second) College World Series.

George H. W. Bush began his career in the oil business and then entered politics in the mid-1960s.  First a Texas congressman, he later became U.N. ambassador, director of the C.I.A., and in 1981, Vice President of the United States.  He was elected president in 1988 defeating Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts; Bush served from 1989 to 1993. His presidency was marked by two major foreign policy victories in 1991, the American-led coalition’s elimination of Saddam Hussein’s troops from Kuwait and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. 

On his 80th birthday, the former president celebrated with a parachuting excursion and he is scheduled to mark his 85th birthday with yet another sky-diving adventure today at Kennebunkport, Maine.          

President George H. W. Bush sat for this portrait at his home in Kennebunkport. The picture’s backdrop, however, is the East Room of the White House. Among artist Ron Sherr’s aims was to balance the formality of the composition with a warmth capable of drawing the viewer into the picture.

The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition “President’s in Waiting” features a video interview of George H.W. Bush, along with interviews of other former vice presidents. And, when you visit the museum, be sure to see "America's Presidents," the nation’s only complete collection of presidential portraits outside the White House.