Former Vice President Dan Quayle, who served with President George H.W. Bush, remembered the late leader Monday as both a person with a "deep caring" for people, but also a person who was "very tough."
"I worked with him during the Gulf War," Quayle told Fox News' "America's Newsroom."
"He was the toughest and most focused of everybody. And you look throughout his career, he was always a winner, so there was a certain toughness. But he had great respect for other people. He had a love of life. He loved his wife and his family and he was just absolutely the best."
Quayle said the biggest challenge Bush faced during his term was with domestic policy, but he still had many accomplishments.
"Foreign policy, he knew exactly what he wanted to do," said Quayle. "He was clearly the very decisive leader. We were all around giving him advice and he would listen but he knew what to do and he knew how to do it.He knew the world better than anybody else. He knew all the leaders. His biggest challenge probably came on the domestic policy."
Bush's accomplishments, however, included the Clean Air Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, noted Quayle, and they came during a time when Democrats controlled both the House and Senate.
"In those days we reached across the aisle and worked with the Democrats as hard as we worked with our fellow Republicans," said Quayle.
However, Quayle said he does not think that Bush's call to "read my lips" on taxes, before he approved a tax increase, cost him his second term in office.
"I think what really probably was the nail in the coffin was that Ross Perot got 19% of the vote," said Quayle. "A Republican businessman from the president's home state garnering 19 percent of the vote around the country, that's very difficult to overcome. And we didn't."
He also recalled that Bush sent his three children consolation letters after their loss.
"This was after the election in 1992," said Quayle. "We had lost, and a couple days afterwards my three children received a handwritten note from the president of the United States telling them how proud he was to have served with their father.
"That was so touching and so revealing in a time that, you know, he obviously wasn't feeling the best. He had just been defeated. He took time out to console my children. We'll never forget that."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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