George W. Bush biography
Date of birth : 1946-07-06
Date of death : -
Birthplace : New Haven, Connecticut, United States
Nationality : American
Category : Politics
Last modified : 2010-07-06
Credited as : Politician, Former President of the United States,
8 votes so far
Early life
Bush was the oldest of six children of George Bush, who served as the 41st president of the United States (1989–93), and Barbara Bush. His paternal grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U.S. senator from Connecticut (1952–63). The younger Bush grew up largely in Midland and Houston, Texas. From 1961 to 1964 he attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., the boarding school from which his father had 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, whose members were less likely than regular soldiers to fight in the Vietnam War. 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. Although Bush apparently missed at least eight months of duty between May 1972 and May 1973, he was granted an early discharge so that he could start Harvard business school in the fall of 1973. His spotty military record resurfaced as a campaign issue in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.
fter 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, 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 had begun the previous year, after a conversation with the Rev. Billy Graham, a Bush family friend.
After the sale of his company, Bush spent 18 months in Washington, D.C., working as an adviser and speechwriter in his father's presidential campaign. Following the election, he moved to Dallas, where he and a former business partner organized a group of investors to purchase 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. A major issue in the campaign concerned Bush's sale of all his Harken stock in June 1990, just days before the company completed a second quarter with heavy losses. An investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 1991 into the possibility of illegal insider trading (trading that takes advantage of information not available to the public) did not uncover any wrongdoing. Bush won the election with 53 percent of the vote (compared with 46 percent for Richards), thus becoming the first child of a U.S. president to be elected a state governor.
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. 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 Bush received international attention for the brisk use of capital punishment in Texas relative to other states. 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.” Reelected in 1998 with nearly 70 percent of the vote, Bush became the first Texas governor to win consecutive four-year terms (in 1972 voters had approved a referendum that extended the governor's term from two years to four).
Bush formally announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in June 1999. He described his political philosophy as “compassionate conservatism,” a view that combined traditional Republican economic policies with concern for the underprivileged. Despite Bush's refusal to give direct answers to questions about his drinking and possible use of illegal drugs (he implied that he had not used illegal drugs since 1974), he won the Republican nomination, taking a strong lead in public opinion polls over Vice Pres. Al Gore, the Democratic Party nominee; Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate; and political journalist Patrick Buchanan, the nominee of the Reform Party. His running mate was Dick Cheney, former chief of staff for Pres. Gerald Ford and secretary of defense during the presidency of Bush's father.
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 them. 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”—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 (one Gore elector abstained).
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). ( primary source document: First Inaugural Address.)
Presidency
Early initiatives
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 strength, Bush proposed a $1.6 trillion tax-cut bill in February 2001. A compromise measure worth $1.35 billion was passed by Congress in June, despite Democratic objections that it unfairly benefited the wealthy. In the same month, however, control of the Senate formally passed to the Democrats after Republican Sen. James Jeffords left his party to become an independent. Subsequently, many of Bush's domestic initiatives encountered significant resistance in the Senate.
In a report issued in May 2001, the National Energy Policy Development Group, a task force headed by Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, called for increasing the production of fossil fuels and nuclear power in the country by opening more federal lands to mining and oil and gas exploration, extending tax credits and other subsidies to energy companies, and easing environmental regulations. In July a coalition of nonprofit organizations filed suit to make public the secret deliberations of the task force and the identities of the groups it met with. (The case was decided in the administration's favour by the Supreme Court in June 2004.)
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, which the United States had signed 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 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and attempted to secure commitments from various governments not to extradite U.S. citizens to the new International Criminal Court, whose jurisdiction it rejected.
The September 11 attacks
On September 11, 2001, Bush faced a crisis that would transform his presidency. That morning, 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, Pa., after passengers apparently attempted to retake it ( September 11 attacks). The crashes—the worst terrorist incident on U.S. soil—killed some 3,000 people.
The Bush administration accused radical Islamist Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, al-Qaeda (Arabic: “the Base”), of responsibility for the attacks and charged the Taliban government of Afghanistan with harbouring bin Laden and his followers (in a videotape in 2004, bin Laden acknowledged that he was responsible). After assembling an international military coalition, Bush ordered a massive bombing campaign against Afghanistan, which began on Oct. 7, 2001. U.S.-led forces quickly toppled the Taliban government and routed al-Qaeda fighters, though bin Laden himself remained elusive. In the wake of the September 11 attacks and during the war in Afghanistan, Bush's public-approval ratings were the highest of his presidency, reaching 90 percent in some polls.
Immediately after the September 11 attacks, domestic security and the threat of terrorism became the chief focus of the Bush administration and the top priority of government at every level. Declaring a global “war on terrorism,” Bush announced that the country would not rest until “every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” ( primary source document: Declaration of War on Terrorism.) To coordinate the government's domestic response, the administration formed a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, which began operating on Jan. 24, 2003.
In June 2006 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, declared that the system of military commissions that the administration had intended to use to try selected prisoners at Guantánamo on charges of war crimes was in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which governs American rules of courts-martial. Later that year, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which gave the commissions the express statutory basis that the court had found lacking; the law also prevented enemy combatants who were not American citizens from challenging their detention in the federal courts.
In February 2005 the CIA confirmed that some individuals in its custody had been subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding (simulated drowning), which was generally regarded as a form of torture under international law. The CIA's position that waterboarding did not constitute torture had been based on the legal opinions of the Justice Department and specifically on a secret memo issued in 2002 that adopted an unconventionally narrow and legally questionable definition of torture. After the memo was leaked to the press in June 2004, the Justice Department rescinded its opinion. In 2005, however, the department issued new secret memos declaring the legality of enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. The new memos were revealed in news reports in 2007, prompting outrage from critics of the administration. In July 2007 Bush issued an executive order that prohibited the CIA from using torture or acts of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, though the specific interrogation techniques it was allowed to use remained classified. In March 2008 Bush vetoed a bill directed specifically at the CIA that would have prevented the agency from using any interrogation technique, such as waterboarding, that was not included in the U.S. Army's field manual on interrogation.
The Iraq War
Road to war
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.
At the same time, Bush and other high administration officials began to draw worldwide attention to Iraqi Pres. addm ussein and to suspicions that Iraq possessed or was attempting 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 afterward 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 to secure support from other Security Council members for a second resolution explicitly authorizing the use of force against Iraq (though administration officials insisted that earlier resolutions provided sufficient legal justification for military action). In response, France and Russia, while agreeing that Iraq had failed to cooperate fully with weapons inspectors, argued that the inspections regime should be continued and strengthened.
As part of the administration's diplomatic campaign, Bush and other officials frequently warned that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, that it was attempting to acquire nuclear weapons, and that it had long-standing ties to al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. In his State of the Union address in January 2003, Bush announced that Iraq had attempted to purchase enriched uranium from Niger for use in nuclear weapons. The subsequent determination that some intelligence reports of the purchase had relied on forged documents complicated the administration's diplomatic efforts in the United Nations. Meanwhile, massive peace demonstrations took place in several major cities around the world.
Occupation and insurgency
Although the Bush administration had planned for a short war, stabilizing the country after the invasion proved difficult. From May 1, when Bush declared an end to major combat in Iraq, to the end of December 2003, more than 200 U.S. soldiers were killed as a result of attacks by Iraqis. During the next four years the number of U.S. casualties increased dramatically, reaching more than 900 in 2007 alone. (The number of Iraqis who died during the invasion or the insurgency is uncertain.) Widespread sectarian violence, accompanied by regular and increasingly deadly attacks on military, police, and civilian targets by militias and terrorist organizations, made large parts of the country virtually ungovernable. The increasing numbers of U.S. dead and wounded, the failure to uncover weapons of mass destruction, and the enormous cost to U.S. taxpayers (approximately $10 billion per month through 2007) gradually eroded public support for the war; by 2005 a clear majority of Americans believed that it had been a mistake. By the fifth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2008, some 4,000 U.S. soldiers had been killed. As the death toll mounted, Bush's public-approval ratings dropped, falling below 30 percent in many polls.
While acknowledging that it had underestimated the tenacity of the Iraqi resistance, the Bush administration maintained that part of the blame for the continuing violence lay with Iran, which it accused of supplying weapons and money to Iraqi-based terrorist groups. In his State of the Union address in 2002, Bush had warned that Iran (along with Iraq and North Korea) was part of an “axis of evil” that threatened the world with its support of terrorism and its ambition to acquire nuclear weapons. In 2006–07 the United States joined other members of the Security Council in condemning Iran's nuclear research program. The administration's repeated warnings concerning a possible Iranian nuclear weapon led to speculation that Bush was contemplating military action against the country. In December 2007, however, the administration's suspicions were contradicted by the National Intelligence Estimate, a consensus report of U.S. intelligence agencies, which declared with “high confidence” that in 2003 Iran had abandoned attempts to develop a nuclear weapon.
Foreign aid
In his State of the Union address in January 2003, Bush proposed an ambitious program to address the humanitarian crisis created by the HIV/AIDS pandemic in 15 countries in Africa and the Caribbean. With a budget of $15 billion over a five-year period, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) aimed to supply life-extending medications to 2 million victims of HIV/AIDS, to prevent 7 million new cases of the disease, and to provide care for 10 million AIDS sufferers and the orphaned children of AIDS victims. The program was widely praised in the United States, even by Bush's critics, and generated enormous goodwill toward the Bush administration in Africa. Medical professionals and public health officials welcomed the greater availability of retroviral drugs but generally objected to the program's requirement that one-third of prevention funds be spent on teaching sexual abstinence and marital fidelity.
In January 2004 the Bush administration established the Millennium Challenge Corporation to distribute development aid to poor countries that demonstrated a commitment to democracy, free enterprise, and transparent governance. The agency's innovative approach allowed recipient countries to design and manage their own multiyear programs to reduce poverty and promote economic growth. By 2008 the corporation had approved some $5 billion in grant requests, though relatively little of the money had been dispersed.
The Bush administration's foreign aid programs were designed to serve its declared foreign policy goal of promoting democracy abroad, especially in parts of the world plagued by poverty and war. In eastern Europe, Bush supported expanding the membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as a means of securing democracy and stability in war-ravaged or formerly communist countries. During his presidency NATO gained seven new members: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
Domestic affairs
In December 2001 Bush successfully negotiated with the Democratic-controlled Senate legislation that provided federal funding to religious, or “faith-based,” charities and social services. The measure, he argued, would end long-standing discrimination in federal funding against churches and other religious groups that provided needed social services in poor communities. The bill was passed by the Senate despite objections from many Democratic senators that it violated the constitutional separation of church and state. A White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives was created in January 2001.
In 2002 the U.S. economy continued to perform poorly, despite having recovered from a recession the previous November. Widespread corporate accounting scandals, some of the largest corporate bankruptcies in U.S. history, and fears over war and terrorism all contributed to consumer uncertainty and a prolonged downturn in the financial markets. Despite the economic turmoil, Bush's personal popularity enabled the Republicans to regain a majority in the Senate in midterm elections in November 2002 (though the party also lost three state governorships). With both houses of Congress under Republican control, Bush secured passage of a second tax cut of $350 billion in May 2003.
Environmental and science policy
The Bush administration's environmental policies reflected its conviction that economic development could be accomplished without serious harm to the environment and that limits on development, where necessary, should be achieved through voluntary cooperation by industry rather than regulation by government. In keeping with the recommendations of the energy task force, the administration's proposed Clear Skies Act would have introduced a cap-and-trade system to regulate major sources of air pollution by power plants throughout the country. Although the measure would have reduced emissions of nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and mercury by 70 percent by 2016, critics charged that the reductions were less than what would be achieved by enforcing the existing Clean Air Act. Largely because of disagreements about whether the Clear Skies Act should regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, the measure died in the Senate in 2005. Despite this setback, the administration soon implemented the Clean Air Interstate Rule, a regional cap-and-trade system for 28 Eastern states and the District of Columbia.
After the Supreme Court ruled in April 2007 that greenhouse gas emissions by automobiles constitute a form of air pollution under the Clean Air Act, Bush signed energy legislation that imposed increases in automobile fuel economy standards by the year 2020. In December, however, the Environmental Protection Agency blocked a proposal by California and 16 other states to issue regulations that would have required fuel economies greater than those called for in the new federal law.
The Bush administration was frequently accused of politically motivated interference in government scientific research. Critics charged that political appointees at various agencies, many of whom had little or no relevant expertise, altered or suppressed scientific reports that did not promote administration policies, restricted the ability of government experts to speak publicly on certain scientific issues, and limited access to scientific information by policy makers and the public. Numerous complaints by environmental and scientific groups led to Congressional hearings in 2007 on political interference in the work of the Surgeon General of the United States and in research on climate change conducted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In most cases the administration claimed that the interventions were an appropriate attempt to ensure scientific objectivity or simply a benign exercise of the authority of political appointees.
Later developments and assessment
2006 elections
The continued lack of progress in the Iraq War, a series of corruption scandals involving prominent Republican politicians, and the administration's poor response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and surrounding areas in August 2005 helped the Democrats win control of both houses of Congress in the midterm elections of November 2006. The new Congress soon began investigations of the NSA spying program undertaken in 2002 and of allegedly improper political influence in the dismissals of several United States attorneys in December 2006. In the latter investigation the testimony of Alberto R. Gonzales, Bush's attorney general since 2005, was viewed with skepticism by both parties and reinforced the impression that the Justice Department under his leadership was not sufficiently independent of the White House. Gonzales resigned in August 2007 and was replaced in November with Michael Mukasey.
The Plame affair
In March 2007 Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby, was convicted on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in connection with an investigation into the leak of the identity of a covert CIA agent in 2003. The agent, Valerie Plame, was the wife of Joseph C. Wilson, a retired foreign service officer who had traveled to Africa in early 2002 at the request of the CIA to help determine whether Iraq had attempted to purchase enriched uranium from Niger. Wilson reported that there was no evidence of an attempted purchase, and in July 2003 he publicly speculated that the administration had ignored or distorted intelligence reports such as his to justify a military invasion of Iraq. Libby allegedly identified Plame as a CIA agent to journalists to discredit Wilson by suggesting that his selection for the CIA mission was the result of nepotism. In testimony before a grand jury and agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Libby falsely claimed that he had not discussed Plame's identity with journalists. Bush commuted Libby's 30-month prison sentence in July 2007.
During his second term Bush appointed two Supreme Court justices: John G. Roberts, Jr. (confirmed as chief justice in 2005), and Samuel A. Alito, Jr. (confirmed in 2006). The appointments increased to four the number of solidly conservative justices on the nine-member Supreme Court.
As Bush entered the final year of his presidency in 2008, the country faced enormous challenges. Although al-Qaeda had been subdued, it had not been destroyed. The United States and its allies continued to fight skirmishes with terrorists and their Taliban supporters in Afghanistan, and the insurgency in Iraq continued to claim U.S. casualties. The surpluses in the federal budget in 2000 and 2001 were a distant memory, as the combined effects of military spending, tax cuts, and slow economic growth produced a series of enormous budget deficits starting in 2003. Later in 2008 the economy was threatened by a severe credit crisis, leading Congress to enact a controversial Bush administration plan to rescue the financial industry with up to $700 billion in government funds ( Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008). Despite Bush's 2000 campaign promise to be “a uniter, not a divider,” the country remained politically polarized to an extent not seen since the Vietnam War. While Bush's critics faulted him for these problems and many others, his supporters vigorously defended him as a strong leader who had guided the country through one of the most dangerous periods in its history.
