In the hours after Barbara Bush died Tuesday, people from around the world began expressing their condolences and sharing their warm memories of the Bush family matriarch, even if they didn’t share her political views.
Former president Bill Clinton, the man who once campaigned against her husband, called her “a remarkable woman” with “grit grace, brains beauty.” Another former president, Barack Obama, said she had “humility and decency that reflects the very best of the American spirit.”
But a creative writing professor at Fresno State University had a message for those offering up fond remembrances:
“Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal,” Randa Jarrar wrote on Twitter, according to the Fresno Bee.
Jarrar’s words — and others that she used as she argued with critics during an overnight tweetstorm — sparked a backlash on social media that would soon prompt the university to distance itself from her remarks. More than 2,000 people had replied to her, the Bee reported. Many tagged Fresno State and the institution’s president, Joseph Castro, demanding that the professor be fired.
According to the Bee, Jarrar taunted them, sharing a contact number that was actually that of a suicide hotline, and said she was a tenured professor who makes $100,000 a year.
“I will never be fired,” she said, according to the report, which noted that Jarrar describes herself as an Arab American and a Muslim American in her Twitter messages.
Some people, of course, took issue with what Jarrar said about Bush. Others were upset at what they viewed as Jarrar’s incivility about a woman widely regarded as genteel. For others, the sin was more basic: She had spoken ill of the dead.
I cannot be the only student who has avoided Randa Jarrar’s classes due to her outward racism. It should be unacceptable.
People found other ways to strike back at her, though. The rating on the Amazon page for Jarrar’s book took a precipitous drop after it received a slew of bad reviews in the wake of her comments. “Prosaic, poorly-written, poor grammar, incoherent,” one reviewer said. “Will make for expensive toilet paper.”
“Jarrar’s racist rants disrupt the learning environment at Fresno,” a commenter wrote Wednesday after Jarrar’s Bush comments. “ANY other English prof would be better than this one, especially after her disrespectful comments lately. I would avoid this class at all costs, Randa makes it clear that she hates white people. Myopic views, self centered, and needs to be fired.”
Amid the barrage of criticism, some defended Jarrar.
Fresno State responded to the controversy Tuesday evening, tweeting a statement by Castro that said Jarrar’s words are “obviously contrary to the core values of our University” and they “were made as a private citizen.”
In a Wednesday morning news conference, Provost Lynnette Zelezny said the university had put in place “additional security,” a common action “when we feel that there’s a spotlight on us.”
As the provost spoke, the points Jarrar had made about Barbara Bush were still reverberating around the Internet. She brought up, for example, Bush’s statements about the mostly black evacuees taking refuge in Houston’s Astrodome during Hurricane Katrina.
Bush made statements that many viewed as insensitive after her son George W. Bush’s administration was criticized for its slow response to Katrina in 2005, according to The Washington Post’s Lois Romano. Barbara Bush told the public radio program “Marketplace” that the evacuees who’d fled their homes and were being sheltered in Houston’s Astrodome “were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”
Despite Jarrar’s tweet about her tenure, her future interactions with students may be in question.
In Wednesday’s news conference, Zelezny did not detail any disciplinary actions against Jarrar, saying only that the next step was to sit down with “all represented parties.”
But she put to rest one of the biggest questions: Whether Jarrar’s tenure at the university meant she could say whatever she wanted on the Internet.
“To answer the technical question: Can she not be fired? The answer is no.”
The pilot’s voice was calm yet focused as her plane descended, telling air traffic control she had “149 souls” on board and was carrying 21,000 pounds — or about five hours’ worth — of fuel.
“Southwest 1380, we’re single engine,” said Capt. Tammie Jo Shults, a former fighter pilot with the U.S. Navy. “We have part of the aircraft missing, so we’re going to need to slow down a bit.” She asked for medical personnel to meet her aircraft on the runway. “We’ve got injured passengers.”
“Injured passengers, okay, and is your airplane physically on fire?” asked the air traffic controller, according to audio of the interaction.
“No, it’s not on fire, but part of it’s missing,” Shults said, pausing for a moment. “They said there’s a hole, and, uh, someone went out.”
The engine on Shults’s plane had, in fact, exploded Tuesday, spraying shrapnel into the aircraft, causing a window to be blown out and leaving one woman dead and seven other people injured.
The National Transportation Safety Board said Wednesday that investigators will examine whether metal fatigue caused an engine fan of the Boeing 737-700 to snap midflight. The protective engine housing broke off, and pieces were later recovered in fields in Berks County, Pa., 70 miles northwest of Philadelphia International Airport.
The wing on the side of the plane where the explosion occurred suffered damage that left it “banged up pretty good,” NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt said. The cabin window blew out with such force that none of the materials were recovered inside the plane, baffling investigators, he said.
“We didn’t see any shards of glass [that blew in] — I say glass, but it’s acrylic,” Sumwalt said. “We found no evidence at all of any broken acrylic inside.”
In the midst of the chaos, Shults deftly guided the plane onto the runway, touching down at 190 mph, saving the lives of 148 people aboard and averting a far worse catastrophe.
“She has nerves of steel,” passenger Alfred Tumlinson said Wednesday.
When the engine exploded, Tumlinson, 55, was sitting with his wife on the plane’s left side, in the second aisle from the back. The couple from George West, Tex., sent texts to their children, telling them the plane was going down and that they loved them.
“Did we think we were gonna make it?” Tumlinson asked, turning to his wife. “No.”
“I got another day of my life because of that lady and the co-pilot,” he said. “What do you want to know about [Shults] other than she’s an angel?”
Tumlinson described how soon after the explosion, a soothing voice came over the plane’s intercom.
“She was talking to us very calmly,” Tumlinson said. “ ‘We’re descending, we’re not going down, we’re descending, just stay calm, brace yourselves,’ ” he recalled Shults saying.
“ ‘Everybody keep your masks on.’ ”
Finally, passengers were told to brace themselves, he said.
“ ‘Everybody, you gotta lean forward — hands up on the seat in the front, you gotta know that you’re coming down, and you’re coming down hard,’ ” Tumlinson said, becoming emotional while recounting the experience. “But she didn’t slam it down. She brought the bird down very carefully.”
The plane stabilized on the runway and, then, a moment of relief.
“She was so cool when she brought that down into the Philadelphia airport,” Tumlinson said. “Everybody just was applauding. I’m just telling you they were just applauding. It was amazing that we made it to the ground.”
The passengers were instructed to remain calm while medics came on board. Soon after, Shults came into the cabin to check on passengers.
“She came back and talked to every individual in there personally and shook every hand,” Tumlinson recalled, taking note of one other detail. “She had a bomber jacket on.”
Tumlinson’s wife, Diana McBride Self, called Shults “a true American hero.”
Others on social media agreed and compared Shults with Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who guided his US Airways plane to safety in New York’s Hudson River in 2009.
Shults declined to comment. Her mother-in-law, Virginia Shults, said that as soon as she heard the pilot’s voice on the radio transmission online, she said, “That is Tammie Jo.”
“It was just as if she and I were sitting here talking,” Virginia Shults said. “She’s a very calming person.”
Jennifer Riordan, an Albuquerque mother of two children and a vice president at Wells Fargo, was the passenger who died. Witnesses said two men and several flight attendants came to Riordan’s aid after she was pulled toward the blown-out window.
Riordan was seated in Row 14, the same row as the missing window, Sumwalt said.
Sumwalt said that investigators are aware of reports from passengers that Riordan was nearly sucked out of the plane, but that “we have not corroborated that ourselves.”
“We need to corroborate that,” Sumwalt said. “There’s 144 passengers on the airplane, many of whom were seated behind her. I think that we will have some good information based on that, based on the airplane and also based on the medical examiner’s report. I think we’ll be able to have a good idea of what actually happened.”
Riordan died of blunt impact trauma to her head, neck and torso, Philadelphia Department of Public Health spokesman James Garrow said Wednesday night.
“The listed cause of death seems consistent with what we’ve heard in media reports,” he said, though he could not confirm the nature of her death. “The cause that we’re listing and have written on the death certificate sounds consistent with what has been reported,” he said, but he could not say whether the injuries were caused by “the fuselage or the air or the window or debris.”
Virginia Shults said that, “knowing Tammie Jo, I know her heart is broken for the death of that passenger.”
She was not surprised that her daughter-in-law was the pilot credited with the skillful landing. Friends and family members described Tammie Jo Shults as a pioneer in the aviation field, a woman who broke barriers to pursue her goals.
She was among the first female fighter pilots for the U.S. Navy, according to her alma mater, MidAmerica Nazarene University, from which she graduated in 1983.
A Navy spokeswoman said Shults was “among the first cohort of women pilots to transition to tactical aircraft.” After commissioning in the Navy in 1985 and finishing flight training in Pensacola, Fla., her duties took her to Point Mugu, Calif., where she was an instructor pilot on planes including the F/A-18 Hornet.
She was a decorated pilot who rose to the rank of lieutenant commander and twice received the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal, along with a National Defense Service Medal and an expert pistol Marksmanship Medal, according to a biography provided by the Navy Office of Information.
Shults’s persistence in becoming a pilot goes back to her upbringing on a New Mexico ranch, near Holloman Air Force Base, Shults says in the book “Military Fly Moms,” by Linda Maloney.
“Some people grow up around aviation. I grew up under it,” she said. Watching the daily air show, she knew she “just had to fly.”
She recalled attending a lecture on aviation during her senior year of high school, in 1979. A retired colonel started the class by asking Shults, the only girl in attendance, “if I was lost.”
“I mustered up the courage to assure him I was not and that I was interested in flying,” she wrote. “He allowed me to stay, but assured me there were no professional women pilots.”
When she met a woman in college who had received her Air Force wings, Shults wrote, “I set to work trying to break into the club.”
But Shults wrote that the Air Force “wasn’t interested” in talking to her. The Navy let her apply for aviation officer candidate school, “but there did not seem to be a demand for women pilots.”
“Finally,” she wrote, a year after taking the Navy aviation exam, she found a recruiter who would process her application. After aviation officer candidate school in Pensacola, she was assigned to a training squadron at Naval Air Station Chase Field in Beeville, Tex., as an instructor pilot teaching student aviators how to fly the Navy T-2 trainer. She later left to fly the A-7 Corsair in Lemoore, Calif.
By then, she had met her “knight in shining airplane,” a fellow pilot who would become her husband, Dean Shults. (He also flies for Southwest Airlines.)
Because of the combat exclusion law, Tammie Jo Shults was prohibited from flying in a combat squadron. While her husband was able to join a squadron, her choices were limited, involving providing electronic warfare training to Navy ships and aircraft.
She later became one of the first women to fly what was then the Navy’s newest fighter, the F/A-18 Hornet but, again, in a support role. “Women were new to the Hornet community, and already there were signs of growing pains.”
She served 10 years in the Navy, reaching the rank of Navy lieutenant commander. She left the Navy in 1993 and lives in the San Antonio area with her husband. She has two children: a teenage son and a daughter in her early 20s.
Gary Shults, her brother-in-law, described her as a “formidable woman, as sharp as a tack.”
“My brother says she’s the best pilot he knows,” Gary Shults told the Associated Press. “She’s a very caring, giving person who takes care of lots of people.”
Her mother-in-law described her as a devout Christian, with a faith she thinks may have contributed to her calmness amid the midair emergency and landing.
“I know God was with her, and I know she was talking to God,” Virginia Shults said.
Whatever was going through her mind as she completed her landing, Tammie Jo Shults even made time to tell the control tower: “Thank you. . . . Thanks, guys, for the help.”
In a statement, A.M.I. called the settlement an “amicable resolution” and said that under the new agreement it would devote an upcoming magazine cover and feature article to Ms. McDougal, and would run several of her fitness columns in its publications.
“It’s a total win,” Mr. Stris said in an interview. “We got everything we were fighting for — she got out of the contract, gets the life rights back and owes A.M.I. nothing more.”
In a separate interview, Ms. McDougal expressed elation about the end of her “wild ride,” and said she currently had no plans to sell the rights to her story to a new buyer. “It’s one step at a time for me,” she said. “Today, I’m doing my victory dance.”
Her lawsuit said that A.M.I., whose chairman, David J. Pecker, is a friend of President Trump’s, misled her into signing the contract. It also claimed that Mr. Cohen had inappropriately intervened in the deal. A.M.I. had denied misleading her.
The deal and the extent of Mr. Cohen’s role in it are the subjects of a wide-ranging federal corruption investigation that is, in part, looking into his efforts to protect Mr. Trump’s presidential prospects in 2016.
But that was roughly a week before federal investigators obtained email communications, audio recordings and other documentation from Mr. Cohen during their raid of his office, home and hotel room. Those materials included information about A.M.I. and the McDougal suit, people involved in the case said.
The suit also claimed that Mr. Cohen had been secretly involved in the talks between A.M.I. and Ms. McDougal’s lawyer at the time, Keith M. Davidson — who emailed Mr. Cohen at the end of the negotiations. A spokesman for Mr. Davidson has said the lawyer “fulfilled his obligations and zealously advocated for Ms. McDougal.”
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A.M.I. also spoke with Mr. Cohen about Ms. McDougal, though it says it did so only as part of its reporting process.
Mr. Stris said that before reaching the settlement, he was prepared to answer A.M.I.’s motion to dismiss Ms. McDougal’s case with a request for a limited version of pretrial discovery. The move, compelling both sides to share emails and other records, could have provided information that would not be available through the material the F.B.I. seized from Mr. Cohen. An A.M.I. lawyer, Cameron Stracher, said that he doubted the request would have succeeded, and that avoiding discovery was not a motivating factor in the settlement.
The agreement precludes any of that from happening, at least in Ms. McDougal’s civil case against A.M.I., though Mr. Stris said he expected federal investigators to eventually secure everything they needed to fully vet the process behind the deal. “I have tremendous confidence in the men and women of the Southern District of New York,” he said, referring to the federal prosecutors investigating Mr. Cohen.
Mr. Stris said he did not rule out taking legal action if more came to light about potentially inappropriate contact between Mr. Cohen and Mr. Davidson during the course of negotiating her deal. The settlement does not bar Ms. McDougal from claims against either of the men in the future. For now, Ms. McDougal said, “I need to relax and get my life back and de-stress.”
The initial deal prohibited Ms. McDougal from speaking about her alleged affair, but A.M.I. amended the contract after the election to allow her to answer “legitimate press inquiries,” in response to her complaints that the agreement was overly restrictive. In recent months, she has spoken to The New Yorker and Anderson Cooper of CNN.
Separate from the federal investigation into Mr. Cohen, A.M.I. is facing a complaint at the Federal Election Commission that its $150,000 payment to Ms. McDougal was an illegal campaign expenditure. The publisher has denied this and says it acts solely as a news organization with a First Amendment right to run stories — or not run them — as it chooses.
Still, Mr. Trump conspicuously declined to make their release a precondition of his meeting with Mr. Kim. He also did not demand any new concessions from North Korea beforehand, underscoring how determined he is to make history by convening with the leader of a country he threatened with war a few months ago.
In preparing for the planned event, Mr. Trump’s decision to dispatch his C.I.A. director reflected the president’s trust in and comfort with Mr. Pompeo, as well as how diplomats were sidelined in brokering what could be a landmark encounter.
“Meeting went very smoothly and a good relationship was formed,” Mr. Trump said in an early morning Twitter post before he went golfing with Mr. Abe. “Details of Summit are being worked out now. Denuclearization will be a great thing for World, but also for North Korea!”
Mr. Pompeo is still awaiting confirmation to his new post, and faces a challenging vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where several Democrats have come out against him. The White House and Republicans seized on Mr. Pompeo’s trip as another reason for the Senate to confirm him, while Democrats said he had misled them by failing to disclose his mission, even in private conversations.
But the visit underlines the confidence that Mr. Trump has developed in Mr. Pompeo, a former Tea Party congressman who has emerged as one of the president’s closest advisers — a stark contrast to Rex W. Tillerson, whom Mr. Trump fired as secretary of state days after he accepted Mr. Kim’s invitation to meet.
It also underlines Mr. Trump’s unorthodox approach to one of the riskiest diplomatic gambits of his presidency. However trusted by the president, Mr. Pompeo is hardly a traditional emissary. He is not yet the nation’s chief diplomat but a lame duck as the nation’s spymaster.
Mr. Pompeo met with Mr. Kim on Easter Sunday, a senior official said, bringing along several aides from the C.I.A. — but nobody from the State Department or the White House.
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Some former administration officials expressed surprise that he returned from Pyongyang with no visible concessions, like the release of the three Americans detained in North Korea. Mr. Pompeo raised the issue, another official said, adding that the White House would continue to push for their release.
In 2014, James R. Clapper, then the director of national intelligence, traveled secretly to North Korea to negotiate the release of two Americans, Kenneth Bae and Matthew Todd Miller. Three Korean-Americans — Kim Dong-chul, Kim Sang-duk and Kim Hak-song — are currently being held on charges of espionage and committing hostile acts toward the North Korean state.
The administration also has not agreed on a date for the meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim, which officials said pointed to problems in settling on a site for the encounter. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump told reporters that the White House was looking at five potential locations.
The White House has begun narrowing the list of options, a senior official said, eliminating sites like Pyongyang and the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea, which could pose an optics problem for Mr. Trump. Meeting somewhere in the United States remains a possibility, though that could raise similar issues for Mr. Kim.
PhotoPresident Trump with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan on Wednesday at Mar-a-Lago, Fla. The president continued to express optimism about sitting down with the leader of North Korea. Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times
The administration is studying several third countries — Singapore and Vietnam, in Asia; Sweden and Switzerland, in Europe — though all are far from North Korea, posing a challenge to Mr. Kim’s fleet of rickety aircraft. Mongolia, which is closer to the North, is a long shot, the official said.
Without a site, however, the White House has been unable to announce a date, though officials are sticking to Mr. Trump’s recent declaration that the meeting will be in late May or early June.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump added to the mystery surrounding the visit by appearing to confirm that he had been in direct contact with Mr. Kim himself. He later clarified that while the talks were at “the highest levels,” he would “leave it a little bit short of that.”
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Mr. Pompeo’s involvement with North Korea predated Mr. Trump’s decision to meet Mr. Kim, several officials said. He has been dealing with North Korean representatives through a channel that runs between the C.I.A. and its North Korean counterpart, the Reconnaissance General Bureau.
He also has been in close touch with the director of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, Suh Hoon, who American officials said brokered Mr. Kim’s invitation to Mr. Trump.
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While a meeting between the leaders would be one of the boldest diplomatic gambles in recent years, it was orchestrated largely by the intelligence services of the three countries.
Officials said Mr. Suh laid the groundwork for Mr. Kim’s invitation in negotiations and a subsequent meeting in Pyongyang with Kim Yong-chol, a powerful general who leads inter-Korean relations and used to run North Korea’s intelligence service.
Mr. Suh was one of two South Korean envoys who visited the White House to brief Mr. Trump on their meeting with Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang — which led to the president’s impromptu decision to accept Mr. Kim’s invitation.
For Mr. Pompeo, who now has an office at the State Department, the choice to use the intelligence channel was mostly a convenience — allowing him to be involved in the planning as he awaited his move to the department.
Still, some officials expressed concern that the C.I.A. had taken the lead in orchestrating a leader-to-leader meeting — work that would normally fall to the State Department. The intelligence officials on the North Korean side, they said, are shadowy figures, not least Kim Yong-chol himself, who is accused of masterminding a torpedo attack that sank a South Korean Navy ship in 2010, killing 46 sailors.
The State Department’s role in North Korea dwindled after Mr. Trump publicly split with Mr. Tillerson over his efforts to open a diplomatic channel to the North, initially to obtain the release of the three Americans but also to set the stage for a broader negotiation.
In October, while Mr. Tillerson was in Beijing, Mr. Trump tweeted, “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man…”
The State Department recently lost its chief North Korea negotiator, Joseph Yun, who retired from the Foreign Service, in part because of his frustration with his agency’s diminished role.
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The timing of Mr. Tillerson’s departure, officials said, was not coincidental. Mr. Trump wanted to have Mr. Pompeo in place to oversee an opening to North Korea. But Mr. Pompeo has expressed extremely hawkish views about North Korea, suggesting over the summer that the United States should push for regime change.
“It would be a great thing to denuclearize the peninsula, to get those weapons off of that, but the thing that is most dangerous about it is the character who holds the control over them today,” Mr. Pompeo said at the Aspen Security Forum. “So from the administration’s perspective, the most important thing we can do is separate those two.”
Last week, Mr. Pompeo insisted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he had never advocated such change.
“Just to be clear, my role as a diplomat is to make sure that we never get to a place where we have to confront the difficult situation in Korea that this country has been headed for now for a couple of decades,” he added.
The Internal Revenue Service announced late Tuesday that it would let taxpayers submit tax returns without penalty through Wednesday, after a long day of technical problems that fueled confusion about what is already one of Americans’ most frustrating interactions with their government.
A computer glitch at the IRS knocked offline the agency’s ability to process many tax returns filed electronically, a stunning breakdown that left agency officials flummoxed and millions of Americans bewildered. Senior government officials were at a loss to explain what happened, even as close to 5 million Americans were expected to try to file their taxes before the midnight deadline.
IRS officials did not specify what went wrong, saying only that they would undertake a “hard reboot” of their systems. By late Tuesday, the IRS said that its systems were back online and that taxpayers could proceed to file returns through the end of Wednesday. Taxes had been due on Tuesday. (That was two days later than the usual due date, April 15, which fell on a Sunday. Monday was Emancipation Day, a holiday in the District.)
“This is the busiest tax day of the year, and the IRS apologizes for the inconvenience this system issue caused for taxpayers,” said the agency’s acting commissioner, David Kautter.
An IRS spokeswoman said that “all indications point to this being hardware-related. We’re aware of no other external issues.”
The episode recalled other high-profile government technology breakdowns, such as the challenging launch of the Affordable Care Act marketplaces in 2013, and raised fresh questions about whether the IRS, which has long complained about antiquated computer systems, is prepared for the massive overhaul mandated by last year’s sweeping tax law.
Each year, millions of Americans are required to file tax returns by mid-April for money they earned the prior year. The process can be a financially and administratively painful one, but the IRS is supposed to have sophisticated computer systems that can handle millions of last-minute filers. Between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. Tuesday, officials discovered that those systems had faltered.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many people were affected or could take advantage of the one-day delay in the filing deadline, but IRS officials said taxpayers wouldn’t have to do anything special to take advantage of the postponement. Many filers who use online tax preparation software, such as TurboTax or HR Block, or pay their taxes directly to the IRS online were affected. The vast majority of tax preparers, such as accountants, are required to file taxes electronically.
The IRS is often at the center of political fights in Washington, with Democrats calling for more funding so the agency can do its job while Republicans have worked for years to pare it back, before agreeing this year to fund the agency at higher levels.
The IRS has faced steady budget cuts for nearly a decade, with its staff size falling by about 18,000 employees from 2010 to 2017 and a recent report showing that it can answer only about 60 percent of calls from tax filers.
The agency is taking steps to implement changes required by a sprawling overhaul of the tax code that Republicans passed in December. It has been working with businesses to make sure they are withholding the correct amounts from employees’ paychecks, as well as rolling out online tools that workers can use to ensure their employers’ calculations are correct.
“The IRS is highly vulnerable to IT breakdowns and cyberattacks,” said Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union, a nonpartisan group that has pushed for changes at the IRS.
Members of Congress expressed frustration with the agency’s performance.
“Unfortunately, it’s another example where they’re not capable of dealing with the volume,” said Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who has called for reforms at the IRS partly because of the agency’s technological shortcomings.
“This is game day for the IRS, and it seems the IRS can’t get out of the locker room,” said Rep. Greg Gianforte (R-Mont.).
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) noted that the agency’s budget has been repeatedly cut in recent years and said this could have contributed to the problems.
“While we don’t yet know what has caused this systems failure, the lack of Republican funding for the IRS to serve taxpayers will only compound the issue. Americans should not be punished for being unable to file their tax returns or pay their tax bills today,” said Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the IRS.
IRS officials were surprised by the breakdown.
“On my way over here this morning, I was told a number of systems are down at the moment,” Kautter told lawmakers at an oversight hearing Tuesday morning. “We are working to resolve the issue, and taxpayers should continue to file as they normally would.”
“If we can’t solve it today, we’ll figure out a solution,” Kautter said. “Taxpayers would not be penalized because of a technical problem the IRS is having.”
Tuesday’s outage caught at least one White House official off guard, too. Larry Kudlow, President Trump’s top economic adviser, appeared not to know about the problems when asked about them shortly after noon Tuesday.
“The IRS is crashing?” he said, repeating a reporter’s question. “It sounds horrible. It sounds really bad. Hope it gets fixed.”
A spokeswoman for Intuit, the company that owns the TurboTax software, said Tuesday before the delay was announced that taxpayers should continue as usual.
“Taxpayers should go ahead and continue to prepare and file their taxes as normal with TurboTax,” said spokeswoman Ashley McMahon. “TurboTax has uninterrupted service and is available and accepting e-filed returns. We will hold returns until the IRS is ready to begin accepting them again.”
The IRS has more than 60 different IT systems for managing the cases of individual taxpayers, according to a report submitted to Congress by an internal IRS watchdog. Many of them have not been updated in decades, and two of them are nearly six decades old — the oldest anywhere in the federal government, the report said.
In testimony in October, two senior IRS officials warned that the agency’s systems were at high risk.
“We are concerned that the potential for a catastrophic system failure is increasing as our infrastructure continues to age. Thus, replacing this aging IT infrastructure is a high priority for the IRS,” wrote Jeffrey Tribiano, deputy commissioner for operations support, and Silvana Gina Garza, chief information officer, in prepared testimony.
In his testimony before Congress on Tuesday, Kautter said the IRS had prioritized the core filing system in its technology spending.
For several hours Tuesday, an erroneous page linked to in the IRS’s online payment section described a “Planned Outage: April 17, 2018 — December 31, 9999.”
While Republicans previously favored scaling back the IRS, the party more recently supported efforts to better support the agency. Congress approved $320 million in short-term funding to help the IRS implement the new tax law as part of the massive budget deal passed in March, but many lawmakers say more money is needed.
The House is scheduled to vote this week on a bipartisan bill making major changes to the agency, including beefing up free tax advisory programs for the poor and giving taxpayers several new rights and protections.
Erica Werner, Ellen Nakashima and Anne Gearan contributed to this report.
One person is dead after a Southwest flight with a blown engine made an emergency landing. USA TODAY
Shrapnel from a blown jet engine crashed through a window of a Southwest Airlines flight and caused such a perilous drop in air pressure that a passenger suffered fatal injuries after nearly being sucked outside.
Passengers recall a harrowing scene where desperate crew members and others tried to plug the broken window, while also trying to save the mortally wounded woman, identified as a bank executive and mother of two.
The battered jet eventually made an emergency landing in Philadelphia and all other passengers made it off without serious injuries.
Dallas-bound Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 out of New York had 144 passengers and a crew of five onboard, Southwest said in a statement. The plane was met on the tarmac by a phalanx of emergency vehicles that quickly sprayed the area with safety foam and aided the injured.
Jennifer Riordan, a mother of two from Albuquerque, N.M., was identified late Tuesday as the sole victim of the incident, according to the Associated Press.
Riordan, a vice president of community relations for Wells Fargo bank and graduate of the University of New Mexico, was the first passenger death on a U.S. airline since 2009— and the first ever in Southwest Airlines’ history.
Passengers on board described chaos as the decompression led to her being partially sucked out of the plane. They rushed to try and pull her back inside but her injuries were too grave.
Seven others were injured in the incident. Tracking data from FlightAware.com showed Flight 1380 was heading west over Pennsylvania at about 32,200 feet and traveling 500 mph when it abruptly turned toward Philadelphia.
Amanda Bourman, of New York, was asleep on the plane when she heard a sudden noise and the oxygen masks dropped.
“Everybody was crying and upset,” she told the AP. “You had a few passengers that were very strong, and they kept yelling to people, you know, ‘It’s OK! We’re going to do this!’”
Another passenger, Marty Martinez, posted a brief Facebook Live video showing him donning his oxygen mask. “Something is wrong with our plane!,” he wrote. “It appears we are going down! Emergency landing!! Southwest flight from NYC to Dallas!!”
NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt said the plane engine would be closely examined to determine what caused the tragedy.
Southwest said the Boeing 737-700 left New York’s LaGuardia Airport shortly after 10:30 a.m. ET, bound for Dallas Love Field. The airport said the plane had landed “safely” and that passengers were being brought into the terminal.
Thiel said a small fire was found in one engine and fuel was leaking. At least one window and the fuselage were also damaged, officials said. AP also reported that the twin-engine 737 apparently blew an engine at 30,000 feet and got hit by shrapnel that smashed a window.
Bourman said it was traumatic and some passengers were in tears while others shouted encouragement. Her husband, Timothy, told philly.com the plane quickly dropped and some passengers started yelling in panic.
Bourman said passengers were told to brace for impact, but the pilot was able to land.
“We’re just all really thankful to be alive right now,” he said. “Thankful to God, thankful to that pilot.”
Gary Kelly, Southwest’s chief executive officer, commended the flight crew for safely landing the plane but said the company and the NTSB were in the early stages of investigating exactly what led to the incident.
“This is a sad day and on behalf of the entire Southwest family, I want to extend my deepest sympathies for the family and loved ones of our deceased customer,” Kelly said. “Truly, this is a tragic loss.”
In addition to being the first fatality aboard a U.S. passenger airline since 2009, Kelly said it was Southwest’s first fatality ever.
“Let me assure you the safety of our customers and crew is our uncompromising priority,” he said.
Southwest flies Boeing 737 aircraft exclusively, with a fleet of about 700 planes.
“It is a very, very reliable engine,” Kelly said. “The airplane in my opinion is proven. It’s very reliable. It has the greatest success of any aircraft type over a long, long period of time. It doesn’t create any doubt in my mind, at least at this point.”
The plane Tuesday was a 737-700, but the entire fleet has the type of GE engine that failed, Kelly said.
“We are in close contact with the manufacturers,” said Kelly, who said the company is cooperating with investigators from FAA, DOT and NTSB. “At this point, it’s very premature to say what changes we might need to make, if any.”
Kelly has tried to contact the victim’s family, but hadn’t reached them by 6:30 p.m. Eastern.
“I reached out to the family and at this point have not made contact,” Kelly said.
The plane was delivered to Southwest in July 2000 and has made about 40,000 flights. The engine last had a major overhaul about 10,000 flights ago, and the plane’s most recent inspection was Sunday, although Kelly couldn’t say what was inspected.
“There is no information that there were any issues with the airplane or the engines,” Kelly said.
Flights continued to arrive and depart, but the incident led to delays of other flights, the airport said in its statement. The FAA had issued “ground stop” for planes on the ground at other airports waiting to depart Philadelphia. The ground stop was lifted shortly before 2 p.m.
Contributing: Christal Hayes and Bart Jansen of USA TODAY.
Tyler Q. Houlton, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the ruling would undercut “efforts to remove aliens convicted of certain violent crimes, including sexual assault, kidnapping and burglary, from the United States.”
“By preventing the federal government from removing known criminal aliens,” he said, “it allows our nation to be a safe haven for criminals and makes us more vulnerable as a result.”
The case, Sessions v. Dimaya, No. 15-1498, was first argued in January 2017 before an eight-member court left short-handed by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. The justices deadlocked 4 to 4, and the case was reargued in October after Justice Gorsuch joined the court.
The case concerned James Dimaya, a native of the Philippines who became a lawful permanent resident in 1992, when he was 13. In 2007 and 2009, he was convicted of residential burglary.
The government sought to deport him on the theory that he had committed an “aggravated felony,” which the immigration law defined to include any offense “that, by its nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense.”
In 2015, in Johnson v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that a similar criminal law was unconstitutionally vague. Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the majority in Tuesday’s case, said the reasoning in the Johnson case also doomed the challenged provision of the immigration law.
She quoted at length from Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in Johnson, which said courts could not tell which crimes Congress had meant to punish.
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“We can as well repeat here what we asked in Johnson,” Justice Kagan wrote, paraphrasing Justice Scalia. “How does one go about divining the conduct entailed in a crime’s ordinary case? Statistical analyses? Surveys? Experts? Google? Gut instinct?”
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She added that lower courts had been unable to apply the immigration law consistently.
“Does car burglary qualify as a violent felony?” she asked. “Some courts say yes, another says no. What of statutory rape? Once again, the circuits part ways. How about evading arrest? The decisions point in different directions. Residential trespass? The same is true.”
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined all of Justice Kagan’s opinion, and Justice Gorsuch most of it.
When the Johnson case was before the Supreme Court, the government warned that a ruling striking down the law at issue there would make the immigration law “equally susceptible” to constitutional attack.
Both laws, the government said then, required courts to identify features of a hypothetical typical offense and then to judge the risk of violence arising from them.
But when Mr. Dimaya’s case reached the Supreme Court, the government said there were significant differences between the two laws, focusing on minor variations in their wording. In dissent, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., joined by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., made a similar point.
Justice Kagan responded that some of Chief Justice Roberts’s analysis was “slicing the baloney mighty thin.”
The government also argued that the two laws should be treated differently because one concerned crimes and the other immigration, which is a civil matter.
In its brief, the government said civil laws are almost never so vague as to violate the Constitution. “Although the court has on occasion tested civil provisions for vagueness,” the brief said, “it has struck down those provisions under the due process clause because they were so unintelligible as to effectively supply no standard at all.”
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Justice Kagan disagreed. “This court’s precedent forecloses that argument,” she wrote, “because we long ago held that the most exacting vagueness standard should apply in removal cases.”
A 1951 Supreme Court decision, Jordan v. De George, indicated that both criminal and immigration laws should be tested against the same constitutional standard for vagueness “in view of the grave nature of deportation.”
Near the end of her opinion, Justice Kagan again quoted Justice Scalia. “Insanity,” he wrote in a 2011 dissent, “is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.”
Justice Kagan said it was time to heed that advice. “We abandoned that lunatic practice in Johnson,” she wrote, “and see no reason to start it again.”
CIA Director Mike Pompeo made a top-secret visit to North Korea over Easter weekend as an envoy for President Donald Trump to meet with that country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, according to two people with direct knowledge of the trip.
The extraordinary meeting between one of Trump’s most trusted emmisaries and the authoritarian head of a rogue state was part of an effort to lay the groundwork for direct talks between Trump and Kim about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, according to the two people, who requested anonymity because of the highly classified nature of the talks.
The clandestine mission, which has not previously been reported, came soon after Pompeo was nominated to be secretary of state.
“I’m optimistic that the United States government can set the conditions for that appropriately so that the president and the North Korean leader can have that conversation will set us down the course of achieving a diplomatic outcome that America so desperately – America and the world so desperately need,” Pompeo told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week during his confirmation hearing.
Speaking at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Tuesday, Trump appeared to allude to the extraordinary face-to-face meeting between Kim and Pompeo when he said the U.S. has had direct talks with North Korea “at very high levels.” The president didn’t elaborate.
Trump said that he would sit down with Kim probably in early June, if not sooner.
Pompeo has taken the lead on the administration’s negotiations with Pyongyang. His meeting with Kim marks the highest-level meeting between the two countries since 2000, when then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with Kim Jong Il, the current leader’s father to discuss strategic issues. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper Jr. visited the country in 2014 to secure the release of two American captives and met with a lower-level intelligence official.
The CIA declined to comment. The White House also declined to comment saying it would not discuss the CIA director’s travels. The North Korean government also declined to comment.
About a week after Pompeo’s trip to North Korea, U.S. officials said that officials there had directly confirmed that Kim was willing to negotiate about potential denuclearization, according to administration officials, a sign that both sides had opened a new communications channel ahead of the summit meeting and that the administration believed North Korea was serious about holding a summit.
“We have had direct talks at very high levels, extremely high levels with North Korea,” Trump said Tuesday during a bilateral meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Mar-a-Lago, his winter resort.
Trump did not elaborate. The United States has no diplomatic relations with North Korea, but U.S. diplomats have visited and Washington has used several quiet channels to communicate with Pyongyang.
“North Korea is coming along,” Trump said. “South Korea is meeting and has plans to meet to see if they can end the war, and they have my blessing on that.”
Trump also said he has given “my blessing” to planned discussions between South Korea and North Korea about bringing a formal end to the Korean War, as fast-moving diplomatic developments surrounding nuclear-armed North Korea came into view.
Opening a two-day summit with Abe, Trump took some credit for the rapid developments related to North Korea, whose nuclear and ballistic missile tests his administration has considered the gravest national security threat to the United States.
Trump said that South Korean officials have “been very generous that without us, and without me in particular, I guess, they wouldn’t be discussing anything and the Olympics would have been a failure.” Seoul used the Winter Games, held in PyeongChang in February, as a vehicle to reopen diplomatic talks with Pyongyang.
North Korea sent athletes and a high-level delegation to the event in a major sign of warming relations with South Korea, a U.S. ally. That has led to a flurry of high-stakes diplomacy in East Asia, in which Trump has seized a leading role.
“There’s a great chance to solve a world problem,” Trump said. “This is not a problem for the United States. This is not a problem for Japan or any other country. This is a problem for the world.”
Hostilities in the Korean War, which involved the United States, ended 65 years ago, but a peace treaty was never signed. A top South Korean official was quoted Tuesday as saying that a formal end to hostilities was on the agenda for the summit between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in next week in the demilitarized zone between the countries.
“They do have my blessing to discuss the end of the war,” Trump said.
Yet such a deal would be complicated and would require direct U.S. participation and agreement. The United States signed the armistice agreement on South Korea’s behalf, and any peace treaty would have to be between the United States and North Korea.
A big part of the reason a peace treaty has never been signed is because Pyongyang has long insisted that if a peace treaty was agreed, U.S. troops would no longer be required in South Korea, a demand the United States has rejected.
Trump’s planned session withKim, the dynastic leader Trump has mocked as “Little Rocket Man,” comes after the two traded insults and threats last year. Trump vowed to “totally destroy” North Korea if it menaced the United States or its allies, and Kim called Trump senile.
On Tuesday, Trump said the summit with Kim was likely to happen by early June if all goes well. He added a caveat: “It’s possible things won’t go well and we won’t have the meetings and we’ll just continue to go on this very strong path we have taken.”
Trump later said that five locations are under consideration to host the summit and that a decision would come soon. None of the locations was in the United States, Trump said later, in response to a question from a reporter. Administration officials are said to be looking at potential sites in Asia outside the Korean Peninsula, including Southeast Asia, and in Europe.
Abe appeared delighted with the progress he made with Trump, including a pledge from the U.S. president to raise with Kim the issue of the unresolved cases of at least 13 Japanese citizens abducted by North Korean agents in the 1970s and 1980s – an important domestic issue for Abe.
Trump met with several families of the abductees during a visit to Tokyo in November, and the president was outraged by the death last summer of Otto Warmbier, an American college student who died shortly after being released in a coma from 17 months in captivity in the North. Three Americans remain in captivity, and U.S. officials suggested their release is likely to be part of talks with Pyongyang.
Senate Republicans are escalating their attacks on West Virginia Senate GOP candidate Don Blankenship, increasingly worried that the coal baron and ex-prisoner will blow a winnable race against Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.
Republicans see West Virginia as a prime pickup opportunity in November, given President Donald Trump’s huge popularity there. But they say the multimillionaire Blankenship, running in a tight three-way primary against Rep. Evan Jenkins (R-W.Va.) and state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, is indefensible as a candidate after serving a year in prison for conspiring to violate mine safety violations. Twenty-nine miners died at his company’s Upper Big Branch mine in 2010.
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“Wasn’t he convicted of a crime?” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas said in an interview Tuesday. “That sort of background doesn’t lend itself to public office, in my view. Being convicted of a crime is a real liability.”
As the race gets closer, alarms are going off in Senate leadership suites. At a Monday evening Senate Republican leadership meeting, National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) focused on Blankenship’s weakness, explaining to other Republicans that the former coal magnate would be difficult for the party to defend in the state, according to attendees.
He specifically referenced accusations that Blankenship’s companies contaminated drinking water. A case involving the issue was settled with West Virginia residents, though Massey Energy, which Blankenship led, admitted no wrongdoing.
“That’s not popular in West Virginia,” Gardner told leaders gathered in McConnell’s office, referring to the contamination claims.
The situation between Blankenship and national Republicans is growing more fraught by the day. Last week, a super PAC apparently controlled by national interests blasted Blankenship with the allegations about contaminating the state’s drinking water at the same time he built a private water supply for his home. Blankenship hit back Monday in a scathing statement likening Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to the Russians, interfering in an election outside his jurisdiction.
Cornyn and other top Republican senators continued the tit-for-tat this week. And the famously strategic McConnell wryly claimed he doesn’t “pay a lot of attention to these primaries,” before throwing a jab at Blankenship.
“We’ll wait to see who the nominee is and get behind a Republican candidate. And hopefully it will be one who is actually electable,” McConnell said Tuesday, which he later called a “subtle hint” about his preference in the primary.
Meanwhile, Jenkins and Morrisey are beating up each other ahead of the May 8 primary. Morrisey released an ad on Tuesday attacking Jenkins’ “liberal Democrat record,” while Jenkins has focused on Morrisey receiving campaign money from the pharmaceutical industry, an attack that resonates in a state wracked by opioid addiction.
Officially, Senate Republicans aren’t intervening in the race out of fear it would aid Blankenship’s bid to portray himself as an outsider taking on the corrupt establishment. But privately, Blankenship is a hot topic among GOP leaders.
“It’s kind of wild out there. I don’t think he will [win]. I certainly hope one of the other candidates does, because I think he would be obviously a challenged candidate going into the fall,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 GOP leader.
On Monday, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), a McConnell ally, met with a small group of donors in New York City. She described the primary as extremely close for candidates Blankenship, Jenkins, and Morrisey. And, according to one person who was present, she said that Republicans were concerned that should Blankenship win the nomination, Manchin would walk over him in a general election.
In an interview on Tuesday, Capito said she would not endorse in the primary and said “it’s really hard to predict” who will win. Limited public polling in the race has indicated that all three candidates are in contention and there is no favorite.
“It’s tightening up, by all indications. And I think that’s going to heighten the interest of a lot of Republican and independent voters in the state and I think that’s a good thing,” Capito said.
It’s no surprise GOP senators are searching for a silver lining, because they find themselves in a nearly impossible position in the West Virginia race.
During last year’s Alabama Senate race, the national party — led by the McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund super PAC — spent millions of dollars in an unsuccessful effort to stop former state Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore from winning the nomination. The barrage failed, with Moore portraying himself as a victim of a GOP establishment bent on taking him down — a message that resonated with the state’s conservative voters.
Moore beat former Sen. Luther Strange (R-Ala.), but then lost to Democrat Doug Jones, shaving a seat off the Senate GOP’s already thin majority. Thune admitted that the GOP getting directly involved in West Virginia would “probably” help Blankenship similarly.
“I still think in the end people are discerning enough that they’ll figure this out. Obviously we’ll want to have a good candidate out there that will run a good race in the fall,” he said.
Instead, Republican leaders are taking a more guarded approach. They have refused to take credit for the recently launched, anti-Blankenship ad by the so-called Mountain Families PAC. Yet their fingerprints are all over the generically titled group, which has enlisted a team of veteran Republican strategists who have worked closely with Senate Leadership Fund in the past. The super PAC’s ad-making firm, McCarthy Hennings Whalen, has also done work for McConnell.
Trump appeared at an event in West Virginia this month and sat next to Jenkins and Morrisey. Blankenship did not attend. Senate Republicans privately said they hope Trump will attack Blankenship if upcoming polls show he could win.
Blankenship, meanwhile, is taking a page out of the Moore playbook. In a scathing statement Monday, he derided McConnell as the “Swamp captain” of D.C., said he was wrongly accused in the mine explosion and compared McConnell to a Russian interloper.
“West Virginians are aware that McConnell cannot vote in their election,” Blankenship said. “They want him to mind his own business and do his job.”
As the wife of the 41st president and the mother of the 43rd, George W. Bush, Mrs. Bush was only the second woman in American history to have a son of hers follow his father to the White House. (Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams and mother of John Quincy Adams, was the first.)
Another son, Jeb, the governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007, was an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.
During that campaign, he was repeatedly derided in personal terms by the eventual nominee and now president, Donald J. Trump, prompting Mrs. Bush, who was never shy about expressing her views, to lash back, suggesting in television interviews that Mr. Trump was a misogynist and a hatemonger.
PhotoBarbara Bush with her husband and a very young George W. Bush in 1955 in Rye, N.Y., where Mrs. Bush grew up. Credit
George Bush Presidential Library, via Associated Press
“He’s said terrible things about women, terrible things about the military,” Mrs. Bush told CNN. “I don’t understand why people are for him.”
Dedicated to her family and largely indifferent to glamour, Mrs. Bush played down her role in her husband’s political success. But she was a shrewd and valuable ally, becoming a sought-after speaker in at least four national campaigns: in 1980, when Mr. Bush was chosen to be Ronald Reagan’s running mate; in 1984, when the two ran for re-election; in 1988, when Mr. Bush campaigned for president; and in 1992, when he sought re-election.
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She stepped into another presidential campaign in 2000, that of her son George, then the governor of Texas. She appeared at fund-raisers and met voters in New Hampshire and other states on his behalf as he rolled to the Republican presidential nomination.
She was clearly a political asset. A 1999 poll found that 63 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of her and that only 3 percent had an unfavorable one.
Outspoken and Combative
While first lady, from January 1989 to January 1993, Mrs. Bush generally refused to talk publicly about contentious issues, particularly when her opinion was said to differ from her husband’s.
“I’m not against it or for it,” she said of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1989. “I’m not talking about it. I want equal rights for women, men, everybody.”
There were rumors that she favored abortion rights, but she made it clear that she supported her husband and would not say whether she was comfortable with his anti-abortion stand.
She was vocal, however, in championing causes of her choosing. Literacy was one, and so was civil rights; she had been an early supporter of the movement.
And she could be combative in news interviews, sometimes yanking off her glasses and tartly chastising reporters when she thought they were being overly aggressive.
PhotoMrs. Bush reading to children at a day care center in New York in 1990. Literacy and civil rights were two causes she championed. Credit
William E. Sauro/The New York Times
Her candor occasionally got her into trouble. In 2005, while visiting victims of Hurricane Katrina at the Houston Astrodome, where they were being temporarily housed, she remarked that many of them “were underprivileged anyway” and that their Astrodome stay — though the living conditions there were dire — was “working very well for them.”
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The comments, coming at a time when her son’s administration was being roundly criticized over its response to the storm, were widely heard as insensitive and condescending.
Two years earlier, shortly before President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, she said in a television interview that she had not been watching coverage of the prelude to war. “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths, and how many, what day it’s going to happen?” she asked. “Why would I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”
She was similarly outspoken in 2013 when she was asked, on the “Today” show, if she thought her son Jeb should run for president in 2016. “I really don’t,” she replied, adding, “There are other people out there that are very qualified, and we’ve had enough Bushes.”
She later changed her mind. In an email to potential supporters in March 2015, she acknowledged, “When the idea of Jeb running for president first came up, I was hesitant.” But she said she was starting a “Run Jeb Run Fund” because “Jeb is our best chance of taking back the White House in 2016.”
She went on to campaign for him in New Hampshire, but he finished fourth in the Republican primary there in February and suspended his campaign a few days later.
Mrs. Bush enjoyed a favorable public image throughout her years as first lady. In one respect she benefited from comparisons with her predecessor, Nancy Reagan, whom many perceived, rightly or wrongly, as remote, icy and overly style-conscious.
By contrast, Mrs. Bush was regarded as unpretentious, a woman who could wear fake pearls, enjoy takeout tacos, walk the dog in her bathrobe and make fun of herself. Perhaps adding to her appeal, she conformed to the popular view of an old-fashioned grandmother, with her white hair and matronly figure; though she was almost a year younger than her husband, many thought she looked much older.
“What not everyone always understood is that Barbara revealed as much as she wanted to but seldom more,” Donnie Radcliffe wrote in a 1989 biography, “Simply Barbara Bush: A Portrait of America’s Candid First Lady.” “She came into the White House with a dexterity at manipulating her image, and she wasn’t above playing off her own outspoken style against Nancy Reagan’s reluctance and often inability to express herself.”
PhotoMrs. Bush with her son Jeb at a rally in Derry, New Hampshire in 2016. Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
“A less popular political wife,” Ms. Radcliffe added, “might have seemed calculating.”
Part of Mrs. Bush’s popularity stemmed from her penchant for self-deprecation. Soon after moving into the White House, she said, “My mail tells me a lot of fat, white-haired, wrinkled ladies are tickled pink.”
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She would do anything asked of her to help the Bush administration, she said, but she drew a line: “I won’t dye my hair, change my wardrobe or lose weight.” Even so, as first lady she was known to wear designer clothes and have her hair styled.
For all her joking about herself, she also confessed that she had felt like crying after Jane Pauley told her on the “Today” show, “Mrs. Bush, people say George is a man of the ’80s and you’re a woman of the ’40s.”
An Invisible Influence
Mrs. Bush often insisted that she stayed out of her husband’s concerns. But few who knew her believed that she would ever hesitate to tell Mr. Bush her views.
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“You have to have influence,” she said in 1992. “When you’ve been married 47 years, if you don’t have any influence, then I really think you’re in deep trouble.”
The substance of that influence remained largely invisible to the public eye, however, making her one of the few first ladies of her era to escape serious criticism. When Mrs. Reagan raised more than $1 million in tax-deductible contributions in 1981 to redecorate the White House living quarters, there was a public outcry. When the Bushes’ friends raised almost $200,000 to spruce up the vice-presidential house the same year, there was hardly a stir.
“I got away with murder,” Mrs. Bush said shortly before her husband’s inauguration.
One glaring exception came in 1984. Speaking of Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro of New York, the Democratic nominee for vice president, Mrs. Bush characterized her as something that “rhymes with rich.” She later apologized, but even then she parried with her critics, saying she did not mean any offense by calling Ms. Ferraro “a witch.”
She was born Barbara Pierce on June 8, 1925, at a maternity hospital in New York City run by the Salvation Army principally for unwed mothers. The family obstetrician practiced there one month a year, and that month happened to be June. She was the third child of the former Pauline Robinson and Marvin Pierce. Her father was in the publishing business and eventually became president of the McCall publishing company. Her mother, the daughter of an Ohio Supreme Court justice, was active in civic affairs in Rye, N.Y., the New York City suburb where the family lived.
One of Mrs. Bush’s ancestors was Franklin Pierce, the 14th president of the United States.
Barbara was brought up in considerable affluence. She attended the public Milton School and the private Rye Country Day School and, along with her contemporaries, suffered through dancing classes, which she never forgot. “I was 5 feet 8 inches at the age of 12, and it certainly bothered the boys,” she recalled.
PhotoMrs. Bush in a 1988 portrait of the Bush clan at the family compound in Kennebunkport, Me., during her husband’s vice presidency. George W. Bush sits next to Mrs. Bush. Credit
Paul Hosefros/The New York Times
Her final two years of high school were spent at Ashley Hall, a boarding school in Charleston, S.C. A classmate once described it as a place where “being bad meant taking off your hat and gloves when you got out of sight of the school.”
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Long Romance Begins
She met George Bush in 1941 at a Christmas dance at the Round Hill Country Club in Greenwich, Conn. George had grown up in Greenwich, a son of Prescott S. Bush, a Wall Street executive and a future United States senator from Connecticut, and the former Dorothy Walker. At the time, he was a senior at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. They began corresponding.
After graduating in 1942, Mr. Bush enlisted in the Navy and trained as a pilot. The next year, he was assigned to a torpedo squadron in the Pacific and piloted a Grumman Avenger. On one combat mission, in 1944, he was shot down and rescued by a submarine. Barbara did not hear from him for a month.
After enrolling at Smith College but before entering the freshman class, she shocked her mother by spending the summer working in a nuts-and-bolts factory.
She and Mr. Bush, on leave from the Navy, married in Rye on Jan. 6, 1945; the bride, not yet 20, had dropped out of Smith at the beginning of her sophomore year. “The truth is, I just wasn’t interested,” she said in interviews. “I was just interested in George.”
They honeymooned in Sea Island, Ga., and spent nine months at military bases in Michigan, Maine and Virginia before Mr. Bush was discharged and entered Yale. In New Haven, where the couple moved, their first son, George, was born in 1946.
After Mr. Bush’s graduation, in 1948, the family left for Texas, where Mr. Bush, with the help of a family friend, had taken a job as an equipment clerk in the oil industry. For a time, in Odessa, Tex., the family lived in one half of a house; the other half was used as a brothel. Within a year they were sent to California. A daughter, Pauline (known as Robin), was born there in 1949 but died of leukemia before her fourth birthday.
The California sojourn was brief; the Bushes soon returned to Texas — first to Midland, where they bought a house in a neighborhood known as Easter Egg Row because the houses were all painted in pastel colors, and later to Houston. By the time the Bushes reached the White House, they had moved 26 times.
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In Texas, four more children were born: Jeb (John Ellis) in 1953, Neil Mallon in 1955, Marvin Pierce in 1956 and Dorothy Walker in 1959. Only George and Jeb went into politics; Neil and Marvin became businessmen, and Dorothy Bush Koch became a philanthropist.
PhotoMrs. Bush at a 2015 presidential campaign rally in Miami for her son Jeb. “When the idea of Jeb running for president first came up, I was hesitant,” she once said, but she changed her mind. Mrs. Bush is flanked by Columba Bush, Jeb’s wife, and George P. Bush, his son. Credit
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Mrs. Bush’s children survive her, as do her husband; her brother, Scott Pierce; 17 grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
Every summer, while Mr. Bush was engaged in oil deals and raising investment money, Mrs. Bush and the children drove to the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Me.
On her first trip there, Mrs. Bush discovered that the hotel where she had made reservations along the way would not accommodate two black family employees who were accompanying her and the children. The employees said they would find another place. But Mrs. Bush refused to split up the group and found other accommodations. On becoming first lady, she insisted that her press secretary be black — a first for that position.
The family moved to Washington in 1966, when Mr. Bush, after an unsuccessful run for the Senate in 1964, was elected to the House of Representatives from Texas’ Seventh Congressional District, which includes parts of Houston. He served two terms and mounted a failed second campaign for the Senate.
Later, as compensation for giving up his safe seat in the House to make the Senate run, he was named ambassador to the United Nations by President Richard M. Nixon. He assumed the post in 1971, and the Bushes moved into the ambassadorial suite of the Waldorf Towers in New York.
Lifelong Volunteer
The family returned to Washington in 1973 when Mr. Bush was appointed chairman of the Republican National Committee, a position he occupied during the Watergate crisis. In 1974, President Gerald R. Ford sent him to the People’s Republic of China to lead the United States Liaison Office in Beijing.
“Watergate was a terrible experience,” Mrs. Bush told Ms. Radcliffe in 1984. “So to go off to China and learn a whole new culture was beautiful.”
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She particularly liked having her husband to herself; their children had not accompanied them. The two cycled around Beijing, studied Chinese and learned tai chi.
In “Barbara Bush: A Memoir,” published in 1994, Mrs. Bush acknowledged that she suffered from depression in 1976 after she and her husband had returned from his two-year China posting and he was named director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a post he held for 11 months.
She had discussed her depression at a news conference in 1989, saying she believed that the women’s movement had contributed to her illness. “I believe it made me feel inadequate,” she said. “I’m not quite sure how. You were made to feel demeaned a little bit.”
Mrs. Bush published another memoir, “Reflections: Life After the White House,” in 2004.
A lifelong volunteer for charitable causes, Mrs. Bush raised money for the United Negro College Fund while in New Haven, started a thrift shop in Midland and volunteered in nursing homes and hospitals in Houston, Washington and New York. Her son Neil’s dyslexia led to her interest in fighting illiteracy.
In her eight years as the wife of the vice president, she attended more than 500 events related to literacy, and after she became first lady she started the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy. The profits from her book “C. Fred’s Story: A Dog’s Life” (1984), a wry look at Washington life as seen by her dog, and from a follow-up based on another family dog, “Millie’s Book: As Dictated to Barbara Bush” (1990), went to literacy causes.
Mrs. Bush hoped her contributions to those causes would form a large part of her legacy.
“I want to be known as a wife, a mother, a grandmother,” she wrote in 1988. “That’s what I am. And I’d like to be known as someone who really cared about people and worked very, very hard to make America more literate.”
