But, as politicians go, 41 had many good qualities. Most of the time, he tried to do the right and decent thing, as he saw it, to act for the good of the country and the world. He earned his sobriquet from his biographer Jon Meacham: “The Last Gentleman.”

Covering H.W.’s White House was wildly different than covering Donald Trump’s. A Trump day bursts with a fusillade of huge news stories, often starting at dawn with a crazy tweet and usually involving the amorality, criminality and vulgarity of the president and his circle. I could go for months without getting a juicy story out of 41’s White House. It was often hard to even break into the paper — unless we discovered that the president showered with his dog, Millie, or that Millie was suffering from lead poisoning from licking the White House paint.

In the absence of stories about impeachment, porn stars and white-collar criminal transgressions, I was left writing about Bush-speak, 41’s tangled syntax. At a Knoxville high school, when he was asked about ideas to improve schools, he replied: “Well, I’m going to kick that one right into the end zone of the Secretary of Education.’’ Sometimes he forgot and read his stage directions, like: “Message: I care.” As Lance Morrow wrote in Time magazine, the president treated words as “perverse, buzzing little demons that need to be brushed away periodically like flies.” This did not help H.W. in debates with Bill Clinton, which is why he was caught impatiently checking his watch.

He once tried to dismiss a reporter who asked about his role in the Iran-contra scandal, chiding: “You’re burning up time. The meter is running through the sand on you, and I am now filibustering.” He went past dialoguing with other world leaders to “trialoguing.” He often quoted some advice from his mother, using it for all occasions: “So tomorrow there’s going to be another tidal wave, so keep your snorkel above the water level.”

He shunned personal pronouns because his beloved mother, Dorothy, always warned him not to gloat or focus on “the big I.” Asked what the Malta summit with Mikhail Gorbachev would mean for the world, Bush replied: “Grandkids. All of that. Very important.” In his State of the Union message, he asked: “Ambitious aims? Of course. Easy to do? Far from it.’’ Once on his beloved cigarette boat, the Fidelity, he told me, “Can’t act. Just have to be me.”

Dana Carvey mocked the president by standing in front of the Berlin Wall on “Saturday Night Live” and intoning: “Before Bush, wall. With Bush, no wall.’’ Bush, who loved to laugh and who traded barbershop jokes with his Secretary of State James Baker and his image wizard Sig Rogich, ended up putting a tape of Carvey mimicking him in his presidential library. (His fondness for dirty jokes grew antiquated, colliding in the end with the #MeToo wave, for which he apologized.)

After 43 became president, 41 wrote to Time’s Hugh Sidey with a self-deprecating comparison to John Adams, the only other president whose son also became president: “A prolific reader, he loved the classics, prided himself on his ability to speak Latin, and had a library of extraordinary proportions. I couldn’t wait to stop studying Latin. Big difference there between me and John.”