My general impression of GHWB at the time was as others have already posted: pretty good with diplomacy, not great on the domestic front. I wasn’t as familiar, at the time, with the lack of urgency he was putting on the AIDS epidemic, which is definitely a strike against him.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been listening to Rachel Maddow’s podcast, “Bag Man,” about Spiro Agnew and the criminal investigation that led to his downfall. I’d been unaware of the fact that Bush played a small, but unseemly, role in it.
Agnew’s troubles had started when the U.S. Attorney’s office in Maryland, led by George Beall, was investigating corruption at various levels of Maryland government; they discovered that Agnew had regularly taken kickbacks while a Maryland official, and had continued taking them while he was Vice-President.
Beall was a member of a prominent Republican family in Maryland; his brother, Glenn, held one of Maryland’s seats in the U.S. Senate at that point. Nixon, Agnew, and Alexander Haig (then Nixon’s chief of staff) had been looking for ways in which they could put pressure on Glenn Beall, to get his brother George to back off on Agnew.
At that time (summer 1973), Bush was chairman of the Republican National Committee. Nixon and Haig brought Bush in, and asked him to approach Glenn Beall, and express his concern over the Agnew investigation. From what was detailed in the podcast, Glenn Beall did, indeed, speak with George Beall, and mentioned Bush among those who had approached him with concern about the Agnew case.
Probably small potatoes, comparatively speaking, but it does illustrate that Bush was by no means immune to being a political creature.