Dorothy W. Bush, Mother of President, Dies at Age 91 : Family: The daughter of privilege was known for instilling a sense of humility and caring in her children. She died hours after son's visit.

By JAMES GERSTENZANG

Nov. 20, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

WASHINGTON — Dorothy Walker Bush, the matriarch who saw her son elected President of the United States and then lived to see his downfall, died Thursday at her home in Greenwich, Conn., the White House said. She was 91.

She had been in ill health for several years and suffered a stroke on Wednesday.

President Bush, accompanied by his daughter, Dorothy Koch, left the White House Thursday morning and spent 70 minutes at her bedside. She died about four hours after he returned to the White House at midday.

He was informed of his mother’s death during a diplomatic ceremony on the State Floor of the White House. White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said a private funeral service would be held Monday in Greenwich, and that the President would attend.

Bill Clinton’s office said the President-elect called Bush Thursday evening to offer his condolences.

The woman whom the President called his family’s “moral leader” who “tamed our arrogance” was the daughter of privilege--her father was shipped off to school in England with his valet--and the wife of a successful businessman and senator.

But she eschewed the showiness of her moneyed New England neighbors, and, even as she sent her five children to school in a chauffeured car, she raised them under a strict code of fair play and concern for others.

“To be a Bush was to be unimpressed by money and its splendors,” wrote Richard Ben Cramer in “What It Takes,” a study of the 1988 presidential campaign out of which Bush emerged the victor.

Even as her son rose to national and then international prominence, his mother stayed out of the limelight, remaining less well-known than such other members of her exclusive club as Rose Kennedy and Lillian Carter.

“She always says the wrong things, like, ‘George was a favorite of the chauffeur, Alec,’ ” Bush said at one point in the 1988 campaign when his affluent upbringing had drawn unwanted scrutiny.

Dorothy Walker was born in St. Louis on July 1, 1901. Married to Prescott Bush Sr. in 1921, she lived with him in Kingsport, Tenn., Milton, Mass.--where the President was born in 1924--and then Greenwich, on Long Island Sound, where she raised her five children. Later in life, she spent several months each winter at Hobe Sound, an exclusive community on Jupiter Island on Florida’s Atlantic Coast. In the summer, she was a familiar, if distant, figure to visitors to Kennebunkport, Me., where the President has a vacation home.

There, she stayed in a house on the family property at Walkers Point and could be seen many Sundays entering the old stone Episcopal church, St. Ann’s by the Sea, being pushed in her wheelchair by her son, the President.

In writings about his youth, Bush credited his father with shaping his world view and teaching him such values as duty and service.

“We were a family on the move, at a time when the automobile was uprooting the old 19th-Century American lifestyle,” he wrote, recalling his father’s rise in the world of business and investment banking that brought the family to Greenwich.

But by all accounts, his mother’s effect on him could not have been stronger. “Mother taught us about dealing with life on a personal basis, relating to other people,” he wrote.

“Every mother has her own style. My mother’s was a little like an Army drill sergeant’s,” Bush wrote in a Mother’s Day article for the Greenwich Times in 1985. “She had five of us to raise, Pres (Prescott), myself, Nancy, John and Bucky (William) and she just felt strongly that there was too much for us to learn and to do to waste any time on chaos. So we had very little chaos around our house.”

“I can hear her now: ‘You can do it. You’ll get it. You’ll get it.’ And she would be patient and tireless and always absolutely sure we would eventually get it,” he wrote. “She also tamed our arrogance. I’ll never forget years ago, saying rather innocently, I thought, ‘I was off my game.’ Mother jumped all over me. ‘You are just learning. You don’t have a game.’ ”

Her father, George Walker, was an avid sportsman who established the Walker Cup, a British-American amateur golf trophy, and she inherited his athletic prowess--a match for anyone, Bush wrote, in tennis, golf, basketball or baseball.

“For that matter, I don’t recall a footrace Mother was ever in that she didn’t come in first,” he wrote in his 1988 campaign autobiography, “Looking Forward.”

And just as he inherited her athletic competitiveness, he learned from her the importance of grace in both victory and defeat.

“Even when her teen-age sons outgrew her, she could bring us down to size whenever we’d get too full of ourselves,” he wrote, adding: “Fifty years later, mother still stays on the alert for anything that sounds like ‘braggadocio’ coming from one of her children.”

She even chided him on his conduct during his political campaigns, once complaining that he spoke too much about himself in his speeches.

Bush’s own disjointed speaking style, and his reluctance to use the pronoun ‘I,’ was often attributed to her lessons on humility.

“Even after I became vice president,” he wrote, “mother called to set me straight on my appearance during one of (President Reagan’s) televised State of the Union messages. She said it didn’t look right for me to be reading something while President Reagan was speaking. When I explained that House Speaker (Thomas P.) ‘Tip’ O’Neill and I were given advance copies of the speech in order to follow the President’s remarks, she was less than persuaded. ‘I really can’t see why that’s necessary,’ she said. ‘Just listen and you’ll find out what he has to say.’ ”