Bush made Europe ‘safer, more united’ says EU’s Juncker

BRUSSELS: European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker hailed US president George H.W. Bush on Saturday for the part he played in bringing unity and peace to Europe after the Cold War.

"I will never forget the role he played in making Europe a safer and more united place following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain," Juncker said of Bush, who died on Friday aged 94.

Bush’s "calmness, leadership and close personal relationships with German chancellor Helmut Kohl and (Soviet Russian leader) Mikhail Gorbachev were decisive in restoring peace and freedom back to so many people across our continent," the former Luxembourg prime minister added.

"We Europeans will forever remember this," Juncker said.

European Parliament president Antonio Tajani in a tweet said that "Europe has lost a champion of its freedom and unity during the Cold War."

George H W Bush -- the upper-crust war hero-turned-oilman and diplomat who steered America through the end of the Cold War as president and led a political dynasty that saw his son win the White House.

The 41st American president was a foreign policy realist who navigated the turbulent but largely peaceful fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 and assembled an unprecedented coalition to defeat Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein two years later.

But the decorated war pilot and former CIA chief suffered the ignominy of being a one-term president, denied a second term over a weak economy when he lost the 1992 election to upstart Democrat Bill Clinton.

His favouring of stability and international consensus stands in sharp contrast to the provocative bluster of fellow Republican and current White House occupant Donald Trump, a man whom Bush did not vote for in 2016.

Bush presided over economic malaise at home, and infuriated his fellow Republicans during a budget battle with rival Democrats by famously breaking his vow: "Read my Lips: No new taxes".

But he was the respected patriarch of a blue-blood political dynasty -- son George spent eight years in the White House, and son Jeb served as governor of Florida.

George W Bush called his father a "man of the highest character and the best dad a son or daughter could ask for," in a statement announcing his death.

Bush’s passing comes just months after the death in April of his wife and revered first lady Barbara Bush -- his "most beloved woman in the world" -- to whom he was married for 73 years.

At the time of his death, Bush was the American president to have lived the longest. Jimmy Carter was born a few months later, so he could quickly reset the record.

George Herbert Walker Bush was born on June 12, 1924 in Milton, Massachusetts into a wealthy New England political dynasty -- the son of Prescott Bush, a successful banker and US senator for Connecticut.

Bush had a pampered upbringing and attended the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, but delayed his acceptance to Yale University in order to enlist in the US Navy on his 18th birthday and head off to war.

He flew 58 combat missions during World War II. Shot down over the Pacific by Japanese anti-aircraft fire, he parachuted out and was rescued by a submarine after huddling in a life raft for four hours while enemy forces circled.

Bush married Barbara Pierce in January 1945, shortly before the war ended, and the couple went on to have six children, including one, Robin, who died as a child.