Former first lady and campaigner on literacy

Born: June 8, 1925;

Died: April 17, 2018

BARBARA Bush, who has died aged 92, was the wife of one president, the mother of another and one of the most popular first ladies ever to live in the White House.

She was also one of her husband George HW Bush’s most trusted advisers and biggest political assets and championed the issue of literacy before, during and after her White House years. She formed the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy to fund schemes that teach parents in low-income families to read and pass on a love of reading to their children.

Mrs Bush's nickname, the Silver Fox, hinted at her grandmotherly image – she was famous for her snow-white hair and strings of pearls – but also her behind-the-scenes power as an enforcer of family discipline. "What you see with me is what you get. I'm not running for president – George Bush is," she said at the 1988 Republican National Convention, although her plain-speaking manner and lack of pretence made her, at times, more popular than her husband.

By the time George Bush was running for president, the Bushes had already been married for more than 40 years and they had the longest marriage of any presidential couple in American history. Writing in a 1994 memoir describing her time in the White House, Mrs Bush said she had the best job in America. "Every single day was interesting, rewarding, and sometimes just plain fun," she said.

The Bushes had met during the Second World War when George Bush was a young Navy pilot (George was the first boy Barbara had ever kissed). After the war had ended and he had graduated from Yale, she and their toddler son, Georgie, followed him from Connecticut to Texas, where he was determined to make his fortune in the oil business. Over the years, Mrs Bush established more than 20 homes in their peripatetic life.

Barbara Bush was born on June 8, 1925, the third of four children, and grew up in New York City. Her father, Marvin, was a gifted athlete who was trained as an engineer and rose to head the McCall publishing empire and she could trace her direct family lineage to the Mayflower.

At a Christmas dance at the Greenwich Country Club in 1941, George Bush asked a mutual friend to introduce him to the pretty girl across the room. Barbara was 16. He was 17. When they married, she was 19 and he was 20.

They had a large and boisterous family: George, Robin, Jeb, Neil, Marvin and Doro. Bush made his money in the Texas oil business before moving the family to Houston to launch a political career, first becoming Harris County Republican chairman, then losing a bid for the US Senate and finally winning one for the House of Representatives.

President Richard Nixon named him UN ambassador, then selected him to chair the Republican National Committee during the Watergate scandal. President Gerald Ford appointed him as the US envoy to China, then as director of the CIA.

He ran for president in 1980, losing the Republican nomination but being selected at the last minute by Ronald Reagan as his running mate. After two terms as vice president, Bush was elected president in 1988.

At each step, Barbara Bush was his indispensable partner – organised, disciplined, focused and flexible. She built sprawling networks of friends, sent out thousands of Christmas cards and easily socialised with strangers, from foreign ambassadors at state dinners to factory workers on the campaign trial.

As first lady, she became enormously popular — over time, scoring higher favourable ratings than her husband or her son. Americans embraced her as an approachable, no-nonsense matron who benefited from the contrast with her designer-clothes-loving predecessor as first lady, Nancy Reagan.

However, the family had its share of pain. Daughter Robin died of leukaemia when she was three years old in 1953 and Mrs Bush suffered from a spate of depression in 1975 so serious that she contemplated suicide. At age 28, son Marvin was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, an incurable disease that forced surgery to remove his colon. Soon after becoming first lady, Mrs Bush was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, a thyroid disorder which gave her double vision and led to painful complications that plagued her for the rest of her life.

In her down time, she was an avid needle-pointer — a hobby she picked up to survive endless political meetings when her husband was running for Harris County chairman — and an inveterate reader, but she was more than the warm and cuddly image. White House staffers sometimes avoided her for fear of being the target of a cutting remark, or of getting on her bad side. She rarely offered her advice in public, but the impact of her private assessments to both family presidents were the subject of considerable speculation.

During the 1984 campaign, when Reagan and Bush were running for re-election against Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro, Barbara Bush told reporters aboard Air Force Two that she and her husband weren't hiding the finances, "not like that four-million-dollar — I can't say it, but it rhymes with 'rich.' "

Afterwards, she insisted that she thought the comment was off the record, but reporters filed stories about it, creating a furore and prompting an apology in public and in a phone call to Ferraro. (She said the rhyming word she had in mind was "witch," persuading no one.)

In a speech in 1985, Mrs Bush recalled the stress of raising a family while married to a man with political ambitions. "This was a period, for me, of long days and short years," she said, "of diapers, runny noses, earaches, more Little League games than you could believe possible, tonsils and those unscheduled races to the hospital emergency room, Sunday school and church, of hours of urging homework or short chubby arms around your neck and sticky kisses."

Her husband is now 93 years old and struggling with a Parkinson’s-like disease that forces him to use a wheelchair and has made it difficult for him to speak.

Her eldest son George W. Bush, now 71 and the nation's 43rd president, served two terms from 2001-09 and retired to Texas. His election made Barbara Bush the second woman in history to be both a wife and mother of presidents — and the only one who lived to see both of them serve.

Just this month, the former first lady wrote about her husband in a note for a college magazine. "I am still old and still in love with the man I married 72 years ago," she wrote.

As well as her memoir, Barbara Bush wrote two children's books, C Fred's Story and Millie's Book. Both were written from the perspective of a family dog.

She is survived by her husband, their children George, Jeb, Neil, Marvin and Dorothy, and 17 grandchildren, several of them involved in public service, and seven great-grandchildren.