The Call to Serve: The Life of an American President, George Herbert Walker Bush: a Visual Biography

A visually stunning portrait of George Herbert Walker Bush, featuring never-before-published photos and memories celebrating the forty-first president’s vision of leadership as service to country—curated by Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Jon Meacham

As American politics has descended into deeper division and extremism, Bush is, in a sense, a countercultural figure. Reflexive partisanship has become fashionable; the politics of total war more common; the center ever smaller. Yet George H. W. Bush embraced compromise as a necessary element of public life, engaged his political foes in the passage of important legislation, and was willing to break with the base of his own party in order to do what he thought was right, whatever the price.—from the Introduction

Lavishly illustrated, The Call to Serve is an intimate, illuminating portrait of the forty-first president, a man who was so much more than just his politics. In words and images—many found in a lifetime of scrapbooks kept by Barbara Pierce Bush—Jon Meacham brings George H. W. Bush vividly to life. From the values of integrity, empathy, and grace that Bush learned in childhood to his leadership at the highest levels in tumultuous times, the forty-first president embodied an ideal of service that warrants attention in our own divided time.

Bush pursued a life of service to America through his heroic combat experience in the Pacific during World War II, his political rise in Texas, his serving as U.S. ambassador to the UN, his time as envoy to China and as director of the CIA, his tenure as Ronald Reagan’s vice president, and his election as the forty-first president of the United States. The Call to Serve commemorates the legacy of a man who was far from perfect but whose ambition was not an end unto itself. Bush’s drive to succeed was, rather, a means to put the values of balance, patriotism, and respect for others into action in the political arena.

A biographical masterpiece, The Call to Serve is an essential tribute to a uniquely American life.

Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. The Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University, he is the author of the New York Times bestsellers And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle; His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope; The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels; The Hope of Glory: Reflections on the Last Words of Jesus; Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush; Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power; American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House; American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation; and Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship. A fellow of the Society of American Historians, Meacham lives in Nashville with his family.