Nancy Bush Ellis, a one-time environmental activist who became an enthusiastic supporter of her brother and nephew in their runs for president, died of COVID-19 complications on Sunday. She was 94. Ellis was a former head of the NAACP’s New England Legal Defense and Educational Fund. After her brother George H.W. Bush announced he was first running for president in 1979, Ellis became a member of his Republican Party, helping campaign for him. She would later do the same for his son, George W. Bush, during his runs in 2000 and 2004. “She’s a part of this great American ethos that’s almost entirely gone,” presidential historian Jon Meachem told The New York Times. “She was the best kind of aristocrat. There was a sense of service without a shred of snobbery.”
