The Bush family and its legacy

H.D.S. GREENWAY'S "The Old Lion of Maine" (Op-ed, Aug. 7) is a distressingly one-sided assessment of George Herbert Walker Bush. Beyond Greenway's list of things that our 41st president happily did not do, let me add another. For all the years during which Bush's sole residence was his Kennebunkport estate, he listed it as a mere summer residence, thereby vastly reducing the taxes he should rightly have paid to the state of Maine. His alleged main residence in Texas was a Houston hotel room, not a condo, much less a house. Only after Bush left the White House and had a mansion built for him in Houston did he list Texas as his principal residence.

One can safely bet that the morally superior former president would have condemned any waiter or waitress who did not list all of his or her tips.

I wonder how Greenway would spin this to romanticize his hero.

HOWARD SEGAL
Orono, Maine

The writer is a professor of history at the University of Maine.

H.D.S. GREENWAY writes of George H. W. Bush, the "old lion of Maine": "History will remember him kindly." I beg to differ. I believe history will remember the elder Bush primarily for his utterly toxic contribution to American history: his son.

STEVE MARSHALL
San Francisco