As we approach a presidential election year where the leading candidates are rather light in the resumé, the qualifications George Herbert Walker Bush brought to the 1988 presidential race made him seem like a ringer.
He had been a businessman, U.S. Senate candidate (twice), U.S. House member, United Nations ambassador, Republican National Committee chairman, China envoy, CIA director and vice president.
"We've come a long way - or not," Jon Meacham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the recently published biography on Bush, "Destiny and Power," said of the current presidential field while addressing a throng of people who'd come to buy his book at Barnes & Noble in Hamilton Place mall earlier this week.
Bush, he said, actually had served his country since he was 18, when he enlisted for service in World War II. His experience as a pilot in that conflict, which saw him shot down and two others die while completing a mission near the Pacific island of Chichi-jima, was life-changing, he said.
The rest of his life, Meacham said, questions of whether he'd done enough to save his crewmen and why he was spared have never been far from his thoughts.
Bush, he said, has been "trying to prove he was worthy to be saved."
That experience, Meacham said, and the companion lessons learned from his mother of competitiveness and not boasting about your accomplishments have driven him to what the author called an "energetic, hectic life."
Thus, he said, when Bush ran for president in 1988 to succeed Ronald Reagan and given his resumé, he was uniquely qualified, though his belief that "sudden and visionary was not particularly productive" was a different approach from Reagan's.
"I argue [in the book]," said Meacham, a former Chattanooga Times staff writer and later editor-in-chief of Newsweek and now executive editor at Random House, "that's exactly what the country needed."
And, at the end of one term, when Bush was defeated by Bill Clinton - and had become, as Dana Carvey said in imitating him on "Saturday Night Live," "a one-termer, just like Jimmy Carter" - he "had packed eight years into four."
During his term, the Berlin Wall fell, the Tiananmen Square protests occurred in China, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was signed, the Soviet Union dissolved, military operations were conducted in Panama and the Persian Gulf War was staged. Domestically, the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed, the Clean Air Act was reauthorized, and a budget bill that paved the way for the strong economy of the 1990s was passed.
As a man, Meacham said, the former president has "a ferocious competitiveness" but "a generosity of spirit" and constantly "thinks about the other guy." He also has "more tactile emotions than he ever gets credit for."
In general, he said, Bush was an "underappreciated president" or, in the words of his son, often "misunderestimated."
"The test of a great political life," said Meacham, who spent nine years writing the book, "is what you do with it."
It's a lesson candidates for 2016 could take to heart.