He was haunted by the things he saw during his service in WW II and refused to talk about it.
And he put pressure on the Salvadoran authorities during his presidency about the death squads and put them on notice that it had to stop or he wouldn't be able to continue supporting their regime.
Was he squeaky clean? Of course not. No American president has been, at least not in recent memory. The human psyche is a scary thing, and they've all got blood on their hands.
The world is a fucked up place, and no leader of the so-called free world can escape that reality.
Originally Posted by Dev Null
Bush was a master at propaganda and reversing facts. He was the point man for the Central American Task Force of the CIA headed by Dewey Claridge and Don Gregg which oversaw the death squads in El Salvador, Guatamala, and Honduras. He fabricated the story you cite because of media pressure here. He also fabricated the stories about atrocities in Kuwait like the fake testimony concerning babies taken out of incubators to die on the floor, the Willie Horton story in 1988, the fake accusations about Noriega, and countless other fables. Over 3,000 civilians were killed in the attack on Panama, and whole neighborhoods were leveled. Many US soldiers were also killed which the public still doesn't know about because of fuck ups in the execution of the plan. In 1991 he once again faked intelligence, telling Saudi Arabia that the Iraqis had moved their forces from Kuwait City to the Saudi border and were preparing to attack Saudi Arabia. That was all lies. Bush and his friends wanted to base in Saudi Arabia after the loss of Iran in 1979, so they green lighted Saddam's attack on Kuwait and then told the Saudis that he was going to attack them next when he wasn't. After that war the US troops stayed in Saudi Arabia and that is what motivated Osama bin-Laden and others to start their terror campaigns.
And if you're going to cite what happened in 1945 I think the record will show that when his TBF caught fire he bailed out leaving two of his crew inside to burn alive and crash.
For what it's worth I grew up near Memorial, went to Westchester High, and know more people who know Poppy than anyone on this board.
It's crazy that all the people eulogizing him never even mention that every single person who knew him personally called him Poppy. In Midland people used to call him Rubbers because of his fucking with younger girls. But his time in Midland was before I was born.