Bush, George W.

Introduction

born July 6, 1946, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.

In full George Walker Bush 43rd president of the United States (2001– ). Narrowly winning the electoral college vote over Vice President Al Gore in one of the closest and most controversial elections in American history, George W. Bush became the first person since Benjamin Harrison in 1888 to become president despite having lost the nationwide popular vote. He was narrowly reelected in 2004, defeating Democratic challenger John Kerry. Before assuming the presidency of the United States, Bush was a businessman and served as governor of Texas (1995–2000).

Early life

Bush was the oldest of six children of George Bush, who served as 41st president of the United States (1989–93), and Barbara Bush. His paternal grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U.S. senator from Connecticut (1952–62). The younger Bush grew up largely in Midland and Houston, Texas. From 1961 to 1964 he attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, the boarding school from which his father graduated. He received a bachelor's degree in history from Yale University, his father's and grandfather's alma mater, in 1968. Bush was president of his fraternity and, like his father, a member of Yale's secretive Skull and Bones society; unlike his father, he was only an average student and did not excel in athletics.

In May 1968, two weeks before his graduation from Yale and the expiration of his student draft deferment, Bush applied as a pilot trainee in the Texas Air National Guard, an assignment that made it less likely that he would have to fight in the Vietnam War than if he had become a member of the regular military. Commissioned a second lieutenant in July 1968, he became a certified fighter pilot in June 1970. In the fall of 1970, he applied for admission to the University of Texas law school but was rejected. From May to November 1972, Bush worked in Alabama on the U.S. Senate campaign of Republican William Blount, a friend of Bush's father. While in Alabama, Bush was suspended from flight duty for failing to take an annual physical exam, and he never flew again. His service records indicate that he missed at least eight months of duty in Alabama or in Texas between May 1972 and May 1973. Nonetheless, an early discharge was granted so that he could start Harvard business school in the fall of 1973. Bush's spotty military record resurfaced as a contentious campaign issue in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.

After receiving his M.B.A. from Harvard in 1975, Bush returned to Midland, where he began working for a Bush family friend, an oil and gas attorney, and later started his own oil and gas firm. He married Laura Welch (see Laura Bush), a teacher and librarian, in Midland in 1977. After an unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978, Bush devoted himself to building his business. With help from his uncle, who was then raising funds for Bush's father's campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Bush was able to attract numerous prominent investors. The company struggled through the early 1980s until the eventual collapse of oil prices in 1986, when it was purchased by the Harken Energy Corporation. Bush received Harken stock, a job as a consultant to the company, and a seat on the company's board of directors.

In the same year, shortly after his 40th birthday, Bush gave up drinking alcohol. “I realized,” he later explained, “that alcohol was beginning to crowd out my energies and could crowd, eventually, my affections for other people.” His decision was partly the result of a self-described spiritual awakening and a strengthening of his Christian faith that began the previous year after a conversation with the Reverend Billy Graham, a Bush family friend.

After the sale of his company, Bush spent 18 months in Washington working as an adviser and speechwriter in his father's presidential campaign. Following the election, he moved to Dallas, where he joined a group of investors buying the Texas Rangers professional baseball team. Although Bush's investment, which he made with a loan he obtained by using his Harken stock as collateral, was relatively small, his role as managing partner of the team brought him much exposure in the media and earned him a reputation as a successful businessman. When Bush's partnership sold the team in 1998, Bush received nearly $15 million.

Governor of Texas

In 1994 Bush challenged Democratic incumbent Ann Richards for the governorship of Texas. It was a hard-fought race in which Bush received the support of some prominent Democratic and Hispanic politicians. Bush won the election 53 percent to 46 percent, the first person ever to be elected a state governor whose father was a U.S. president. A major issue in the campaign concerned an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1991 into Bush's sale of all his Harken stock in June 1990, just days before the company completed a second quarter with heavy losses. Bush's failure to report the sale until well after the reporting deadline prompted an SEC investigation into illegal “insider” trading (taking advantage of information not available to the public), which did not find any wrongdoing, though questions remained regarding its thoroughness.

As governor, Bush increased state spending on elementary and secondary education and made the salaries and promotions of teachers and administrators contingent on their students' performance on standardized tests. Fulfilling a campaign promise to toughen the state's juvenile justice system, his administration increased the number of crimes for which juveniles could be sentenced to adult prisons following custody in juvenile detention and lowered to 14 the age at which children could be tried as adults. Throughout his tenure he received international attention for the brisk pace of public executions in Texas relative to other states. Fulfilling another campaign pledge, Bush signed into law several measures aimed at tort reform, including one that imposed new limits on punitive damages and another that narrowed the legal definition of “gross negligence.” With his reelection in 1998, Bush became the first Texas governor to win consecutive four-year terms.

Bush formally announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination on June 12, 1999. He described his political philosophy as “compassionate conservatism,” a doctrine that combined traditional Republican economic and social policies with concern for the underprivileged. He quickly gathered the endorsement of a large number of Republican officeholders and raised more money than any other Republican or Democratic candidate, collecting approximately $100 million for his primary election campaign. His running mate was Dick Cheney, former chief of staff for President Gerald Ford and secretary of defense during the presidency of Bush's father. Despite his refusal to give direct answers to questions about his drinking and possible use of illegal drugs (he said that, at the time his father was president, he would have passed a background check going back 15 years, to 1974), Bush survived a vigorous challenge in the Republican primary from Senator John McCain and won the Republican nomination, taking a strong lead in public-opinion polls over Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic Party nominee; Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate; and political commentator Patrick Buchanan, the nominee of the Reform Party.

As the general election campaign continued, the gap in the polls between Bush and Gore narrowed to the closest in any election in the previous 40 years. On election day the presidency hinged on the 25 electoral votes of Florida, where Bush led Gore by fewer than 1,000 popular votes after a mandatory statewide machine recount. After the Gore campaign asked for manual recounts in four heavily Democratic counties, the Bush campaign filed suit in federal court to stop any further recounts. For five weeks the election remained unresolved as Florida state courts and federal courts heard numerous legal challenges by both campaigns. Eventually the Florida Supreme Court decided (4–3) to order a statewide manual recount of the approximately 45,000 “undervotes” (i.e., ballots that machines recorded as not clearly expressing a presidential vote). The Bush campaign quickly filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to delay the recounts until it could hear the case; a stay was issued by the court on December 9. Three days later, concluding (7–2) that a fair statewide recount could not be performed in time to meet the December 18 deadline for certifying the state's electors, the court issued a controversial 5–4 decision to reverse the Florida Supreme Court's recount order, effectively awarding the presidency to Bush. By winning Florida, Bush narrowly won the electoral vote over Gore by 271 to 266—only 1 more than the required 270.

After Gore conceded defeat, Bush struck a conciliatory tone, promising to reach out to Democrats and declaring that “I was not elected to serve one party but to serve one nation. Whether you voted for me or not, I will do my best to serve your interests.” With his inauguration, Bush became only the second son of a president to assume the nation's highest office; the other was John Quincy Adams (1825–29), the son of John Adams (1797–1801). (See primary source document: First Inaugural Address.)

Presidency

Bush was the first Republican president to enjoy a majority in both houses of Congress since Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s. Taking advantage of his party's majority, in June 2001 Bush signed into law a $1.35 trillion tax-cut bill, which passed Congress despite fierce opposition from Democrats. Only two days before the bill was signed, however, control of the Senate formally passed to the Democrats following Republican Senator James Jeffords's decision to leave his party and become an independent. Subsequently, many of Bush's domestic initiatives, including his plan to introduce educational vouchers, encountered significant resistance.

In foreign affairs, the Bush administration announced that the United States would not abide by the Kyoto Protocol on reducing the emission of gases responsible for global warming (the United States had signed the protocol in the last days of the Bill Clinton administration) because the agreement did not impose emission limits on developing countries and because it could harm the U.S. economy. The administration also withdrew from the 1972 Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems and attempted to secure commitments from various governments not to extradite U.S. citizens to the new International Criminal Court, whose jurisdiction it rejected. To many of Bush's critics at home and abroad, these developments reflected a dangerous unilateralism in U.S. foreign policy.

In February 2001 U.S. and British warplanes bombed targets in Baghdad in defense of the no-fly zones established in northern and southern Iraq after the First Persian Gulf War, in 1991. The incident foreshadowed events that would dominate Bush's presidency two years later.

The Bush administration's first major challenge came on September 11, 2001, when four American commercial airplanes were hijacked by Islamic terrorists. Two of the planes were deliberately crashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, destroying both towers and collapsing or damaging many surrounding buildings, and a third was used to destroy part of the Pentagon building outside Washington, D.C.; the fourth plane crashed outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after passengers apparently attempted to retake the plane. (See September 11 attacks.) The crashes—the worst terrorist incident on U.S. soil—killed some 3,000 people and prompted calls around the world for a global war on terrorism. (See primary source document: Declaration of War on Terrorism.)

Domestic security and the fight against terrorism subsequently became the chief focus of the Bush administration and the top priority of government at every level. Shortly after the September 11 attacks, the administration requested, and Congress passed, the USA PATRIOT Act, which significantly expanded the search and surveillance powers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law-enforcement agencies. Hundreds of resident aliens and some U.S. citizens were arrested and detained, some on questionable grounds, as the country scrambled to tighten security and to prepare for possible additional attacks. To coordinate these actions, the administration formed a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, which began operating on January 24, 2003.

Bush accused radical Islamist Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, al-Qaeda (Arabic: “the Base”), of responsibility for the September 11 attacks (in a videotape in 2004 bin Laden himself acknowledged that he was responsible). He also charged the Taliban government of Afghanistan with harbouring bin Laden and his followers. Bush built an international coalition against terrorism and ordered a massive bombing campaign, which began on October 7, 2001, against terrorist and Taliban targets in Afghanistan. After U.S. forces routed al-Qaeda and forced the Taliban from power, the Bush administration began working with Afghanistan's various ethnic and political factions to establish a stable regime there. For his handling of the country's response to the terrorist attacks and the war in Afghanistan, Bush received high job-approval ratings.

In September 2002 the administration announced a new National Security Strategy of the United States of America. It was notable for its declaration that the United States would act “preemptively,” using military force if necessary, to forestall or prevent threats to its security by terrorists or “rogue states” possessing biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons—so-called “weapons of mass destruction.” Bush simultaneously drew worldwide attention to Iraqi President Ṣaddām Ḥussein and to suspicions that Iraq had attempted to develop weapons of mass destruction in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions. In November 2002 the Bush administration successfully lobbied for a new Security Council resolution providing for the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq. Soon thereafter Bush declared that Iraq had failed to comply fully with the new resolution and that the country continued to possess weapons of mass destruction. For several weeks the United States and Britain tried unsuccessfully to secure support from France, Russia, and other Security Council members for a second resolution explicitly authorizing the use of force against Iraq, though administration officials continued to insist that earlier resolutions provided sufficient legal justification for military action. As debate in the Security Council dragged on, antiwar sentiment outside the United States increased dramatically, leading to massive peace demonstrations in several major cities throughout the world, especially in Europe. Finally Bush declared an end to diplomacy. On March 17 he issued an ultimatum to Ṣaddām, giving him and his immediate family 48 hours to leave Iraq or face removal by force; he also indicated that, even if Ṣaddām relinquished power, U.S.-led military forces would enter the country to search for weapons of mass destruction and to stabilize the new government.

After Ṣaddām's public refusal to leave and as the 48-hour deadline approached, Bush ordered the war on Iraq, called Operation Iraqi Freedom, to begin on March 20 (local time). Although U.S. and British forces encountered unexpectedly heavy resistance from irregular Iraqi fighters, they quickly overwhelmed them and the Iraqi army, and by mid-April they had entered Baghdad and all other major Iraqi cities and forced Ṣaddām's regime from power. Stabilizing postwar Iraq, however, proved difficult; in the months immediately after the war, one U.S. soldier, on average, was dying daily as a result of attacks by Ṣaddām loyalists and other Iraqis opposed to the occupation. Meanwhile, hundreds of sites suspected of housing or producing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were investigated. As the search continued into the following year, critics of Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair accused both of having exaggerated the threat posed by Ṣaddām in order to win public support for the war. Ṣaddām, who had gone into hiding during the invasion, was captured by U.S. forces in December 2003.

In domestic affairs, the U.S. economy entered a recession in 2001 and continued to falter. Fears over war and terrorism, widespread corporate accounting scandals, some of the largest corporate bankruptcies in U.S. history, problems besetting the travel and tourist industries following the September 11 attacks, and the final bursting of the “bubble economy” of the late 1990s all contributed to consumer uncertainty and a prolonged downturn in the financial markets. The surpluses in the federal budget in 2000 and 2001 had turned into huge deficits by 2003 because of the slowing economy; increases in spending, particularly defense spending related to the war on terrorism; and the tax cut of 2001. Between 2001 and 2003 the economy lost nearly 2.1 million jobs. Bush's chances of implementing his policies improved greatly after the 2002 midterm elections, in which the Republican Party regained a majority in the Senate and maintained its majority in the House of Representatives. In May 2003 Bush won approval of a second tax cut of $350 billion.

In 2004 Bush focused his energies on his campaign for reelection against his Democratic challenger, U.S. Senator John Kerry. Waging an expensive campaign marked by partisan and personal rancour, the candidates entered the fall elections in a virtual dead heat, according to opinion polls. Bush's key campaign platform was his conduct of the war on terrorism, defined by the war in Iraq, which Kerry countered was poorly planned and executed. In an election that illustrated stark divisions among voters, Bush defeated Kerry with a slim majority of the electoral and popular vote.