George Bush

I

Introduction

George Bush, born in 1946, 43rd president of the United States (2001- ), who took office after one of the closest and most disputed elections in U.S. history and launched a war against terrorism after a devastating terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. Bush was reelected in 2004, defeating Democratic opponent John F. Kerry by sweeping the South and winning the key battleground state of Ohio.

When he took office, George Walker Bush, son of former president George Herbert Walker Bush, became the first son to follow his father into the White House since John Quincy Adams followed John Adams in the early 19th century. Bush, a Republican, was also the first presidential candidate since Benjamin Harrison in 1888 to win the electoral vote, and thus the presidency, while losing the nationwide popular vote. Bush lost the popular vote to Democratic candidate Al Gore by more than 500,000 votes out of more than 105 million cast nationwide. However, he secured a 271 to 266 victory in the electoral college when, after five weeks of legal wrangling, Gore failed to overturn election results that gave the state of Florida, with 25 electoral votes, to Bush. See also Disputed Presidential Election of 2000.

As president, Bush faced the challenges of global terrorism. After the September 11 attacks, he declared a war against terrorism, pledging to defeat those who threatened the security of the United States. Bush led a coalition of countries into Afghanistan to topple the Taliban government, which had harbored al-Qaeda, the international terrorist network responsible for the September 11 attacks. In a controversial decision, he also directed a U.S. invasion of Iraq to remove President Saddam Hussein from power. Bush alleged that Hussein was an ally of al-Qaeda and possessed weapons of mass destruction that represented a growing threat to the United States. But after the invasion no weapons of mass destruction were found, and in September 2003 Bush told a group of reporters there was “no evidence” that Hussein was linked to the September 11 attacks. Domestically Bush confronted a slowing economy when he first took office, and he successfully advocated for tax cuts in an effort to stimulate economic growth. The U.S. economy rebounded, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average reached a record high during Bush’s second term.

II

Early Life

George Walker Bush was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, the first child of George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara Pierce Bush. His grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a Wall Street financier who was elected to the Senate of the United States from Connecticut in 1952. Although George Herbert Walker Bush began his career in the oil industry, he eventually served as a congressman, head of the Republican National Committee, ambassador to the United Nations, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and vice president and president of the United States.

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At the age of two, Bush moved with his parents from Connecticut to Odessa, Texas, where his father embarked on a career in the petroleum business. After a year in Texas, the family relocated to California for business reasons. A year later, the family moved back to Texas and settled in Midland, a town in western Texas located about 500 km (300 mi) from Fort Worth. Bush lived in Midland from 1950 to 1959. In 1953 his younger sister Robin, the next oldest child in the family, died from leukemia. After her death, Bush grew especially close to his mother. He had four other siblings: brothers Jeb, Neil, and Marvin, and a sister, Dorothy. In 1959, again for business reasons, the family moved to Houston, Texas. In 1961 Bush left Texas and went to Andover, Massachusetts, to attend Phillips Academy, a boarding school that his father had also attended.

At Phillips, Bush played basketball, baseball, and football. He was best known for being head cheerleader and commissioner of an intramural stickball league. In 1964 he enrolled at Yale University in Connecticut; his father and grandfather had also attended Yale. That same year, Bush campaigned for his father in his unsuccessful bid to win a U.S. Senate seat from Texas.

At Yale, Bush was considered an average student, but he was popular with his classmates. He was head of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and a member of the exclusive Skull and Bones, a secret society that his father and grandfather had also joined. During Bush’s time at Yale, college students all over the country began to hold protests about a variety of issues, including protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War (1959-1975). Bush was uncomfortable with the growth of the student protest movement, and he generally refrained from participating in campus politics. In 1968 he campaigned on behalf of his father, who was running for reelection for a seat in the House of Representatives that he had won in 1966.

Bush graduated from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1968. Upon completing college, he became eligible for the military draft. To meet his service obligation, Bush enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard in 1968. He told the admitting officer that he wanted to become a pilot like his father, who was a highly decorated Navy flier in World War II (1939-1945). He did his basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, and entered a pilot-training program at Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta, Georgia. He received favorable reports from his superiors, attained the rank of second lieutenant, and was certified to fly the F-102 jet fighter during training missions in the South and along the Gulf Coast. After Bush failed to take a required annual physical examination in 1972, however, he lost his certification to fly. Bush remained in the Air National Guard until 1973.

During the early 1970s, Bush worked on U.S. Senate campaigns for Republican candidates in Florida and Alabama. He also worked for a Houston-based firm that specialized in large-scale agricultural operations. In addition, Bush was involved in a mentoring program for children in inner-city Houston. During this time, he flirted with the idea of running for state representative in Texas but decided against it. In 1973 he was admitted to Harvard Business School in Massachusetts.

III

Early Career

After earning his M.B.A. from Harvard in 1975, Bush returned to Midland. Like his father, he first entered the oil industry as a “landman,” someone who helps organize oil-drilling ventures by bringing together geologists, property owners, and investors. In this position, Bush searched property records, studied geological reports, and negotiated deals.

In 1977 Bush announced that he was running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Shortly after he declared his candidacy, he met Laura Welch, a Midland native who worked as a librarian and an elementary-school teacher. In November 1977, three months after they met, the couple wed. Bush became the Republican congressional candidate after a tough primary race, but he lost the general election in 1978. His Democratic opponent attacked Bush as an outsider and a newcomer who did not understand the needs of voters in Texas. Bush captured the financial and political support of the oil industry, but his opponent won the support of rural and agricultural voters.

After his loss, Bush resumed his career in the oil industry, starting a series of small, independent oil-exploration companies, including Arbusto Energy Inc. (Arbusto is the Spanish word for “bush.”) In 1980 he again campaigned on behalf of his father, who had been chosen as the vice-presidential running mate of Ronald Reagan. (Reagan won the election, and Bush’s father went on to serve two terms as vice president.) In 1981 Bush and his wife became the parents of twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, who were named for their grandmothers. Although he was raised as an Episcopalian, Bush began worshiping as a Methodist, the denomination of his wife.

Bush’s oil companies never enjoyed great success. He changed the name of Arbusto Energy to Bush Exploration and spent time in New York attracting investors. In 1984, however, his company merged with a larger company, Spectrum 7. Bush became chairman of Spectrum 7, but the company was hurt by falling oil prices. In 1986 it was folded into Harken Energy Corporation, another Texas petroleum company. Bush served as a consultant and a member of Harken’s board of directors.

In 1987 Bush relocated his family to Washington, D.C., to assist his father in his bid to become president. He worked as a campaign adviser at his father’s national campaign headquarters, serving as a liaison to the media and to conservative and Christian leaders. He was a trusted confidant of his father and mother, who sometimes dispatched Bush to measure the loyalty of certain campaign aides and members of the vice president’s staff. He also campaigned across the country, sometimes appearing as a surrogate for his father. After his father won the election, Bush served as an adviser to the president-elect. He helped oversee a group that decided which individuals might be offered posts in the Bush administration.

After the election, Bush moved to Dallas, Texas, and purchased a small interest in the Texas Rangers baseball team in 1989. He became one of the managing general partners of the baseball team and agreed to serve as the public spokesperson for the ownership group. Bush’s affiliation with the team raised his profile in Texas. In 1990 he explored, but then abandoned, the idea of a bid for the Texas governor’s office. During his time with the Rangers, he oversaw the building of a new baseball stadium in Arlington, Texas. Bush, a lifelong baseball fan, was extremely happy during his tenure with the team.

During the early 1990s, Bush repeatedly traveled to Washington, D.C., to confer with his father—the president—and to offer his advice. They discussed various members of the elder Bush’s White House staff. During his father’s time in the White House, Bush was the subject of a Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) inquiry. The SEC investigated whether Bush had engaged in insider trading when he sold Harken Energy stock shortly before Harken announced financial losses. The investigation ended with no proof of wrongdoing. In the 1992 presidential race, Bush again campaigned on behalf of his father; the elder Bush lost the election to Democrat Bill Clinton. After his father’s defeat, Bush turned his attention to his own political ambitions in Texas and began a regular series of meetings with advisers in Dallas to plan a run for the office of governor.

IV

Governor of Texas

In 1994 Bush ran for governor against popular Democratic governor Ann Richards. The gubernatorial race was a hard fought, sometimes bitter, contest. Bush’s campaign focused on four themes: welfare reform, tort reform, crime reduction, and education improvement. Bush worked hard to sell himself as a Texan, vowing not to be defeated by the same outsider perception that had helped derail his 1978 bid for Congress. He crisscrossed the state, accusing his opponent of spending too much time away from Texas. In an upset, he defeated Richards with 53.5 percent of the vote.

Because the Texas constitution limits the authority of the governor’s office, Bush turned his attention to gaining the confidence of powerful Democrats, especially the lieutenant governor and the speaker of the house. Bush needed to form alliances with Democrats in order to accomplish his goals. After winning their backing, he successfully pushed plans to cut welfare rosters, lower punitive damages in lawsuits, and return control of schools to local municipalities. Critics said he neglected environmental concerns, children’s health insurance, and rising poverty. Nonetheless, toward the end of his first term, a number of high-ranking elected Democrats in Texas, including several Hispanic politicians, publicly gave their support to Bush.

During his first term, Bush faced glaring national and international exposure when a convicted pick-ax murderer named Karla Faye Tucker was scheduled to be executed in Texas in February 1998. Representatives of the Vatican, evangelist Pat Robertson, and others petitioned Bush to grant Tucker a reprieve. Bush declined, however, and the execution proceeded as scheduled. Tucker was the first woman put to death in Texas since the Civil War (1861-1865). Most studies indicated that voters in Texas supported the death penalty.

Throughout Bush’s first term, national attention increasingly focused on him as a future presidential candidate. He made a well-publicized appearance at an Indianapolis, Indiana, gathering of national Republican leaders in 1997, and speculation about his presidential ambitions began to increase. Bush repeatedly said that his sole focus was being elected to another term as Texas governor. In 1998 the Texas Rangers were sold, and Bush earned an estimated $15 million.

In his 1998 reelection campaign, Bush ran against Texas land commissioner Garry Mauro. Mauro, long affiliated with environmental issues in Texas, continued to focus on those issues while Bush began describing himself as a “compassionate conservative.” Some Texas Democrats felt that Bush was intruding on traditional Democratic turf when he began advocating raising salaries for teachers. Bush aggressively courted the minority vote in Texas, making repeated visits to traditional Hispanic and Democratic strongholds such as the city of El Paso. Bush won his 1998 reelection race with a record 69 percent of the vote, becoming the first governor in Texas history to be elected to two consecutive four-year terms. Bush earned 49 percent of the Hispanic vote and 73 percent of the independent vote, both considered records for a Republican candidate. National speculation about Bush’s presidential possibilities soared after his reelection.

Increasing national and international attention to the death penalty marked Bush’s second term as governor because Texas leads the nation in the number of inmate executions. However, Bush enjoyed high approval ratings among Texas voters, and he presided over the state during a time of general prosperity. During his second term as governor, he talked more about his philosophy of using faith-based organizations to do the work traditionally done by government. He urged more freedom for churches, synagogues, and mosques to provide social services and to perform work that state and federal agencies had previously done. Some analysts said his philosophy was a direct outgrowth of his belief that many of society’s problems could be traced to a moral decline and an over-reliance on government that had begun in the 1960s.

Throughout Bush’s second term, his critics contended that his plans to spur private-sector solutions to society’s problems were destroying the safety net that the government provided for poor people in Texas. His critics also said that, under his watch, Texas continued to rank near the bottom of statistical evaluations of the environment, children’s health insurance, and childhood hunger. Bush’s supporters lauded his efforts to raise teacher salaries, and studies indicated that educational test scores had improved under his administration. Throughout his second term, Bush stressed that one of his primary goals was to ensure that every child in Texas would know how to read.

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