Former President George Herbert Walker Bush spent a significant part of his speech in Los Angeles on Monday night talking of his love of family and his pride in the son who currently occupies the White House.
Yet as the 82-year-old former chief executive recounted his years as president, the tale of how he governed stood in marked contrast to what critics, a few of whom were in the audience, say are the official actions of his beleaguered son.
Enumerating the crises and triumphs of his term -- among them the successful coalition-building before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the passage of the Clean Air Act -- Bush extolled the virtues of strength moderated by bipartisanship. He spoke of the need for executive restraint and sensitivity to diplomatic nuance.
Talking to an enthusiastic audience of about 2,200 gathered at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for a lecture in the Music Center Speaker Series, he said he also took pride in having had "a very capable and competent team in my administration," which was "an honorable administration in terms of scandals."
Bush, clad in a dark suit, was erect of bearing despite a hobbling gait that required the use of a cane. He joked easily and often and seemed fully recovered from a dehydration-induced fainting spell he'd suffered the previous day while golfing in Palm Springs.
He and his wife, Barbara, he said, had come to Democratic-leaning California to spend the weekend with friends. "We really do love it here," he said. "As John Kennedy said about Ohio, 'There's no place I get a warmer welcome and fewer votes than Ohio.' "
Some of his family stories evoked laughter. Bush spoke of how, as small boys, he and his brother paid a neighbor girl 10 cents to run naked across a lawn. That caper, he said, caused his father, U.S. Sen. Prescott S. Bush, to use a squash racket to chastise his sons.
His mother, he said, instilled in him certain fundamental values to which he subscribed his entire life as a public figure:
Give others credit.
Be fair and honest.
Listen.
Serve the public.
At one point, a man in the audience, eschewing the orderly procession of questioners to a microphone, rose in his seat and yelled, "Why didn't you pass those values on to your son?"
As the man launched into an anti-Iraq war oration, security guards moved toward him and other audience members shouted him down.
