George W. Bush

President of the United States (2001–2009)

• Born: July 6, 1946
• Place of Birth: New Haven, Connecticut

George Walker Bush, businessman and former Texas governor, became the forty-third president of the United States in 2000, following one of the closest and most controversial presidential elections in US history. Although his ability to perform the duties of the presidency was widely questioned by his critics both before and after the election, many Americans felt that Bush proved himself capable of leadership in his response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Nevertheless, many have remained critical of Bush’s performance and policies regarding crises such as the Iraq War, the federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the 2008 economic recession.

Early Life

George W. Bush, sometimes known simply as "W," was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on July 6, 1946. The eldest of six children born to George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara Pierce Bush, he spent most of his childhood in Midland, Texas, where his father worked in the oil industry. His father, George H. W. Bush, would go on to become the forty-first president of the United States.

When his younger sister, Robin, died of leukemia in 1953, the seven-year-old Bush was a great source of comfort to his mother during a difficult time. This experience, coupled with the fact that his father was often away on business, contributed to the development of a strong bond between Bush and his mother.

As a boy, Bush attended Sam Houston Elementary School, and later attended the Kincaid School, a prestigious academy near Houston. In 1961, following in his father’s footsteps, Bush went to Massachusetts to attend Phillips Academy Andover, where he completed his secondary education.

Education

After graduating from high school in 1964, Bush enrolled at Yale University, also an alma mater of his father’s. He did not succeed academically, but was active in sports, the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, and the secret Yale society known as “Skull & Bones.” He graduated from Yale in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in history.

The Vietnam War, and the American military draft, were both in full swing following Bush’s graduation from college. Bush was able to secure a post with the Air National Guard in Houston, probably due to the fact that his father was, at the time, a prominent US congressman.

Bush completed his active military service in 1970 and continued his part-time commitment to the National Guard for several more years. Bush has described this time in his life as a “nomadic” period, during which he held a number of different jobs. It is said that alcoholism and drug use marked this period of Bush’s life, but he is evasive about the subject.

Bush enrolled in Harvard School of Business in 1973 and graduated with an MBA degree in 1975. Two years later, he married Laura Welch, a former teacher and librarian. The couple’s twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna, were born in 1981.

Big Business

Having earned his business degree, Bush returned to Midland and set up an oil company called Arbusto Energy in 1975. While running his business, Bush also began his political career, running for Congress as a Republican nominee in 1978. However, he failed to win the nomination. When oil prices plummeted during the 1980s, Bush’s company was on the verge of bankruptcy. The outfit was renamed Bush Exploration, and it merged with an oil-investing fund known as Spectrum-7. Bush sold his stock at a large profit just before the company declared substantial losses. The situation prompted an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which suggested that Bush knew of the company’s poor financial condition before selling his stock. No charges regarding the incident were ever filed.

In 1986, at the age of forty, Bush quit drinking alcohol and became more involved in his wife’s Methodist faith. The following year, Bush moved his family to Washington, DC, and became his father’s campaign advisor for the 1988 presidential election. His father’s presidential campaign proved to be a good outlet for Bush’s ambitious and energetic nature. He was instrumental in securing the political support of Christian conservatives in the United States. When George H. W. Bush was elected president, his son returned to Texas.

After relocating to Dallas, Bush and a group of investors purchased the Texas Rangers baseball team. As a managing general partner, Bush attended all of the team’s home games and became widely known in Texas. He sold his interest in the team following his decision to reenter Texas politics.

Political Career

In 1994, with his popularity in Texas on the rise, Bush decided to run for governor of Texas. He ran on a conservative platform, pledging welfare reform, increased funding for public schools, and tort reform (limits on the ability of plaintiffs to file lawsuits). To the surprise of his critics, Bush was elected governor with 54 percent of the vote, defeating popular Democratic Party incumbent Ann Richards.

During his first term as governor, Bush managed to implement part of his controversial plan to lower property taxes, despite opposition from both Republicans and Democrats in the state senate. In 1998, he became the first governor in the history of Texas to be elected to a second consecutive four-year term. He defeated his opponent, Gary Mauro, by a wide margin. A record number of Hispanic American voters in Texas turned out to support Bush and the Republican ticket.

Bush’s second term was characterized by more tax cuts and education reform, although the governor was criticized for what was viewed to be his failure to address social issues in Texas, such as racism and poverty. Nonetheless, he still enjoyed wide support among minority voters, which helped to attract the attention of the national Republican Party in its search for a presidential candidate. In June 1999, Governor Bush announced that he would campaign for the 2000 Republican Party presidential nomination.

2000 Presidential Campaign

During the campaign, Bush described himself as a “compassionate conservative,” and stressed his intentions to limit the size of the federal government, reduce taxes, and improve education. His critics commented on his relative inexperience, his controversial past, and his habit of speaking in general terms about complex issues. In addition, many Democratic Party critics were against Bush’s strong antiabortion stance and his opposition to hate-crime legislation. Liberals also criticized his support for the death penalty, emphasizing the fact that Texas had conducted record numbers of executions during Bush’s term as governor.

Despite Arizona senator John McCain’s victory in the politically important New Hampshire primary, Bush went on to win the Republican Party presidential nomination in August 2000. He chose former US secretary of defense Dick Cheney as his running mate, hoping that the veteran politician would lend an air of experience to his presidential campaign. Bush and Cheney faced Vice President Al Gore and Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman of the Democratic Party in the general election.

The 2000 US presidential election proved to be one of the closest elections in American history. Although election night brought calls from various media outlets declaring victory for each party, it was eventually determined in the days following the election that the majority of electoral college votes needed to win the presidency would be decided by the winner of the state of Florida. A month-long legal and political dispute over voting irregularities and recounts in Florida ensued. The battle over which candidate would lay claim to Florida’s 25 electoral votes, and thus the presidency, eventually reached the Supreme Court. The court ruled in a 5–4 decision to officially end all recounts of the Florida presidential ballots. The decision made official previous vote counts that determined the Bush/Cheney ticket as the winner in Florida and served to officially and legally determine them as the winners of the presidential election. Critics of Bush and supporters of the Gore/Lieberman ticket were bitter about the Supreme Court ruling and noted the fact that Bush/Cheney had lost the popular vote. In addition, many critics of the election outcome were critical of the role that Green Party candidate Ralph Nader played in the election, stating that Nader votes in Florida resulted in a decrease in votes for Gore. Gore publicly conceded the election in a speech to the nation that occurred on December 13, 2000.

President Bush

Although Bush emphasized cooperation between Democrats and Republicans and vowed to heal the divisions caused by the controversial election, many of his critics still doubted the validity of his presidency when he was inaugurated on January 20, 2001. The occasion marked the first time since the administrations of John Adams (1797–1801) and John Quincy Adams (1825–29) that both a father and son have been elected president.

During his first several months in office, Bush worked with a Democratic majority in Congress to get his tax cut proposal passed. He was criticized for his proposal to expand oil exploration in protected nature reserves in Alaska, as well as for his decision to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. However, the biggest test of his administration came following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. During the attacks, terrorists hijacked four commercial jet airliners from US airports, crashing one plane into each of the two World Trade Center towers in New York City and a third into the Pentagon building in Washington, DC, the headquarters of the US Department of Defense. A fourth plane, later determined to be headed for the White House, crash-landed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Of the passengers on board the planes, nobody survived. The two World Trade Center towers collapsed within an hour and a half of the initial impact. In addition, the Pentagon building sustained significant damage, and the country was gripped with a sense of nationwide panic. As a result of the September 11 attacks, 2,998 people, both Americans and foreign nationals, were killed, and over six thousand were injured.

President Bush declared the attacks on the United States to be an act of war, and in response, his administration launched the “global war on terror,” which aimed to destroy terrorist enclaves worldwide and declared as a hostile entity any nation that knowingly harbored terrorist groups. Investigations and intelligence reviews following the attacks determined that they were conducted by the Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organization known as al-Qaeda, led by Saudi Arabian exile Osama bin Laden. Intelligence reports confirmed that the group had trained in areas of Afghanistan, under the auspice of that country’s Islamic fundamentalist government, known as the Taliban.

In October 2001, Bush ordered the US military to launch air strikes in Afghanistan. The military campaign toppled the Taliban regime, removing them as the country’s central governing power. Although the military also targeted various al-Qaeda camps, the US military failed to capture or kill bin Laden. Nonetheless, the operation received widespread support in the US and abroad. Additionally, President Bush established the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

As the war in Afghanistan progressed, President Bush’s approval rating in the US soared. However, America had entered an economic recession, and critics of the Bush administration began to accuse the White House of violating civil rights in implementing certain antiterrorism measures.

Beginning in 2002, the Bush administration began to turn its attention to the nation of Iraq, led at the time by dictator Saddam Hussein. For over a year, President Bush and administration officials presented pieces of evidence it claimed proved that Hussein was developing and producing biological and chemical weapons in Iraq, also known as weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The Bush administration’s accusations regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction resulted in a series of United Nations resolutions aimed at establishing a rigorous schedule of weapons inspections in the country. However, Saddam Hussein continued to wrangle with inspections, eventually rejecting their entry into the country, and continued to deny the existence of WMD.

In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the UN Security Council, presenting the Bush administration’s evidence of WMD in Iraq and urging the organization to support a US-led invasion. Powell’s request was not approved by a majority of the council, and UN Security approval of military action against Iraq was not granted. The governments of France and Germany publicly stated their opposition to any unsanctioned military invasion of Iraq.

Nonetheless, a US-led full-scale military invasion of Iraq began on March 20, 2003. Hussein was captured by US forces in December 2003, and subsequently executed by the newly established Iraq government after being convicted of war crimes.

Although the Hussein government was swiftly toppled, the invasion of Iraq resulted in a power vacuum in the country that pitted Sunni Muslim militias against Shiite militias. In addition, forces loyal to the Hussein government implemented numerous guerilla warfare tactics against US and coalition forces. Over four thousand American troops and hundreds of coalition forces were killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2012. Military activity in the country and the civil strife that followed resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and the exile of hundreds of thousands of civilians who fled the violence.

President Bush was re-elected in 2004, defeating Democratic Party candidate Senator John Kerry. Unlike the 2000 presidential election, Bush won 3.5 million more popular votes than his opponent.

During his second term as president, Bush came under intense political pressure and national and international scrutiny resulting from the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were ever uncovered in Iraq. In 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell testified before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and stated that the United States received faulty intelligence regarding Iraq’s possession of WMD. Powell resigned the same year and was replaced by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. The Bush administration sustained further political damage as a result of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, which involved internationally published photographs of US military personnel abusing Iraqi inmates at prison facilities in Iraq. This scandal, combined with the raging civil violence that occurred in Iraq in the years following the invasion, resulted in the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in December 2006.

During this time, Bush and several federal agencies were also criticized for the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, the costliest natural disaster in US history. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina, a category 3 hurricane, struck land near New Orleans, Louisiana, and affected Mississippi and Alabama as well. The catastrophe caused the deaths of more than 1,800 people and more than $125 billion dollars in damage. More than 1.5 million people were forced to evacuate from areas affected by the storm. Bush was vacationing in Texas and at first did not seem aware of or concerned about the disaster’s impact; his dispute with Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco over command of local National Guard troops delayed the group’s efforts to evacuate survivors and get needed relief supplies to the area.

In January 2007, President Bush ordered an additional twenty thousand US troops to Iraq to quell the widespread violence in the country. The so-called Troop Surge was aimed at putting an end to the ongoing military conflict taking place against various sectarian militias. As a result of the surge, and an increased effort by US officials to make diplomatic arrangements with various militia groups, violence in Iraq and in major Iraqi cities began to subside from previous levels in late 2007 and early 2008. Although improvements on the ground in Iraq resulted in few civilian and military deaths, the controversial nature of the planning and execution of the Iraq war continued.

President Bush’s nationwide approval ratings began to decrease in the years following his re-election, as a result of the ongoing problems in Iraq. The Bush administration also began to come under intense criticism as the subprime mortgage crisis in the US evolved into the global financial crisis of 2008. The subprime mortgage crisis came about after US financial organizations began to realize they had granted housing loans to customers that could not meet the terms of their mortgages. Hundreds of thousands of homeowners nationwide began to default, or fail to make payments on, their mortgages. Subsequently, evidence that major banking institutions had made risky bets on extremely complex financial products began to be uncovered. Critics of the Bush administration cited the White House’s history of deregulating the financial industry as one of the causes of this problem. For the first time in several decades, the federal government had to take major steps to bail out some of the nation’s largest financial institutions to prevent them from collapse, an event that would have destroyed the US economy and one that would have had untold repercussions worldwide.

Bush’s second term in office ended in January 2009. It is likely that his response to the September 11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina, the controversial initiation and execution of the Iraq War, and the 2008 global financial crisis will remain the most significant and influential legacies of his presidency.

In 2013, the George W. Bush Presidential Center, which includes the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, was opened in Dallas, Texas. In the years following, Bush published a biography of his father, titled 41: A Portrait of My Father (2014), and turned to painting as a hobby, producing controversial portraits of veterans involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were displayed in small museums throughout the country. In June 2024, the George W. Bush Institute loaned sixty of Bush's portraits of veterans to Walt Disney World, which put them on display at Epcot's American Adventure pavilion for a year.

Americans' mixed feelings over the legacy of Bush's presidency became prominent once more in 2019, when debates ensued over high-profile celebrity Ellen DeGeneres's defense of her friendship with the former president. While some commentators supported the relationship, others used it to further criticize his policies, particularly regarding the war in Iraq.

Following the contentious presidential election of November 2020 and the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol building, Bush put out a statement condemning the riot, which interrupted the process of congressional certification of the Electoral College. Bush attended the inauguration of President Joe Biden, a Democrat and former vice president and senator. Also in 2021, he released Out of Many, One: Portraits of America's Immigrants, a volume of oil paintings accompanied by short essays.

Bibliography

Bush, George W. Decision Points. Crown, 2010.

Dietrich, John W., ed. The George W. Bush Foreign Policy Reader: Presidential Speeches with Commentary. Routledge, 2015.

Draper, Robert. Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush. Free, 2007.

"George W. Bush's Portraits of Veterans Are Heading to Disney World." AP, 1 May 2024, apnews.com/article/disney-world-george-w-bush-veterans-e634bed15861a9600ced0383964fcdf2. Accessed 9 July 2024.

Harrington, Walt. “Dubya and Me: Over the Course of a Quarter-Century, a Journalist Witnessed the Transformation of George W. Bush.” American Scholar, vol. 80, no. 4, 2011, pp. 20–34.

Kelley, Donald R., et al., eds. Taking the Measure: The Presidency of George W. Bush. Texas A&M UP, 2013.

Leffler, Melvyn P. “The Foreign Policies of the George W. Bush Administration: Memoirs, History, Legacy.” Diplomatic History vol. 37, no. 2, 2013, pp. 190–216.

Mann, James. George W. Bush. Times, 2015.

Ngo, Madeleine. "'I Was Sick to My Stomach': George W. Bush Denounces Capitol Riot in a New Interview." The New York Times, 18 Mar. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/us/george-w-bush-capitol-riot.html. Accessed 9 July 2024.

Watkins, Eli, and Jamie Gangel. "George W. Bush Discovers His 'Inner Rembrandt' in Homage to Veterans." CNN Politics, 27 Feb. 2017, www.cnn.com/2017/02/27/politics/george-w-bush-paintings/index.html. Accessed 9 July 2024.

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