Nancy Bush Ellis, sister of former U.S. President George HW Bush and aunt of former President George W. Bush, also died from covid-19-related complications, her son Alexander Ellis reported.
Within a family with Republican luminaries, Ellis, who was 94 years old and lived in a nursing home, was a militant Democrat engaged in promoting campaigns against poverty, for the defense of the environment and the arts. and, for a time, she was director of the Education and Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of People of Color (NAACP).
Born in 1926 in Massachusetts, Ellis graduated from the University with a degree in English from Vassar University in 1946 and that year she married Alexander Ellis with whom she had four children who survive her. Her family expanded with nine grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren.
“We are saddened to share the news that President Bush’s much-loved sister, Nancy, has died,” the George and Barbara Bush Foundation said in a Twitter message. “Our condolences and prayers go out to the Ellis and Bush families at a time when we remember a remarkable woman who brought joy and light to the world.”
Despite her partisan preference, Ellis enthusiastically participated in her brother’s election campaign in 1980 and accompanied her nephew’s in 2000 because, as presidential historian Jon Meacham said, “she was a Democrat for who the family was ahead of. “
“She is part of this great American trait that has almost disappeared,” Meacham added in statements to The New York Times. “She was of the best kind of aristocrat. There was in her a sense of service without any trace of snobbery.”