Nancy Bush Ellis, sister of former US President George HW Bush and aunt of former US President George W. Bush, has died of complications related to COVID-19, her son Alexander Ellis reported.
In a family of Republican celebrities, Ellis, who was 94 years old and living in a nursing home, was a militant Democrat who was busy promoting campaigns against poverty, for the defense of the environment and the arts and, for a while, She served as director of the Legal Defense and Education Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Born in Massachusetts in 1926, Ellis graduated from college in 1946 with a degree in English from Vassar University and that year married Alexander Ellis with whom she had four surviving children. His family expanded with nine grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren.
“We are sad to share the news that President Bush’s beloved sister, Nancy, has passed away,” the George and Barbara Bush Foundation said in a Twitter post. “Our condolences and prayers go out to the Ellis and Bush families as we think of 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 joined her cousin’s in 2000 because, according to presidential historian Jon Meacham, she was “a Democrat for whom the family had an edge.”
“She’s part of this great American feature that has almost disappeared,” Meacham added in statements to The New York Times. “She was the best kind of aristocrat. There was a sense of service in her without any trace of snobbery. ‘