Hawaii leaders bid aloha to former president

With flags lowered to half-staff across the state, local leaders paid tribute Saturday to former President George H.W. Bush.

Bush, who died Friday at his home in Houston, Texas, at the age of 94, led an extraordinarily eventful life that repeatedly intersected with Hawaii and the Pacific Rim.

As noted by biographer Jon Meacham, the standout athlete and son of U.S. Sen. Prescott Bush was driven to serve his country following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor when he was still a high school senior at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.

U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii noted the connection in a statement issued Saturday.

“President George H.W. Bush showed us all how to live a life of service with personal decency and humility,” Schatz said. “His long career of service began when he was 17. In the immediate aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, he tried to enlist in the Navy, only to be told to come back in six months. When he did, he quickly became the youngest Navy pilot at that point in our nation’s history.”

The actual Boeing N2S-3 Stearman training plane in which Bush soloed is displayed in the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum on Ford Island.

During the war, Bush served in the Pacific Theater flying torpedo bombers off aircraft carriers. He came close to death on Sept. 2, 1944, when his plane was shot down as he dropped bombs on the heavily defended Japanese island of Chichi Jima. His two crewmates were killed and Bush bobbed on a life raft for several hours before being picked up by an American submarine.

In 1991, Bush traveled to Honolulu to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, “not as a sailor but as president,” Schatz continued. “He could have focused on how the day that lives in infamy changed his own life. Instead, he used it to call for healing between the United States and Japan — to foster forgiveness and peace.”

At the direction of President Donald Trump, Gov. David Ige ordered the U.S. and Hawaii state flags to be flown at half-staff at the state Capitol and all state offices and agencies for 30 days.

“President Bush lived a life of service to our nation, from a combat plane to the halls of Congress and the White House,” said Ige in a statement released Saturday. “As we pay tribute to his leadership, let us vow to serve our communities, our state and our nation with the same spirit.”

Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell had expressed similar sentiments in a statement Friday.

Brett Kulbis, the local GOP’s Honolulu chairman, lauded Bush’s lifetime of meritorious service in the military and public service that included stints in Congress, as ambassador to China and director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“As president, he presided over the collapse of the Soviet Union, he won Desert Storm and scored among the highest approval ratings of any president ever,” Kulbis said. “At the time of his death, George H.W. Bush was the longest-lived American president in history and considered one of the country’s most beloved presidents of all time.”

Bush visited Hawaii several times before and during his time in the White House.

He came in August 1980 to help open the Reagan-Bush presidential campaign office on Kapiolani Boulevard and again in 1982 and 1985 as vice president.

His longest stay came in 1990, when he convened a meeting of the Pacific Basin Forum, which brought together leaders from 11 Pacific nations in an event that at the time was seen as an overdue step in repairing and strengthening U.S.-Pacific ties.

The trip also served as a high-profile stump for U.S. Rep. Pat Saiki, at the time the state’s lone Republican in Congress. In a decision widely viewed as an attempt to boost Saiki’s chances for re-election, Bush ordered the military to cease bombing exercises on Kahoolawe in advance of his arrival.

While the move was opposed by the Navy, which had been granted control of the island in 1953, the seeds for Kahoolawe’s reclamation had been planted years prior by the Protect Kahoolawe Ohana and its high-profile activism. Bush’s edict, nonetheless, set the stage for the island’s eventual return to the state of Hawaii in 2003.