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BUSH, George W(alker)
(1946– ),
43d president of the U.S. (2001– ).
The eldest son of George H. W. Bush, 41st president of the U.S.
(1989–93), he is the first son of a former president to
win the White House since John Quincy Adams in 1824.
Born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Conn., he spent
most of his childhood first in Midland and then in Houston, Tex. He
earned his undergraduate degree from Yale, the same university his
father had attended, and fulfilled his military service requirement
with the Texas Air National Guard (1968-73). After earning a master’s
degree in business administration from the Harvard Business School, he
returned to Midland in 1975, hoping, like his father, to make his
fortune in the oil industry. In 1977 he married a schoolteacher and
librarian, Laura Welch (1946- ). He lost a bid for the U.S. House of
Representatives the following year.
Bush's rapid financial and political ascent did not
begin until 1986, when he turned 40, swore off alcohol, and renewed his
Christian faith. A business deal with Harken Oil and Gas, a
Dallas-based firm, offered him the financial stake he needed, and after
assisting in his father’s 1988 presidential campaign, he became
managing partner of the Texas Rangers professional baseball team in
1989. He was elected governor of Texas in 1994, unseating a popular
Democrat incumbent, and won a landslide reelection victory in 1998, the
same year his brother Jeb Bush (1953- ) was elected governor of
Florida.
Campaigning as a “compassionate conservative” in
2000, Bush won the Republican presidential nomination and, together
with his vice-presidential running mate, Richard B. Cheney, went
on to defeat the Democratic ticket of Al Gore and Joseph I. Lieberman.
The victory was not sealed until, with the aid of a mid-December
ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court, Florida’s electoral
votes were safely credited to Bush’s column. The presidential
contest was the first since 1888 in which the electoral-college
winner failed to finish first in the popular vote. After the Supreme
Court ruling, Bush stressed the theme of reconciliation, noting
that he was “not elected to serve one party, but to serve
the nation.”
Bush took office on Jan. 20, 2001, and enjoyed an early
legislative success when Congress passed a $1.35-trillion tax-reduction
measure, intended to stimulate the lagging U.S. economy. For the first
four months of his term, the president’s Republican allies controlled
both the House and the Senate. That changed when Vermont Senator James
M. (Jim) Jeffords (1934- ) announced that he would leave the Republican
party and become an independent, shifting the balance in the Senate to
the Democrats. In August, Bush dealt with a growing national
controversy between medical researchers and antiabortion groups by
agreeing to authorize federal funds for human embryonic stem cell
research, but only for cell lines that already existed on Aug. 9, 2001.
IIn foreign affairs, the administration broke with its
allies by opposing measures that would curtail global warming and
enforce a ban on biological weapons, and by signaling its intention to
withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to build a
large-scale missile-defense system. While Bush had relatively little
foreign policy and national security experience, he assembled a
seasoned team of advisers in this area that included Cheney, Secretary
of State Colin Powell, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice,
all of whom had served in his father’s administration, and Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who held the same post under President Gerald R. Ford.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush confronted a
challenge previously faced by no U.S. president: responding to a
surprise aerial assault against two major metropolitan areas on the
U.S. mainland. Unlike the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, this
onslaught came not from the air force of a foreign government but from
terrorists who, acting in concert, hijacked four large commercial
aircraft and used them as weapons against U.S. civilian and military
targets. Two of the aircraft rammed the twin towers of the World Trade
Center in New York City, leading to the collapse of the two 110-story
structures; a third jetliner struck Department of Defense headquarters
at the Pentagon, near Washington, D.C., seriously damaging one side of
the five-sided structure; and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania,
apparently brought down after the hijacked passengers struggled with
the hijackers. A total of about 3000 people lost their lives. (Because
of the extent of the World Trade Center wreckage, the exact death toll
may never be known.)
Fearful for the safety of the president, who was in
Florida when the day began, the Secret Service flew Bush to U.S. Air
Force bases in Louisiana and Nebraska, while Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld,
and other top administration officials remained in Washington. Bush
returned to the White House to give a nationally televised address that
night in which he pledged that the U.S. would find and punish the
perpetrators and would "make no distinction between the terrorists who
committed these acts and those who harbor them."
Blaming the attack on al-Qaeda, an Islamic extremist
group led by a wealthy Saudi businessman, Osama bin Laden, the Bush
administration worked to organize a worldwide coalition not only
against the terrorists but also against the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan, which was harboring bin Laden. Bush and his top advisers
repeatedly cautioned that the war against terrorism would demand
patience and would be fought using financial and political as well as
military assets. In early October the U.S., with British assistance,
launched a sustained campaign of aerial bombardment against the
Taliban; by the end of the month, defense officials acknowledged that a
small number of U.S. ground troops were operating on Afghan soil.
Diplomacy associated with the war effort dominated the administration’s
revamped foreign policy agenda, and Bush journeyed to Shanghai in
October to press the U.S. case at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
(APEC) summit and in his first face-to-face talks with Chinese leaders.
On the domestic front, Congress passed and Bush signed
a $40-billion emergency appropriation bill to fund military operations
and reconstruction efforts, and a $15-billion bailout package to keep
the nation’s troubled airline industry aloft. Bush also established a
new Office of Homeland Security to coordinate the antiterrorism efforts
of existing federal agencies, signed legislation that greatly expanded
the authority of federal law enforcement officials to investigate and
detain those suspected of terrorism or other illegal activities, and
took steps to deal with the bioterrorist threat (see Chemical and
Biological Warfare) posed by anthrax-contaminated letters that had been
mailed to several U.S. media firms and public figures. Meanwhile, the
administration moved to address the broader economic impact of the war,
which had turned the U.S. economic slowdown into a full-fledged
recession.
Despite the ailing economy, Bush’s poll ratings
remained high throughout 2002. A series of major bankruptcies and
corporate scandals involving Enron (the nation’s largest marketer of
electricity and natural gas), WorldCom (a multinational
telecommunications firm), and other companies led Bush to reshape his
domestic legislative agenda, approving measures that toughened
corporate accounting standards and imposed new limits on big-money
contributions to political campaigns. To aid the war against terrorism,
he proposed the most comprehensive reorganization of the executive
branch since the late 1940s. The plan, which called for the
establishment of a cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security, was
enacted by Congress in November, after the midterm election. Democrats
had hoped to focus the congressional campaign on the economy and other
domestic matters, but it was dominated by discussion of national
security issues, especially the Bush administration’s contention that
Iraq was developing nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that
threatened the U.S. as well as Iraq’s neighbors. In September, in a
speech before the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, Bush challenged
the world organization to pressure Iraq to halt its weapons programs.
The following month, the House and Senate approved a resolution
authorizing the president to take military action against Iraq, if
necessary. In late October and early November Bush campaigned for
Republican congressional candidates, and the November elections saw
Republicans consolidate their hold on the House and recapture the
Senate. In November, after lengthy negotiations, the Bush
administration won unanimous UN Security Council approval for a
resolution providing for UN weapons inspectors to return to Iraq after
a four-year absence and threatening the Iraqi government with "serious
consequences" if it failed to cooperate. In December, as the U.S.
unemployment rate climbed to 6 percent and the stock market remained
shaky, Bush put together a new economic team that was expected to focus
on a unified message and program.
During the early months of 2003, Bush authorized what
his father’s administration had chosen not to 12 years earlier: a
U.S.-led invasion of Iraq that culminated in the ouster of Saddam
Hussein and the occupation of Baghdad by American troops. In early May
Bush declared that "major combat operations" had ended but stated that
the U.S. still had "difficult work to do in Iraq"--a prediction borne
out by developments during the next seven months. At the end of April,
only 138 U.S. troops had lost their lives in the war against Iraq; by
late November the U.S. death toll had risen above 430, as remnants of
the Hussein regime, aided by Islamic extremists, launched a campaign of
sabotage and guerrilla resistance. U.S. probers found ample proof to
support Bush's prewar contention that the Baghdad regime was one of the
world’s most repressive, but they failed to produce clear evidence that
Hussein actually possessed and was prepared to use weapons of mass
destruction against the U.S. or Iraq’s neighbors. A Senate Intelligence Committee report issued in July 2004 concluded that pre-war intelligence on illicit weapons in Iraq had been seriously flawed, but Bush argued that the removal of Hussein had been a necessity to help safeguard the U.S., as well as a benefit in itself. Despite Hussein's capture in Iraq, December 2003, and the formation of a new Iraqi government in June 2004, insurgent violence continued into 2007.
The administration's Iraq policy and its conduct of the war and reconstruction efforts, along with domestic security, were major issues in the 2004 presidential campaign. Bush was elected to a 2nd term as president in November 2004, winning about 59 million popular votes, or 3 million more than Sen. John Kerry (D-MA). In 2005, he presented an outline for winning the Iraq ware but warned against "artificial timelines" for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Bush also continued to press for Social Security reform, but his plans met with public and congressional resistance
In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. Hundreds of thousands of people were left homeless, and the flooded city of New Orleans was evacuated and shut down; estimates of direct and indirect casualties stood at 1,800. Pres. Bush and the Federal Emergency Management Agency were severely criticized for what was widely perceived as a slow and ineffective response to the disaster. Bush and Congress quickly approved a $62 billion "down payment" on disaster relief efforts. In July 2006, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor resigned, creating the first Supreme Court vacancy in more than 11 years; in September 2006, Chief William H. Rehnquist died. Appeals court judge John G. Roberts, initially nominated to succeed O'Connor, was quickly confirmed as new chief justice, and judge Samuel A. Alito was appointed to fill O'Connor's seat.
In 2006, Bush called for Congress to create a temporary worker or guest-worker program that would grant legal status to some of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. Bush exercised his veto power for the first time in July 2006, rejecting legislation that would have eased restrictions on federal funding for stem cell research. In January 2007, Pres. Bush delivered his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress Jan. 23. It was the first time during the Bush presidency that both houses were in Democratic control. Bush appealed to Congress to back his proposal to increase troop strength in Iraq, emphasizing that the U.S. could not afford to fail there. On the domestic front, Bush called for a 20% cut in gasoline consumption over the next 10 years. He also warned of "the serious challenge of global climate change," and appealed to Congress to reform immigration laws and work toward a balanced federal budget. On May 1, 2007, Bush used his veto for only the second time, rejecting a congressional bill setting a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.