Source

• Born: 6 July 1946
• Birthplace: New Haven, Connecticut
• Best Known As: President of the United States, 2001-

George W. Bush became president of the United States on 20 January 2001. Bush is the son of former U.S. president George Bush, who served from 1989-93. (The terms of father and son were separated by the two terms of Bill Clinton.) George W. Bush graduated from Yale in 1968. After serving as a pilot in the Texas National Guard, he attended Harvard Business School and then worked in the oil and gas industries until 1986, when he got involved in his father's successful 1988 presidential campaign. He returned to Texas and was elected governor there in 1994 and again in 1998. Bush won the Republican nomination for president in August of 2000, choosing Dick Cheney as his running mate. In the November general election they ran against Democratic candidate Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman. The election is now remembered for the extremely close and controversial vote in Florida; after a post-election delay of a month while votes were recounted and lawsuits were filed on both sides, Gore conceded the election to Bush on 13 December 2000. Bush led in electoral votes 271 to 267, while receiving fewer popular votes nationwide than Gore: the final official tally was 50,158,094 votes for Gore to 49,820,518 votes for Bush. Bush and Cheney won re-election in 2004 against a Democratic ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards.

Bush married his wife Laura Bush (formerly Laura Welch) in 1977; they have twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, born in 1981... In the fall of 2000 Barbara entered Yale, Jenna the University of Texas at Austin; both graduated from their respective schools in 2004... George W. Bush has an undergraduate degree from Yale (1968) and an MBA from Harvard (1975)... In November 2000, days before the presidential election, Bush admitted that in 1976 he was arrested for drunk driving in Maine, an arrest he had previously hidden... He has said that he stopped drinking alcohol entirely in 1986... Bush is the fourth man to win the presidency while losing the popular vote... Bush fainted briefly on 13 January 2002 after a pretzel stuck in his throat while he was watching football on TV; Bush recovered moments later and the incident was not considered serious.

Bush, George Walker (1946-) 43rd president of the United States, born in New Haven, Connecticut. During the Vietnam War, Bush served two years in the Texas Air National Guard. He was governor of Texas from 1994 to 2001. Bush, son of the 41st president, defeated Vice President Al Gore (winner of the popular vote by over 500, 000 votes) in one of the closest elections in U.S. history. He won 271 electoral votes, just one more than the minimum; five weeks after election day, Bush was awarded Florida's twenty-five electoral votes by a (contested) margin of 537 out of 6 million cast.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

When George W. Bush (born 1946) won a disputed election to become president of the United States, it capped a meteoric rise to power in a relatively short political career that combined good timing, a powerful family, and uncanny campaigning skills. A late bloomer in terms of achievement, Bush's victory represented the second time in American history that the son of a former president took on the world's most powerful political job.

George Walker Bush was born in New Haven, Connecticut on July 6, 1946. His parents moved the family from New Haven, where they had lived next door to the president of Yale University, to Texas when George W. was two years old. His father, George Herbert Walker Bush, had just graduated from Yale and wanted to try his hand at the oil business. At first they lived in a ramshackle duplex in the roughneck town of Odessa, with two prostitutes renting the other half of the house. Two years later, after a brief time following the elder Bush as a drill-bit salesman in California, they moved to Midland, a more refined city that was better suited to raising a family.

One of their neighbors, Charlie Younger, described Midland as "a real Ozzie-and-Harriet sort of town." It was also bursting with optimism during the boom times of the 1950s, when the elder Bush made his fortune in drilling. Young George W. was a strong-willed and wisecracking child who posed a challenge for his mother, Barbara. His father, who had played baseball at Yale, coached his Little League baseball team, and the young boy became a baseball fanatic, memorizing statistics and trivia from his collection of baseball cards. The Bushes had five more children: a son Jeb; a daughter Robin, (who died of leukemia in childhood); then sons Neil and Marvin and daughter Dorothy. As the eldest, George W. was expected to shine. He was an all-around athlete, fair student, and occasional troublemaker in school - he was once paddled for painting a mustache on his face during a music class. In seventh grade, he ran for class president and won. The next year, his father, who had become a millionaire, moved the family to Houston.

Two years later, George W. was sent back East to enroll at Phillips Academy, an elite private prep school in Andover, Massachusetts. At Andover, he was a whirlwind of physical activity, playing varsity baseball and basketball and junior varsity football. In basketball he often made self-deprecating jokes about riding the bench. Instead of trying out for varsity football, he became the squad's head cheerleader. He also organized a stickball league and was nicknamed Tweeds Bush, after the political organizer Boss Tweed. Against the school's intense competition Bush arrayed his sense of humor. "I was able to instill a sense of frivolity," Bush later said. "Andover was kind of a strange experience."

His high school academic record was far from top-notch. However, drawing on his family connections, Bush landed a spot at Yale, where both his father and grandfather had attended. Bush, extremely gregarious and a notoriously poor dresser, made many friends, somehow bridging the growing divide between the public school graduates who were entering Yale and the "preppies." Bush's interest in politics faded temporarily after his father lost a close election for a seat in the U.S. Senate, in which his grandfather had served. He remained uninterested in politics even after his father won the Senate seat on a second try in 1966. Instead, he became president of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and enjoyed parties, drinking, watching and playing football, and dating. Grades weren't a high priority. "He was a serious student of people," recalled classmate Robert McCallum. He was booked on a misdemeanor charge for being part of a prank that involved stealing a Christmas wreath for the frat house, but the charges were dropped. He was also questioned by police for helping to tear down the goalposts at Princeton University after a football game. For a brief time, he was engaged to a Rice University student, Cathryn Wolfman. In his senior year, he joined the notorious secret society, Skull and Bones. Despite his background of privilege, Bush became more at ease with all kinds of people in college. "I was never one to feel guilty," he said about his wealth and family connections. "I feel lucky." Moving back to Houston after graduating from Yale, Bush took up residence in a trendy apartment complex, the Chateaux Dijon - a hub for young single people. Cocky and loud, Bush played volleyball in the swimming pool, flirted with women, and drove a sports car. He worked, for a time, for an agribusiness company and for a mentoring program. "I was rootless," he later said. "I had no responsibilities whatsoever." Later, he would fend off reporters' questions about rumors of drug use in those days. "How I behaved as an irresponsible youth is irrelevant to this campaign," he said during his 1994 race for governor. "What matters is how I behave as an adult." Other questions later arose about how he had managed to avoid serving in Vietnam. He was a member of an elite Texas Air National Guard unit stationed at Ellington Air Force Base that included the sons of other prominent politicians and civic leaders. The National Guard had a long waiting list of young men eager to avoid military service during the war, but Bush managed to sail through easily. He has denied any impropriety, but political writer Molly Ivins claims that a family friend used Ben Barnes, then speaker of the House of Representatives in Texas, to recommend Bush for a spot in the Guard unit.

Texas Oil Business

Bush was rejected by the University of Texas Law School, but gained admittance to Harvard's Business School. After graduation, he retraced his father's footsteps and returned to Midland, Texas in 1975 to try his luck in the oil business. Bush started by searching deeds for other oilmen who wanted mineral rights. His first attempt at exploration, Arbusto Energy, failed to strike oil.

In 1977 Bush suddenly announced that would run for a seat in the U.S. Congress. Asked later about his renewed interest in politics, Bush said it was because President Jimmy Carter was trying to control natural gas prices and "I felt the United States was headed toward European-style socialism." A friend set up Bush for a date with Laura Welch, a librarian. She had grown up near him in Houston and even lived at the Chateaux Dijon, but they had never crossed paths. Three months later, he married her and they immediately hit the campaign trail. In 1982, they would have twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara. In a primary, Bush prevailed over the Republican Party's handpicked choice, Odessa mayor Jim Reese, who portrayed him as an elitist and a liberal. Bush then faced off against Democrat Kent Hance, who painted him as elite East Coast carpetbagger whose $400,000 in campaign contributions came from well-connected outsiders such as baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Bush played into Hance's hands by airing a campaign ad showing him jogging - an activity considered alien to many west Texans. Hance's campaign used a last-minute attack ad that accused Bush of having given free beer to college students in order to win their vote. Bush refrained from retaliating, and lost the election.

Bush raised money from prominent family friends to support an oil drilling fund. However, Arbusto was still unable to find oil. He merged it with another company, Spectrum 7, which soon was three million dollars in debt. Many independent oil companies were going broke. Midland, the financial center of the Texas oil country, was in decline. Bush needed a miracle to survive in the oil business and was finally bailed out by Harken Oil and Gas (later Harken Energy Corporation). Harken wanted the name of the vice-president's son on its board of directors so badly that it assumed Spectrum 7's debt, paid Bush $320,000 worth of stock options, and offered him a consulting position at $80,000 a year. Government regulators later investigated the deal after Harken, which had no previous experience in the Persian Gulf, landed a lucrative contract to drill for oil off the coast of Bahrain. Bush's decision to sell 212,140 shares of Harken for $848,560 - just before the company announced poor quarterly earnings - was also scrutinized, but he was not charged with any wrongdoing.

In 1985, Bush was in the family's Kennebunkport, Maine, complex, when evangelist Billy Graham paid a visit. George W. Bush said he had a "personal conversion" and began taking Biblical teachings more seriously. A year later, on the morning after a raucous party celebrating his 40th birthday, Bush suddenly swore off drinking. He had not considered himself an alcoholic, and neither had friends or family, but all admitted he drank to excess on occasion. The announcement was a turning point.

In 1988, Bush worked on his father's presidential campaign as a "loyalty thermometer," taking the pulse of campaign workers and making sure that they were ready to deflect any criticism that was directed against his father. He also traveled far and wide soliciting donations and help from powerful people. Bush was instrumental in hiring decisions, but found Washington to be a pompous, petty place. He left shortly after the work for the transition team was finished. In the process, however, he had, he said, "earned his spurs" in his father's eyes. He would return to work on the 1992 campaign, playing an instrumental role in getting rid of Chief of Staff George Sununu, who had failed the loyalty test.

Bought Baseball Team

Late in 1988, Bush heard that the Texas Rangers, a struggling professional baseball club, was up for sale. He put together a group of 70 investors who contributed $14 million to buy the team at a bargain price. Bush's own investment of $606,000 - part of his booty from the Harken stock sale - was the smallest of any investor. But Bush became the driving force and public face of the new ownership group. During the next five years, he was managing general partner of the franchise. He organized a successful campaign to get voters to approve a sales tax for a new publicly funded stadium paid with $135 million in bonds. The lucrative stadium deal turned the franchise around financially, since the owners got to keep the stadium when the bonds were paid off. In 1994, when Bush ran for governor, he put his share of the Rangers, along with his other assets, in a blind trust and resigned as managing general partner just before a players strike wiped out the World Series. His opponent, Ann Richards, accused Bush of benefiting from corporate welfare, but the charges didn't stick and Bush won the election. In 1998, his group sold the team, and got a personal windfall of $14.9 million. That was money he used to bankroll his run for the presidency.

His old friend, Joseph O'Neill, said of Bush's 1988 moves: "He really hated Washington, but it charged him up. Then, with the Rangers, he really hit stride. It took some hard times and big jobs to bring out the bigness in him." When his father lost to Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential race, Bush the younger felt free to resume acting on his long-shelved political ambitions. His celebrity as the most well known owner of the Rangers and as the son of a former president gave him an advantage as he ran for governor in 1994. But his opponent was the popular governor, Ann Richards. With the help of political strategist Karl Rove, nicknamed "Bush's brain," Bush stayed doggedly "on message" and remained affable and unresponsive to Richards's attacks.

Governor of Texas

Famous for delegating details and making connections, Bush used his newly honed management skills in the governor's office. Texas is also a weak-governor state, and Bush was adept at making compromises and taking credit. Bush's governing style in Texas depended on bi-partisanship, a political tradition in that state. Longtime Texas Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, a Democrat, endorsed Bush in his 1998 bid for re-election. Bullock, a tough negotiator, had been a mentor for Bush in Texas politics. He did not earn a reputation as a hard-driving executive, often taking time out in the middle of the day to go jogging or play video games. He complained that he did not like to read long books and that he hated meetings and briefings. But Bush did work hard on education reform, championing public schools.

A key to Bush's popularity in Texas was his ability to appeal both to the old-guard "country club" Republicans, who tended to be more moderate, and the Christian Right, which had come to control the GOP in that state. Bush described himself as a born-again Christian, that helped him with the fundamentalist voters, but downplayed issues like his opposition to abortion, keeping his appeal to moderates. He would use that same formula to secure the GOP presidential nomination and keep the party together during the 2000 campaign.

Presidential Campaign

Many months before the first presidential primaries were held for the 2000 election, Bush had virtually sewed up the GOP nomination by demonstrating his ability to attract millions in contributions. Business interests and Republican stalwarts closed ranks behind the Bush candidacy, making his nomination appear to be inevitable. To some critics such as Ivins, Bush was characterized as "a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America." Washington Post writer Lois Romano and George Lardner Jr. said that "all along George W. harbored qualities that his father could only envy: a visceral and energetic charm, sound political instincts, an easy and convincing sense of humor, a common touch." But then a formidable challenger emerged out of a large pack of contenders.

Arizona Senator John McCain rode a wave of media and popular enthusiasm in early 2000 to provide a point of coalescence for those opposed to Bush's nomination. Sounding his key theme of campaign finance reform, McCain attacked Bush as being the creation of special interest and business contributors. Bush's campaigned was ambushed by McCain in New Hampshire, where the challenger pulled off an upset. The defeat prompted Bush to change the tone and tactics of his campaign. To win the South Carolina primary, Bush visited controversial Bob Jones University, a hotbed of far-right activism. He also launched a series of attacks on McCain's credibility. McCain, complaining about campaign dirty tricks, was soundly defeated, and Bush eventually won in enough other states to fend off McCain's challenge.

In the general election campaign, Bush selected Dick Cheney, who had been Secretary of Defense under his father, as his running mate. It signaled that Bush would surround himself with people he considered authoritative. Bush took an early lead in the polls but his opponent, Vice-President Al Gore, bounced back after the Democratic convention, when he started sounding a populist theme. The media had a field day with Bush's tendencies to malapropisms and Gore hammered at his foreign policy weaknesses and lack of experience. There was also some criticism of an alleged subliminal messages in a Bush campaign ad in which the word "Democrats" morphed into "rats" for a split-second. Bush immediately pulled the ads, and continued to display his people skills. "What Bush does with people is establish a direct, personal connection," wrote reporter Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker. Lemann claims that Bush has "a talent for establishing a jovial connection with an unusually large number of people." The polls drew close and a series of three debates in October was expected to be decisive. Gore, portrayed as a man with more command of policies and details, was expected to win. However, Bush more than held his own, and his folksiness made Gore look stiff by comparison. In a second debate Gore was more agreeable, and the two candidates declared much common ground. However, Gore's dramatic mood shift made him appear insincere to some voters. Bush remained adamantly "on message," repeatedly sounding his issues of education reform, social security privatization, and tax cuts, while downplaying controversial issues such as abortion.

Although the 2000 presidential election was extremely close, and was finally resolved by a five to four decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, Bush emerged as the winner. Ivins had often said of Bush: "He is so lucky that if they tried to hang him, the rope would break."

Books

Ivins, Molly and Lou Dubose, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, Vintage, 2000.

Periodicals

New Yorker, January 31, 2000.

Newsweek, November 22, 1999.

Texas Monthly, June 1999.

Time, June 21, 1999.

US News and World Report, January 22, 2001.

Washington Post, July 25, 1999; July 26, 1999; July 27, 1999; July 28, 1999; July 29, 1999; July 30, 1999; July 31, 1999.

For more information on George Walker Bush, visit Britannica.com.

• Born: July 6, 1946, New Haven, Conn.
• Education: Yale University, B.A.,1968
• Harvard University, M.B.A.,1975
• Political Party: Republican
• Military Service: Texas Air National Guard, 1968–73
• Previous government service: Governor of Texas, 1994–2001
• Elected President, 2000; served 2001–

George W. Bush was elected to the presidency eight years after his father's defeat by Bill Clinton in 1992. He grew up in the booming oil town of Midland, Texas, and as a young man worked in the oil industry. He lost a race for Congress in 1978. In 1989 he was part of a group that purchased the Texas Rangers baseball team, and served as managing director until he became governor of Texas. Bush was the first Texas governor to win a second consecutive four-year term.

Governor Bush persuaded the legislature to pass tort reform and limit frivolous lawsuits, and pass welfare reform to require recipients to go for job training. He opposed the elimination of aid to illegal immigrants and focused on improving the quality of Texas education.

Bush became the frontrunner for the Republican nomination and defeated John McCain in the primaries. Running against Al Gore Jr., Bush proclaimed himself a “compassionate conservative.” His program called for large tax cuts focused on the wealthy, new drug benefits in Medicare to appeal to the elderly, and an overhaul of Social Security to provide young contributors with the opportunity to invest some of their contributions in the stock market. In foreign affairs Bush strongly supported constructing an anti-missile system and was skeptical about America's role in peacekeeping and nation-building abroad. His addition of Dick Cheney on the ticket and his promise that he would appoint an experienced team to assist him assuaged voters worried about his lack of national experience. His call to restore “honor and dignity” to the White House was heeded by the voters, and Bush was elected narrowly with 48 percent of the vote, slightly less than Gore received, and 271 electoral college votes, after a contest marred by inaccurate vote counts in Florida and a lengthy set of legal challenges by Gore.

See also Cheney, Richard; Electoral College

Sources

• Bill Minutaglio, First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty (New York: Times Books, 1999)

1946–, 43d president of the United States (2001–), b. New Haven, Conn. The eldest son of President George H. W. Bush, he was was raised in Texas and, like his father, attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and Yale, graduating in 1968. He subsequently earned a Harvard M.B.A. (1975) and worked in the oil and gas industry (1975–86). Bush helped manage his father's 1988 presidential campaign, then became managing partner (1989–94) of the Texas Rangers baseball team.

Governor of Texas and Presidential Candidate

In 1994, Bush was elected governor of Texas, defeating the incumbent, Ann Richards. In office he won a reputation for being able to forge bipartisan coalitions with the conservative legislature's Democrats, and won passage of changes to tort laws and the welfare, public-school, and juvenile-justice systems. His most significant setback occurred when legislative Republicans deserted his tax-system overhaul. Bush was reelected in 1998 by a landslide.

In 1999, Bush officially began his campaign for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, and quickly raised record campaign funding. Widely regarded as the favorite Republican hopeful, Bush won a majority of convention delegates in the primaries and became the GOP's candidate. Although he appeared generally to lead in the polls, he ultimately lost the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore. However, Bush secured the presidency with a victory in the electoral college when he won Florida by a narrow margin, having outlasted Gore's attempt to challenge the Florida vote-counting process in court. He thus became the first person in more than a century to win the presidency without achieving a plurality in the popular vote.

Presidency

In his first months in office Bush moved quickly to win congressional approval of his tax-cut program, as well as to halt or modify the institution of various regulations proposed in the last weeks of the Clinton administration. Many of his proposed measures were generally conservative and probusiness, as in legislation to modify bankruptcy laws, proposals to fund church-run social welfare programs, and the abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and of the antiballistic missile (ABM) treaty (see disarmament, nuclear; Strategic Defense Initiative). In other areas, however, his administration pursued a less traditionally conservative course, for example, securing the establishment of federally mandated nationwide standardized testing for public school students. President Bush was also unusual in assigning greater policy-making and governing responsibilities to the vice president and members of the cabinet than earlier administrations had.

Devastating terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Sept., 2001, confronted Bush with a crisis without recent parallels. Some 3,000 lives were lost in a coordinated assault against the United States, but the perpetrators were a decentralized and elusive terrorist network, not a nation. Bush demanded that Afghanistan's Taliban government turn over Osama bin Laden, the Saudi-born Islamic militant heading Al Qaeda, the group behind the attacks; the president adamantly refused to negotiate and said that no distinction would be made between terrorists and those who harbored them. The administration, which had previously pursued an essentially unilateralist foreign policy, now sought international support for military action against bin Laden and Afghanistan and for measures to cut off the financial resources of various terrorist groups. In addition, the Office of Homeland Security was created in the White House to coordinate government efforts to counter terrorist threats.

In October, Bush ordered air and then ground raids against Afghanistan, beginning a war whose immediate goals were the destruction of Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies. Afghani opposition forces, with U.S. support, ousted the Taliban and largely routed it and Al Qaeda by the end of 2001, but bin Laden remained uncaptured. The long-term course of the “war on terrorism” that Bush proclaimed, however, was less clear. A second unsettling challenge confronted his government in late 2001 when cases of anthrax resulted from spores that had been mailed by an unknown source to U.S. media and government offices in bioterror attacks. Despite their coincidence, the anthrax and Al Qaeda attacks appeared to be unrelated. In Dec., 2001, Bush officially announced the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM treaty, but he also had agreed to further missile cuts with Russia, which were formalized in 2002 by the Moscow Treaty.

As sporadic fighting in Afghanistan continued, with U.S. forces devoted mainly to mopping-up operations, the administration provided military assistance to a number of nations as part of the war on terrorism. In February the administration announced plans for the largest American military buildup since the 1980s. That increase in defense spending and the loss of revenue due to the 2001 tax cut led to new budget deficits, beginning in 2002. Very strong public support for the president declined somewhat in 2002, largely over domestic issues, where the administration, as in its decision to make the Homeland Security Office a cabinet department (enacted in Nov., 2002; see Homeland Security, U.S. Dept. of) and in its support for increased regulations on business accounting practices, was largely following the lead of Congress in responding to public concerns.

As 2002 progressed, the administration took a forceful stand against Iraq over its alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and its resistance to UN arms inspections. Congress authorized the use of the military against Iraq, and the United States continued to build up its forces in the Middle East. Although in November the Security Council passed a resolution offering Iraq a “final opportunity” to cooperate on arms inspections, which subsequently resumed, it became clear that Bush was determined on a course of “pre-emptive war” to prevent Iraq from developing or possessing weapons of mass destruction that might someday be used against the United States. This use of pre-emptive war to protect the United States, often called the “Bush doctrine,” was adopted by the administration in its National Security Strategy (2002). A significant shift in official U.S. policy, it was the result in part of the September 11th attacks.

Bush faced a second crisis involving weapons of mass destruction beginning in Oct., 2002, when North Korea admitted it had a nuclear weapons program. The administration initially responded by ending fuel shipments required under a 1994 agreement and refusing to negotiate until the North Koreans complied completely with their responsibilities under that agreement (neither they nor the United States had fully done so). Subsequently, however, North Korea engaged in a series of well-publicized moves, including withdrawing from the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, that were designed to enable it to resume the development of nuclear weapons. Faced with pressure from North Korea's neighbors for negotiated solution and apparently unwilling to pursue a military solution, the administration adopted a somewhat less confrontational tone in 2003 and 2004, but the situation remained unresolved.

The Nov., 2002, elections resulted in unexpected, if small, gains for the Republicans, who secured control of both houses of Congress, and enhanced the political strength of the president, who had campaigned vigorously in the off-year election. In December, Bush ordered the deployment of a ballistic missile defense system designed to prevent so-called rogue missile attacks, and the next month he proposed a new round of tax cuts, ostensibly as an economic stimulus. Many criticized the cuts as inappropriate because of the increasing budget deficits and because the most significant cuts would not occur immediately.

In early 2003, Bush, insisting that Iraq must prove it had no weapons of mass destruction or face being disarmed, pushed for an end to inspections and for the use of military force against Iraq. Despite strong opposition from many European allies as well as Russia, China, and most other nations, Bush demanded in March that Iraqi president Hussein step down or face invasion, and on March 19, U.S. and British forces commenced their attack. By mid-April the allies were largely in control of the major Iraqi cities and largely had turned their attention to the establishment of a new Iraqi government and the rebuilding of Iraq. No weapons of mass destruction, however, were found by allied forces after the war, a fact the forced the president to appoint (Feb., 2004) a bipartisan commission to investigate U.S. intelligence failures.

Bush won congressional approval of his new tax cuts (albeit at a reduced level) in May, and those cuts combined with the effects of the slowly recovering economy and the costs of the Iraq invasion and occupation produced a record budget deficit of $374 billion. In mid-2003 the administration signed free-trade agreements with Singapore and Chile, and a Central American agreement was negotiated at year's end. Negotiations continued on a Free Trade Area of the Americas (though they suffered a setback in 2005), and additional bilateral trade agreements were subsequently signed. A Medicare overhaul bill also was finalized in late 2003; it included a prescription drug benefit for the first time.

In 2004 several U.S. and British investigative bodies criticized several of the rationales for invading Iraq; a Senate committee reported that much of the CIA's assessment of Iraq was not based on sound intelligence. The administration was also embarrassed by revelations in May that U.S. forces had abused Iraqi prisoners, actions that may have been engendered by U.S. policy changes after Sept., 2001, on how such prisoners could be treated. In July the commission investigating the terror attacks of Sept., 2001, called for a major reorganization of U.S. intelligence agencies. The president publicly supported the recommendation, but the legislation languished when House Republicans passed an alternative, and a reorganization plan was not passed until after the November elections.

Early in 2004 Bush came out in favor of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and he pushed unsuccessfully for a senatorial vote on such an amendment in July, a move that prefigured his appeal to socially conservative voters in the fall presidential campaign. Campaigning also as a war president, Bush defeated Democratic senator John Kerry in the Nov., 2004, presidential contest. He also secured increases in the Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, which subsequently (2005) enabled him to win passage of laws that increased the restrictions on filing for bankruptcy and on filing class-action lawsuits. In other areas, however, such as changes to social security (2005) and immigration law (2006), Bush's electoral victory did not translate readily into an ability to win passage of legislation.

Less than a year after his reelection, the slow, often inadequate government response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina (Aug., 2005) seemed to catalyze public dissatisfaction with the president. Bush was dealt an additional setback by conservative allies in October when his nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court was attacked, and she was forced to withdraw. Conservatives were subsequently strongly supportive, however, of his nomination of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Court.

The administration suffered further embarrassment when I. Lewis Libby, Jr., Cheney's chief of staff, was charged with (and, in 2007, convicted of) lying to and obstructing an investigation into the leaking of a CIA officer's name, and it was subsequently revealed (2006) that the president ordered the release of other previously classified information by Libby. (In 2006, however, it was disclosed that former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage had first revealed the CIA officer's name, ostensibly inadvertently.)

The revelation (Dec., 2005) that the National Security Agency had, at Bush's order, wiretapped international communications originating in the United States without obtaining the legally required warrants also stirred controversy, particularly when officials justified it by asserting that the president's constitutional powers to defend the United States were not subject to congressional legislation. That argument subsequently appeared to be undercut by the Supreme Court, which ruled (June, 2006) that president could not establish military commissions to try terror suspects held at Guantánamo because he had not been authorized by Congress to do so. In Sept., 2006, however, Congress passed a bill designed to answer the Court's objections, though many critics objected to the legislation because it stripped terror suspects of habeas corpus and other rights.

As the Nov., 2006, mid-term elections approached, the conduct of and progress in the war in Iraq loomed as a significant national issue, though somewhat less so than a series of congressional scandals, a matter not under the president's control. Nonetheless, the loss of Republican control of the House and Senate were seen as a referendum on the war, and the day after the election Bush accepted Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's resignation, despite having pledged the week before that Rumsfeld would serve until Bush's second term ended.

In December the congressionally commissioned Iraq Study Group recommended increasing Iraqi security forces involved in the war there, diminishing U.S. combat forces, making diplomatic overtures to Iran and Syria, and other changes; many of the recommendations were regarded questionably by military experts. Bush opted (Jan., 2007) for a temporary increase in U.S. forces aimed mainly at establishing security in Baghdad and destroying insurgent power centers elsewhere in Iraq. Despite confrontations with Democrats in Congress over the war, Bush won passage (May, 2005) of a war funding bill that did not include troop withdrawal deadlines. He failed, however, to win passage the next month of an overhaul of U.S. immigration law. His commutation (July) of the prison sentence of Lewis Libby (the vice president's former chief of staff, who had been convicted of obstruction of justice; see Cheney, Dick) was applauded by conservatives but otherwise met with disapproval from Americans.

Bibliography

See his A Charge to Keep (2000); H. Gillman, The Votes That Counted: How the Court Decided the 2000 Presidential Election (2001); Washington Post political staff, Deadlock: The Inside Story of America's Closest Election (2001); F. Bruni, Ambling into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush (2002); I. H. Daalder and J. M. Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (2003); P. and R. Schweizer, The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty (2004); J. Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (2004); R. Draper, Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush (2007); J. Goldsmith, The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment inside the Bush Administration (2007).

1946 -

U.S. president (2001 - ); dramatically increased America's role in the Middle East.

The son of President George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush earned a B.A. in history from Yale University in 1968 and an M.B.A. from Harvard in 1975. Like his father, he worked in the petroleum industry and he later served as governor of Texas (1995 - 2001). George W. Bush was elected president as a result of controversial elections of November 2000, in which his opponent, Albert Gore, actually received more popular votes than Bush but failed to win the presidency after the U.S. Supreme Court intervened in a disagreement over which candidate had carried the vote in Florida.

Attacks against targets in New York and Washington, D.C., mounted by the al-Qaʿida organization of Osama bin Ladin on 11 September 2001, profoundly changed the Bush presidency and America's role in the Middle East and southwest Asia. Bush's earlier disdain for involvement in the region's complexities gave way to his need to respond to the biggest terrorist attack in American history. He ordered the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, which succeeded in destroying the government of the Taliban and severely disrupting the al-Qaʿida network, which had used the country as a base for training and operations. The United States then worked with the United Nations in trying to rebuild the country around President Hamid Karzai. Beginning in 2002, Bush dramatically escalated pressure on Iraq and its president, Saddam Hussein. Claiming that Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons, he argued that the country constituted a threat to U.S. security. Despite massive global opposition, even from traditional American allies like Germany and France, U.S. and British forces invaded the country in March 2003 and overthrew Saddam Hussein's government.

Bush also picked up the efforts of his predecessor, Bill Clinton, to forge peace between Israel and the Palestinians. He became the first U.S. president openly to call for the creation of a Palestinian state, although his administration refused to deal with Palestinian Authority leader Yasir Arafat and pressured Arafat to cede some of his powers to a newly created prime minister's position. On the other hand, Bush was willing to work with Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, whom he called a "man of peace." The Bush administration, along with the United Nations, Russia, and the European Union, developed a "Road Map" for peace between the two sides, which Bush tried to push in 2003.

Bibliography

Sifry, Micah L., and Serf, Christopher, eds. The Iraq WarReader: History, Documents, Opinions. New York: Touch-stone Books, 2003.

— MICHAEL R. FISCHBACH

The son of former president George H. W. Bush, he was elected governor of Texas in 1994. In 2000, he secured the Republican nomination for the presidency and narrowly defeated Al Gore, the Democratic party nominee, in an election marred by charges of irregularities in the counting of votes, especially in Florida. Although Gore won more popular votes, Bush prevailed in the Electoral College after a Supreme Court decision resolved the Florida controversy in his favor.

In the wake of the September 11 attacks (2001), the Bush adminstration identified Osama bin Laden as the mastermind behind the terror. With support from U.S. allies, Bush ordered a deployment of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf and in nations adjoining Afghanistan, where bin Laden apparently ran training camps for terrorists with the backing of the Taliban. Air strikes led to the rout of the Taliban in November, though operations continued and bin Laden appeared to have evaded capture. On the domestic front, Bush oversaw successive reduction of interest rates to stimulate the sluggish U.S. economy.