Poppy
His maternal grandfather, George Herbert Walker, was known as Pop. So the boy named after him took on his nickname too, in the diminutive form: Poppy. The little Pop: both child and potential patriarch. It's an odd propensity WASPS have: saddling male children with frothy nicknames: Bunny, Cricket, Skipper, Scooter, Biff. Is it an intentional masking of privilege, a light taking down of a child born with such a leg up? His mother told him Don't say 'I.' Always share credit. Don't brag. Poppy obeyed the WASP credo of "aw shucks" humility as his childhood and youth glided along the oiled rails put in place for him: from Greenwich Country Day school to preppy Phillips Andover Academy, to Yale, enjoying the bastions of privilege while never putting on what his mother called the la-dee-dahs. But he was also raised up with an ideal of service. Between high school and college, in 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, becoming its youngest aviator. He flew bombing runs in the South Pacific and was shot down in 1945. He went back and flew eight more missions, for a total of 58. You could call him a throw-back. The next two presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, would use the National Guard as a way of avoiding being sent to Vietnam. Joe Biden would get a draft deferment because of asthma; Donald Trump because of bone spurs. Poppy was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross. He was the last president--to date--to serve his country in combat.
George
After Yale, Poppy went west, to Texas, where he sloughed off his childhood nickname and became simply George. He wanted independence, but he didn't scorn a helping hand. He learned the oil business working for a family friend. Then he founded his own oil drilling company, taking investment dollars from the family back East. Zapata Petroleum made him a millionaire. He decided to enter politics, and ran for Senate. Afraid to admit his moderate views, he moved to the right in rhetoric, seeking to win over the ultra-conservative John Birchers who were becoming a force in the party. But the anti-civil-rights positions he took to appeal to them made him feel ashamed of himself, and in the end, it didn't even work. He reconsidered. "We must be sure we don't inflame the passions of unthinking men to garner a vote," George later wrote a supporter. It became his credo. You could call him an old-school conservative in a party that was changing direction. He was the last Republican president to believe in rational argument over raw resentment.
Rubbers
After losing the Senate race, George Bush stopped pandering to the right. He ran a more controlled campaign and won the Houston district's seat in the House. In Congress, he voted as a moderate, joining Democrats in supporting tax increases in the interest of fiscal responsibility. He supported the Civil Rights Act of 1968, despite pushback from his district. He had visited Vietnam, and thought it unfair that black veterans who went to war while their white counterparts wangled deferments should be barred from decent housing when they got home. He believed in the ERA. And he supported decriminalizing contraception so assiduously, he earned a new nickname: Rubbers. People called him a flip-flopper. But he was the last Republican president to be both a fiscal conservative and a social moderate.
George Bosh
Bush was a good soldier. He accepted Richard Nixon's appointments, becoming ambassador to the United Nations, then chair of the Republican National Committee. He defended Nixon until the president became indefensible. Then, at Gerald Ford's request, he went to China as chief of the U.S. Liaison Office there. Later, he accepted Ford's offer to direct the Central Intelligence Agency, even though he and Barbara both cried when the offer came in. For a man who had been considered a potential running mate by two presidents, the CIA felt like exile. He feared his political career was over. But he mounted a campaign for president in 1980. He ran as a moderate conservative of the old school, calling Reagan's supply-side economic theory "voodoo economics." He had to squelch that opinion when Reagan tapped him for VP. For the next eight years, vice president Bush carefully avoiding criticizing the president. He stuck to the duties he was given and quietly assumed responsibility the two times Reagan was incapacitated. Reagan rewarded him by endorsing his presidential run in 1988, though with seeming reluctance, even once calling him George Bosh. A slip revealing a secret nickname? A sly insult? Or a simple mispronunciation from a man whose Alzheimer's diagnosis was not far off? People mostly ignored it, as they had learned to ignore Reagan's fumbles, and George Bosh won handily. Call it the end of an era: he was the last non-incumbent Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote.
Timberwolf
No one knows why his Secret Service code name was Timberwolf. But as president, he shared some qualities with the canine. He was elusive. He watched and waited. He was opportunistic, especially in foreign affairs. He savored the downfall of his opponents, but he didn't gloat. When Eastern Europeans toppled their Soviet-backed governments, he quietly continued working with Gorbachev on reform. When East Germans tore down the Berlin Wall, he quietly supported German reunification and Germany's entry into NATO. When Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union disbanded, he immediately began forging a relationship with Boris Yeltsin's Russia. It's not that he was averse to war. He started two wars, one to remove strongman and drug trafficker Manuel Noriega from his dictatorship of Panama, and one to repel Iraq's invasion of Kuwait under Saddam Hussein. Both wars had clearly articulated goals, and they ended when those goals were achieved. The war in Panama lasted less than six weeks. The war in Kuwait lasted 100 hours. You could call him restrained. He was the last president who started a war he didn't leave to someone else to end.
Gampy
His grandchildren nicknamed him Gampy. To them he was warm and affable. To the nation he was stilted, patrician, and lacking in ability to inspire. Even he admitted he had a problem with "the vision thing." But his approval rating after the Gulf War topped out at 89%, a number even Reagan never reached. The problem was, it didn't last. The economy was still reeling from Reagan's reckless tax cuts and deficit spending. Bush struggled to clean up Reagan's economic mess, but his principled betrayal of his campaign promise not to raise taxes, and his bailout of the savings and loan industry left a bad taste in taxpayers' mouths. His handling of domestic issues seemed vacillating and weak. And he just didn't have a personality that drew people in. He was personally pious but he refused to put that on display; his failure to flaunt his faith was a problem for much of the right. In the end, he was too conservative for liberals and too moderate for the ascendant far right, especially on social issues. In 1992, Gampy lost the election. Journalists called him a lackluster campaigner. But he was simply the last Republican president who refused to dole out red meat.
41
His sons strove, as sons do, to match or top his success. When Jeb Bush ran for governor of Florida and George Walker Bush ran for governor of Texas, their father knew his own legacy might turn out to be a liability. He knew he was often called a betrayer of the Reagan revolution, an insufficient conservative. He gave his sons permission to disavow their father's positions. "Chart your own course," he told them; "nothing can ever be written that will drive a wedge between us." When George W. became president in 2001, the former president decided to call himself George H.W. Bush, so as to be distinguished from his son. Between themselves, they called each other 41 and 43, as if the presidency were a number on a baseball jersey, as if the office was a family tradition, like horseshoes on the lawn at Kennebunkport. But while 43 was in office, 41 made a point of staying out of his son's affairs. He said little, even as, in many ways, the son took the party in the direction the father repudiated. Once, George H.W. Bush told a biographer he thought Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld didn't serve his son well as advisors: they were too "arrogant" and "hard line." But they were the future of the party. And after the Republican primary of 2016, in which Jeb Bush went down to defeat, it was clear that Trump had transformed the party beyond recognition. After the election, both ex-Presidents Bush were asked whom they voted for. Forty-three said he chose neither of the above; he couldn't vote for a Democrat, and he wouldn't vote for Trump. But 41 said he voted for Hilary Clinton, the wife of the man who had denied him his chance at a second term. You could call him a patriot, if you believe that means putting country ahead of party.
After the upset of 2016, 43 privately told former aides, "I'm worried that I will be the last Republican president." But in truth, his father may have beat him to it.
41: George H.W. Bush