The Pulse: George H.W. Bush finally gets his due

Finally, 41 is getting his just due. That's on account of former Newsweek editor-in-chief Jon Meacham's investing 17 years in the writing of

Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush

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Bush never did write his own memoir. In keeping with his WASPy upbringing, where he was advised by his parents to "never go bragging on yourself," he choose instead to assemble his life as expressed in letters and, in 1999, published a fascinating compendium simply titled All the Best.

For example, rather than let time distort his recall of being shot down Sept. 2, 1944, off the island of Chichi Jima, in the Bonins, and rescued by the USS Finback, Bush published a letter he wrote the next day to his parents. "I'm afraid I was pretty much of a sissy about it cause I sat in my raft and sobbed for awhile," he wrote. "My heart aches for the families of those two boys with me."

But his life's work deserved the treatment of a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. Meacham told me recently that his friend Michael Beschloss, a fellow historian, has a rule that it takes 20 to 25 years before a presidency can be seen historically and not journalistically.

Many are reading Meacham's biography noting what Bush's career reminds us about changes in the Republican Party. After encountering a Pat Robertson supporter in Kingsport, Tenn., who refused to shake his hand during the 1988 campaign, Bush recorded a diary entry about the extremists in the GOP: "They don't care about Party. They don't care about anything. They're the excesses. . . . They will destroy this party if they're permitted to take over." He was prescient. He was also representative of a time when credentials mattered in his party.

In 1980, Bush ran for president on the slogan that he'd be "A President We Won't Have to Train." He'd already been a war hero, businessman, congressman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, ambassador to the United Nations, envoy to China, and director of the CIA. By the time he was elected president eight years later, that resumé would also include vice president.

Meacham told me that today that resumé would be a campaign burden.

"Can you imagine today [his] paper trail?" he asked. "You would have four years of congressional votes, which by the way he served two years under Johnson, and he voted with the Johnson administration 53 percent of the time. He served two years under Nixon in the House, and he voted with him 55 percent of the time. Can you imagine people going through the U.N. votes? Can you imagine people going through the [years as] chairman of the RNC during Watergate? Can you imagine people looking at our Chinese policy? Can you imagine a director of the CIA? Can you imagine an eight-year vice president responsible for everything? I mean, it's just an entirely different universe."

Today there's a shortcut: Say something incendiary, gain a platform from the polarized media, become a fund-raising magnet, and announce your candidacy. There's no longer a need to get elected, bide your time, pass legislation, gain seniority, and eventually seek higher office.

Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul have each served less than one term in the Senate and yet they are running for the nation's highest office, just as Barack Obama was a first-term U.S. senator who had been elected three times to the Illinois Senate when he ran for president in 2008. As evidenced by the appeal of GOP front-runners Donald Trump and Ben Carson, and even Carly Fiorina, today it's not a prerequisite to have ever held office. In fact, among Republicans this year, there seems an inverse relationship between credentials and standing in the polls.

Lindsey Graham has 33 years of service in the Air Force, three terms in the U.S. Senate, four terms in the U.S. House, and one term in the South Carolina legislature.

John Kasich shares a long resumé of public service. He was once the youngest (age 26) ever elected to the Ohio Senate. At age 30, he was elected to Congress, where he served nine terms, including 18 years on the House Armed Services Committee and six years as House Budget Committee chair, during which time the nation achieved a balanced budget. (Kasich also served as managing director of Lehman Brothers' Columbus, Ohio, office, and as a Fox News television host.)

Today he is the two-term governor of the most purple of states, having been reelected by a wide margin. So I asked him what he thought of credentials being passé?

He told me that Republicans are very frustrated at having elected majorities in the House and Senate and getting nothing in return.

"I sort of play both positions," Kasich told me. "I've worked with the establishment, but I've also been an outside-the-establishment guy. I've been a reformer all of my life and I've shaken a lot of things up and stepped on a lot of toes.

"But at the end, it's not about pontification; it's about reform and enactment. You know, you stand up and say: 'I fought for this. I fought for that. I fought for the other thing.' Well, if you didn't achieve anything, then in some respects you were either a Paul Revere or a clanking bell."

As Meacham reminds us, Bush 41 established a record both before and as president. He signed into law the Americans With Disabilities Act, instituted a temporary ban on assault rifles (and later renounced his lifetime membership in the National Rifle Association). He presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall, signed START I with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, and began the NAFTA negotiations.

"I actually believe that, culturally and temperamentally, George H.W. Bush has more in common with the Roosevelts and even with the Founding Fathers than he does with his successors," Meacham said. "And that ambient sense of service, that public service with a natural extension of yourself and as it says in the Gospel, 'To whom much is given, much is expected,' George H.W. Bush totally embodied that principle."

Michael Smerconish can be heard from 9 a.m. to noon on Sirius XM's POTUS Channel 124 and seen hosting "Smerconish" at 9 a.m. Saturdays on CNN.