President George H. Walker

On a cold January morning in 1989, as Marine One skimmed low over the Potomac River and settled onto the South Lawn for the last time of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, George Herbert Walker Bush stepped out into the crisp winter air and paused. For eight years he had been the loyal vice president, the former rival who swallowed his pride and joined the ticket, the man standing half a step behind one of the most transformative figures in modern American politics. Now he was about to become the forty-first President of the United States, inheriting not only Reagan’s political coalition but a world on the edge of transformation: the Soviet empire cracking, markets globalizing, old certainties dissolving.

He did not look like a revolutionary. Bush moved with the careful, slightly stiff bearing of a man raised in pr ...