The old lion of Maine

KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine

HERE IN this postcard-pretty town is where you will find the old lion in summer, George Herbert Walker Bush, now 83. Take a turn out of town along the ocean and there out on the rocks, where Walker Point hooks into the Atlantic, is the summer compound of our 41st president.

It is the home he has known the longest. "It's our family strength, being this close to the ocean," he once said.

There is a small guardhouse on the driveway, and a sign saying "authorized vehicles only," but once, almost 20 years ago, I was in an authorized vehicle to come with colleagues for an interview. We found what you would expect: a big, comfortable, understated house with a spectacular view, and the unfailing graciousness of a Connecticut Yankee turned Texan who was then running for president. If he was prickly at times it was only because, for him, reporters are akin to broccoli.

Kennebunkporters are proud of their summer neighbor, although they find it a bit tiresome when the likes of Vladimir Putin come to visit. "Lots of press, lots of security, a lot of noise," they told me at the Dock Square Coffee House. "Difficult to get from one place to another."

The former president still plays golf, they say, and particularly likes going fishing for striped bass and blue fish from his thunderous, 31-foot Fountain, Tournament Edition cigarette boat, Fidelity II, which they say can go faster than 50 miles an hour.

George H.W. Bush is now the oldest of our former presidents, and the last of the "greatest generation" presidents who fought in World War II. He is also the last US president to have fought in any war.

Bush signed on to be a Navy flyer right out of school. He flew 58 combat missions in the Pacific, his last in a Grumman Avenger torpedo plane when his plane was hit by enemy fire. With his engine in flames he continued the mission, managing to bail out just in time. He ended up floating in the Pacific Ocean in a rubber raft before he was rescued by the US submarine Finback. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

His career included being a congressman, head of the Liaison Office in Bejing (before we had an embassy in China), head of the CIA, ambassador to the United Nations, Ronald Reagan's vice president, and finally president of the United States. All of these tasks he accomplished with a lack of flashiness that may have cost him votes along the way.

It was Bush who presided over the end of the Cold War, ensuring that there was a minimum of triumphant crowing so as not to humiliate his former adversaries.

It was Bush the elder who wrested Kuwait from the clutches of Saddam Hussein, and showed wisdom afterward in not pressing on to Baghdad. "It would have been disastrous," he later said. "We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad, in effect rule Iraq."

But the events that showed to me his character to the fullest were two other things he did not do.

The first came in 1989 when he refused to join his European allies and Mikhail Gorbachev in objecting to German reunification. They "can't turn back the clock. . . . The change is too inexorable, " Bush proclaimed. Thus was he able to midwife a united Germany within NATO.

"It is the foreign policy achievement of which he is most proud," says documentary filmmaker Austin Hoyt, who is preparing a profile of the 41st president for public television's "The American Experience."

The second came when the Berlin Wall was coming down. Remembering John Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner," and Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Bush's people urged him to go to Berlin and cash in, politically, on the historic moment.

"I was one of those who thought he should go to Berlin," said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was working for the senior Bush at the time. But Bush refused. "From his point of view this was a German moment," Rice said in an interview with Hoyt. "It was a moment for Germans to reconcile. It was a moment for Germany to come to terms with its division. And it was a moment for Germany to celebrate that division had ended" -- not to be upstaged by political posturing from the White House.

It was a moment of grace and tact not often seen in American politics and diplomacy. History will remember him kindly.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.