George Bush led the biggest diplomatic triumph since Jefferson

The 41st president, who couldn’t always get his sentences straight, wasn’t foreordained for history’s hall of fame. Amid rising deficits and unemployment, Bush lost the 1992 election to a little-known Democrat by the name of Bill Clinton. Yet as his secretary of state, James Baker, put it in 2013, Bush “was the best one-term president the country has ever had, and one of the most underrated presidents of all time.”