Who is Barbara Bush?

Here are things to be known about the Former First Lady Barbara Bush:

Barbara Bush Foundation 

FILE – In this January 22, 1990, file photo, then US first lady Barbara Bush during a visit to the Model Learning Center in Washington. A family spokesman said Tuesday, April 17, 2018, that former first lady Barbara Bush has died at the age of 92. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds, File)

As first lady from 1989 to 1993, Bush started a foundation to promote family literacy with a goal to improve the lives of disadvantaged Americans by boosting literacy among parents and their children. “Focusing on the family is the best place to start to make this country more literate, and I still feel that being more literate will help us solve so many of the other problems facing our society,” she wrote in her 1994 memoir. In 2014, the foundation was awarded with more $40 million to expand its literacy policy. She was also known for her AIDS activism as first lady—at a time when HIV and AIDS were still steeped in stigma.

Memoir 

After leaving the White House, she found time to write her memoir. In 1990, she authored “Millie’s Book,” a humorous look at the adventures of the family’s English springer spaniel in the White House.

Children

In this Jan. 21, 1985, file photo, US President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, right, stand with Vice President George Bush and Barbara Bush following the oaths in the Capitol Building in Washington.  (AP Photo/Bob Daugherty, File)

Bush had six children including the former president George W Bush and the former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. She is also survived by her sons Neil and Marvin and her daughter Doro Bush Koch. Her daughter Robin died at the age of three in 1953.

Style

Barbara Bush was dubbed “The Silver Fox” by her husband and children. She was known for her snow-white hair and for being fiercely protective of her family. Her triple-strand false pearl necklace sparked a national fashion trend when she wore them to her husband’s inauguration in 1989.The pearls became synonymous with Bush, who later said she selected them to hide the wrinkles in her neck.

Controversies

Barbara Bush sometimes made biting remarks, particularly when she felt the need to defend her husband. Bush generally refused to discuss publicly her personal views on controversial topics such as abortion, an issue on which she was believed to differ from her husband’s more conservative stance. But during her husband’s 1992 re-election race, which he lost to Democrat Bill Clinton, she told reporters that abortion and homosexuality were “personal things” that should be left out of political conventions and party platforms. “I don’t think that’s healthy for the country when anyone thinks their morals are better than anyone else’s,” she said.

[bc_video video_id=”5772393870001″ account_id=”5757251836001″ player_id=”ByU0hpZif”]

She even attracted controversy in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when she said: “So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them,” while meeting with survivors of the natural disaster in Houston.