President of the United States

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Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush

Republican Gerald Ford and Democrat Jimmy Carter, Nixon’s immediate successors, failed to reestablish presidential authority. For the remainder of the 1970s Congress eclipsed the presidency as the focus of national politics. Ford, under a cloud because of his decision to pardon Nixon, lost the election of 1976 to Carter after only two years and three months in office. Republican Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, after Carter failed to free Americans held hostage in Iran and to solve a shortage of gasoline and other energy sources.

Reagan restored the influence of the presidency to what it had essentially been in the 1950s and early 1960s. He also rejuvenated the Republican Party, which had been under a cloud since the Watergate scandal.

A charming, fatherly personality with clear ideas about what he wanted to do as president, Reagan reestablished a measure of public trust and confidence in the White House. At the start of his term the worst recession since the Great Depression called into question Reagan’s policy of lower taxes and higher defense spending. The tax cuts favored wealthy Americans, and Reagan hoped the benefits would “trickle down” to the middle class and the poor. The initial failure of these policies led a majority of Americans to say that they did not want Reagan to run for a second term. When the economy began to boom in 1984, however, Reagan won a landslide victory over Walter Mondale, Carter’s vice president, who had declared himself in favor of a tax increase to reduce annual deficits of over $100 billion. The deficits continued to mount under Reagan, but the expansion of the U.S. economy contributed to his popularity and reputation for effectiveness.

Reagan made strong use of television. His background as an actor gave him unusual poise before television cameras, and his speechwriters had a knack for choosing memorable phrases. In 1985, for example, he warned that he would veto any tax increase, daring Congress to submit such legislation: “Go ahead, make my day!” Reagan borrowed the line from trigger-happy movie detective Dirty Harry, and the tough talk spoke to many Americans fed up with taxes. Reagan’s ability to convey his political views in clear, catchy terms led some to nickname him The Great Communicator.

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In addition to the strength of the economy in the mid-1980s and Reagan’s strong speaking skills, his popularity as president rested on developments in the Cold War. He began his first term by describing the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” He vowed to defy the USSR, and he initially shunned the idea of holding summit talks with Soviet leaders as most Cold War-era presidents had. When Mikhail Gorbachev became the top Soviet leader in 1985, however, and introduced radical policy changes that departed from traditional Soviet economic and political ideas, Reagan agreed to meet with him. Holding four summit conferences from 1985 to 1988, Reagan and Gorbachev presided over dramatic changes in Soviet-American relations, including unprecedented arms control agreements. By the time Reagan left office in 1989, it was clear that Communism was a dying system in the Soviet Union and that the United States had prevailed in the Cold War.

Reagan’s continuing popularity at the end of his term made it easy for his vice president, George Bush, to win the 1988 election. Bush’s one term was notable for the search for a new grand design in foreign policy to replace traditional Cold War assumptions. His successful leadership in the Persian Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 briefly sent his public approval ratings soaring to 88 percent. But a recession swelled the ranks of the unemployed in 1992, and Bush seemed unable to solve the domestic economic crisis. Democrat Bill Clinton promised to take swift action to improve the economy, and he won a narrow victory against Bush and independent candidate Ross Perot.

L

Bill Clinton

Democrat Bill Clinton failed to achieve his major domestic and foreign policy initiatives in his first term as president. Congressional leaders torpedoed Clinton’s far-reaching proposal for national health-care reform, undermining his public support. The collapse of his health-care program also led to Republican majorities in both houses of Congress in 1994, marking the first time since 1946 that the Republicans controlled the House of Representatives. During the next two years Clinton attacked conservative congressional proposals that alienated a majority of Americans and reestablished himself as an acceptable, if not highly popular, president.

In 1996, with the economy booming and the Republican Party nominating 72-year-old Robert Dole for president, the much younger Clinton became the first Democrat to win reelection to the White House since Franklin Roosevelt. Clinton’s reelection made him only the fifth president, after Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan, to achieve that distinction in the 20th century. Growing personal income and continuing business growth in 1997 and into 1998 increased government tax receipts, making it possible in 1998 for Clinton to propose the first balanced federal budget since 1969. Despite financial and economic problems besetting Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, and Brazil, the U.S. economy was strong, with unemployment levels of less than 5 percent and inflation at less than 2 percent. The U.S. stock market continued to boom, reaching unprecedented highs.

In January 1998 independent counsel Kenneth Starr began investigating allegations that Clinton had lied under oath to conceal a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. In a September 1998 report to Congress, Starr charged Clinton with obstruction of justice, lying under oath (perjury) witness tampering, and abuse of power. The House of Representatives voted on four articles of impeachment against Clinton in December 1998. The House approved two articles that accused Clinton of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Despite the scandal, the public continued to support Clinton and the Democratic Party. In 1998 congressional elections, Democratic candidates made surprising gains in the House of Representatives and maintained equal numbers in the Senate. It was the first time since 1934 that an incumbent president’s party had made gains in a midterm election. Following a monthlong trial, the Senate rejected both articles of impeachment in February 1999. Both Senate votes fell considerably short of the two-thirds majority required for a conviction.

M

George W. Bush

The 2000 presidential election between Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore, and Texas governor George W. Bush, a Republican and the son of former president George Bush, was one of the closest and most disputed elections in United States history. The morning after Election Day dawned with Florida’s results too close to call, leaving both candidates short of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. After a mandatory machine recount showed Bush winning the state by mere hundreds of votes out of some 6 million cast, Gore requested hand recounts of ballots in four heavily Democratic counties. A five-week legal battle ensued, during which state and federal courts considered a misleading ballot design, challenges to the manual recounts underway, and other election irregularities. On December 12 the Supreme Court of the United States effectively sealed Bush’s victory by ruling against further manual recounts (see Disputed Presidential Election of 2000). Bush became the first presidential candidate since Benjamin Harrison in 1888 to win the electoral vote—and thus the presidency—but lose the popular vote. Gore won the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes out of more than 105 million cast. Bush also was the first son of a president to win the White House since John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams, became president in 1825.

Bush’s victory marked the first time in nearly 50 years that Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. In the first months of his administration, Bush advocated a $1.6-trillion tax cut over ten years to return some of the federal surplus to taxpayers and stimulate a slowing economy. He largely achieved this goal in mid-2001, when Congress passed a $1.35-trillion tax cut. Around this same time, however, Bush suffered a setback when Senator James Jeffords of Vermont, a Republican, announced he would become an independent. Jeffords’s decision shifted the balance of power in the Senate to the Democrats.

Just eight months into his presidency, Bush and the nation faced a terrible new challenge. On September 11, 2001, terrorists crashed hijacked commercial jetliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, in New York City, and the Pentagon, outside Washington, D.C. (see September 11 Attacks). The coordinated terrorist strike destroyed the World Trade Center and killed about 3,000 people. United States authorities soon identified the al-Qaeda terrorist network of Saudi exile Osama bin Laden as the group responsible for the attack. Bush declared that destroying al-Qaeda and preventing future terrorist attacks would be the top priorities of his administration. In the following months, a U.S.-led coalition force launched a military offensive in Afghanistan, where bin Laden and al-Qaeda were based. Congress also passed, and Bush signed, antiterrorism legislation that significantly expanded the federal government’s surveillance powers.

A strong showing by Republicans in the 2002 midterm elections—fueled in part by Bush’s high approval ratings—enabled them to recapture control of the Senate. Combined with an enlarged Republican majority in the House, the achievement enabled Bush to more easily enact his legislative agenda. He secured another round of tax cuts and got Congress to pass a controversial prescription drug benefit for senior citizens.

In 2002 the Bush administration turned its attention to Iraq, claiming that the country supported terrorist organizations and that it illegally possessed weapons of mass destruction. Although Iraq agreed to the return of United Nations (UN) weapons inspectors, U.S. authorities charged that Iraq was not cooperating fully and was hiding banned weapons. In March 2003, despite opposition from some members of the UN Security Council, a U.S.-led military coalition invaded Iraq with the goals of destroying the country’s banned weapons and deposing Iraq’s authoritarian president, Saddam Hussein. By mid-April the Bush administration declared that Hussein’s regime was no longer in control of the country. See also U.S.-Iraq War.

Deposing the Hussein regime did not bring an end to the fighting, however. A violent insurgency continued to claim the lives of American soldiers, and by the end of 2005 more than 2,000 U.S. troops had been killed in Iraq. More troops were killed after Bush declared an end to major combat in May 2003 than were killed during the invasion itself.

President Bush faced criticism for failing to plan adequately for the transition to a new Iraqi regime. The original reason for the invasion also came under a cloud. A U.S. weapons inspection team, known as the Iraqi Survey Group led by David Kay, failed to find any of the weapons of mass destruction alleged by the Bush administration. In January 2004 Kay resigned from the group, saying “we were all wrong, probably” about the existence of such weapons.

The Iraq war was part of a radical shift in U.S. foreign policy. President Bush became the first U.S. president to articulate a strategy of “preventive war” in which he asserted the right to launch a war to “confront the worst threats before they emerge.” Since the end of World War II (1939-1945), American presidents were guided by a strategy of deterrence and containment to protect national security. President Bush believed that such a strategy was inadequate in a period when terrorists, protected by other countries, could launch surprise attacks on the United States.

As Bush sought reelection in 2004, he faced a mounting deficit, an uneven economic recovery marked by an overall loss of jobs, and increasing criticism for his handling of Iraq. Despite these setbacks, Bush won a second term as president, fending off a challenge from Democratic Senator John Kerry in an election marked by the highest voter turnout in more than three decades. In addition to narrowly winning the electoral vote, Bush won the popular vote by a margin of 51 percent to Kerry’s 48 percent. Bush drew much of his support from voters who endorsed his conservative views on social issues, such as opposition to abortion and gay marriage, and from those who felt he could best protect the country from terrorism.

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