Submitted by Ed J. Lopez-Reyes, former Greenwich resident
I no longer live in Greenwich. Southern California is home today. But having served three terms representing District 3 on Greenwich’s Representative Town Meeting (RTM), including as Chairman, I continue to regard my years in Town government as an important part of my experience in public service.
That is one reason I have followed the debate surrounding a proposed statue of President George H.W. Bush with personal interest.
Bush was born in Massachusetts but grew up in Greenwich, where his family settled when he was young. His father, Prescott Bush, served as moderator of Greenwich’s Representative Town Meeting and played a leading role in the successful opposition to locating the United Nations headquarters in the Greenwich area in 1946, before representing Connecticut in the United States Senate. The family’s connection to Greenwich was not incidental. It was part of the community’s political and civic life.
George H.W. Bush attended Greenwich Country Day School before leaving for Phillips Academy Andover. After graduating at 18, he enlisted in the Navy during World War II. He became a naval aviator, flew 58 combat missions in the Pacific, and began a remarkable public career that took him through Congress, the United Nations, China, the Central Intelligence Agency, the vice presidency, and ultimately the White House.
Yet before much of that story was written, there was Greenwich.
What a pity, then, that honoring one of America’s last great coalition-building presidents, a decorated war hero, and a member of a family so intimately connected to Greenwich has become such a complicated undertaking.
The proposed statue represents more than one individual. It recognizes an important chapter of American history that Greenwich helped cultivate. It reminds residents and visitors of the Town’s contribution to the nation’s political heritage, even as the Bush family’s center of gravity eventually shifted south and west.
The chronology of the proposal’s approvals, reversals, and reconsiderations also illustrates an unfortunate tendency in local governance: the ability to complicate even relatively straightforward civic gestures.
Bureaucracy has an unfortunate habit. If government discovers that it can delay something, someone will inevitably find a reason why it should.
In June, the RTM rejected the privately funded proposal to install the statue near the Havemeyer Building. The vote was 110 opposed, 81 in favor, and five abstentions. Much of the debate concerned the suitability of the location, the uncertain future of the Havemeyer property, and the importance of respecting the existing memorials.
Those were legitimate considerations, not necessarily objections to honoring Bush himself.
Since then, there has been encouraging progress. Greenwich’s Cultural Arts Advisory Committee unanimously endorsed a new location behind Town Hall, overlooking Havemeyer Field and Greenwich Common. The proposal, advanced through a private donation from former state Senator L. Scott Frantz, would recognize Bush without requiring the Town to finance the monument’s construction.
Additional municipal approvals remain necessary, including review by the Historic District Commission, Planning and Zoning Commission, and ultimately the RTM.
The Town now has an opportunity to move forward. It should take it.
Having sat on the RTM myself, I appreciate that simple questions rarely remain simple once they reach a legislative body. Location matters. Procedure matters. Stewardship of public property matters. Members have an obligation to ask questions before accepting a gift or altering a public space.
Indeed, I would expect nothing less.
But responsible oversight should produce decisions, not become an endless exercise in finding new reasons to postpone them. There is a difference between deliberation and paralysis.
The proposed Town Hall location offers a promising compromise, one that respects concerns about the original site while preserving the larger purpose of the monument. Greenwich’s elected officials should approach the remaining approvals with that objective in mind.
Because procedure should not obscure history.
A town is more than its budgets, ordinances, roads, and land-use decisions. A community is also the custodian of its own memory. Greenwich possesses a national history that is easy to overlook precisely because so much of that history happened there quietly.
The Bush family’s story is part of it.
Living elsewhere has made me more conscious of Greenwich’s influence on my own understanding of public service. My family shared that connection. After retiring as a University of Connecticut professor, my mother taught adult English as a Second Language through Greenwich Public Schools.
My own service included the RTM and the Connecticut Army National Guard, a citizen-soldier tradition I continue today in the California Army National Guard. Greenwich gave us opportunities to serve a community that had become our home, and those experiences travel with you.
Perhaps that is why I have particular sympathy for the Greenwich portion of George H.W. Bush’s biography.
His identity eventually became associated with Texas, Washington, D.C., and Maine. The Bush family’s political center of gravity migrated south and west. My journey is of an entirely different scale, but I understand leaving a place while continuing to carry the experiences, institutions, and sense of service it gave you.
History does not cease belonging to a place merely because the people who made it moved somewhere else.
And honoring that history should not require navigating an obstacle course of municipal indecision.
George H.W. Bush was hardly beyond political disagreement, nor should any president be. But his life embodied military service, diplomacy, political compromise, and a belief that public service transcends partisan divisions. Those qualities deserve recognition regardless of one’s political affiliation.
At a time when national politics often seems incapable of producing even modest consensus, Greenwich has an opportunity to demonstrate something better: that a community can recognize its history without making every decision a referendum on contemporary political divisions.
The statue would not merely commemorate the 41st president. It would remind future generations that a young man who grew up in Greenwich went on to help shape the course of world history.
George H.W. Bush belonged to a national story. He also belonged to a Greenwich story.
They should be remembered together.
Eduardo J. Lopez-Reyes is Owner and Chief Consultant of Wolf & King Strategies in Newport Beach, California. A former Greenwich Representative Town Meeting District 3 Chairman and 2022 Republican nominee for Connecticut’s 150th House District, he previously served as National Vice Chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus. He is currently National Vice President of the Hispanic Leadership Fund and the American Association of Senior Citizens and serves in the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Corps with the California Army National Guard.