Bush, George W.

Bush, George W. 1946-

BIBLIOGRAPHY

George Walker Bush, the forty-third president of the United States, presided over the country during the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and led the nation in the resulting overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The son of George H. W. Bush, the forty-first president of the United States, George W. was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1946 and grew up in Texas before attending the Philips Academy prep school in Andover, Massachusetts. In 1968 Bush earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale University, his father’s alma mater. After serving in the Texas Air National Guard, Bush received a Masters of Business Administration degree from Harvard Business School in 1975 and moved to Texas, where he was an executive in a series of oil-exploration ventures. He also ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1978.

In 1989 Bush bought a stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team and became the managing general partner of the team. The public visibility of this position helped him secure the Republican nomination in the 1994 Texas race for governor. He subsequently defeated the incumbent Democrat, Ann Richards, in the general election.

After being reelected as governor in 1998 by a wide margin, Bush became the leading Republican contender for the U.S. presidency. Fighting off a strong primary challenge from Senator John McCain of Arizona, Bush won the GOP nomination. During the 2000 campaign against Bill Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, Bush carefully positioned himself as a “compassionate conservative,” who supported education reform, tax cuts, and private accounts in Social Security.

On election night Gore won the popular vote, but it appeared that Bush had won the Electoral College and thus the presidency. However, Gore’s aides discovered that Florida was essentially tied, and the vice president retracted the concession he had offered Bush. Gore’s campaign quickly requested hand recounts in several counties and the election shifted into a legal battle. The Florida Supreme Court issued a decision allowing the results of such recounts to be incorporated into statewide vote totals, but the U.S. Supreme Court halted the recounts in a controversial 5 to 4 decision. With Bush still ahead in the official state count, the election was over. Bush and his father became the second father and son to both serve as president, following John Adams and John Quincy Adams.

Some observers expected Bush to govern as a centrist and seek bipartisan cooperation in response to the circumstances of his election. Instead, Bush, a self-proclaimed conservative, pushed ahead with his campaign plan for a sizeable tax cut, which was passed into law by June 2001 with significant Democratic support.

Then on September 11 of that year, members of the Al-Qaeda terrorist organization struck the United States, flying jetliners into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and crashing a fourth jet in a field in Pennsylvania. More than three thousand Americans were killed. After this national trauma, the public united behind Bush, pushing his approval ratings to unprecedented levels. Within months, U.S. air strikes helped the Northern Alliance overthrow the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had provided safe haven to Al-Qaeda’s leader Osama bin Laden and his followers. However, the United States failed to capture bin Laden.

In the fall of 2002 the Bush administration began to push for an invasion of Iraq, arguing that Iraq’s leader Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator who posed a grave threat to the United States due to his possession of weapons of mass destruction and links to Al-Qaeda. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair secured a United Nations Security Council resolution calling on Saddam to disarm and submit to weapons inspections. Yet Saddam continued to resist the inspections, and in response the United States and the United Kingdom called for military action against Iraq. Independent observers and many foreign countries questioned the Bush administration’s claims about Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al-Qaeda. The United States and the United Kingdom failed to secure a second United Nations resolution approving military action against Iraq, but decided to invade without it, beginning the attack on March 20, 2003. Saddam’s regime quickly fell with minimal casualties, and Saddam himself was captured on December 13.

The occupation of Iraq proved more difficult than anticipated. A governing regime was set up, and elections were held, but an insurgency composed of disaffected Iraqis and foreign jihadists became an increasingly deadly threat to coalition forces. By spring 2006, more than two thousand U.S. troops had died in Iraq, and a majority of Americans told pollsters that the war had been a mistake. In addition, convincing evidence that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction at the time of the invasion was never found, nor was hard evidence of operational links between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Over time, Bush increasingly emphasized the cause of creating a democracy in Iraq, which had received relatively little attention before the war.

In the domestic arena, Bush passed several major initiatives after September 11, including the No Child Left Behind Act (which enacted a new accountability regime of school testing), a second tax cut, and a bill adding prescription-drug coverage to Medicare.

In 2004 he defeated his Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry, in a reelection campaign that emphasized security concerns and such social issues as gay marriage. Bush won 51 percent of the vote and 286 electoral votes in the narrowest presidential reelection victory since Woodrow Wilson in 1916.

The first major initiative of Bush’s second term was an effort to create private investment accounts in Social Security, but his proposal failed to gain significant momentum in Congress. By spring 2006 Bush’s approval ratings had plunged to less than 40 percent; conservative discontent with his presidency had grown; and calls for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq had begun to mount. However, Al-Qaeda had not successfully attacked the United States again and economic growth remained relatively strong.

SEE ALSO Al-Qaeda; bin Laden, Osama; Bush, George H. W.; Electoral College; Hussein, Saddam; Iraq-U.S. War; Republican Party; September 11, 2001; Taliban; United Nations

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boston Globe Web site. Campaign 2004: George W. Bush. http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/bush/.

Washington Post Web site. 2004 election: George W. Bush. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/politics/elections/2004/georgewbush/.

Brendan Nyhan