George W. Bush

George W. Bush: The Accidental War President

Three days after the towers fell, a president who had spent his first eight months in office talking about school testing stood on a wrecked fire truck at Ground Zero with a bullhorn and a retired firefighter's arm around him. Someone shouted that they couldn't hear him. "I can hear you," Bush answered. "The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." It was the highest approval rating of his life and the beginning of everything that would sink it.

The Long Apprenticeship of a Famous Son

George Walker Bush was born on July 6, 1946, at Grace-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut, the eldest child of George H. W. Bush and Barbara Pierce Bush. The family's defining early wound was the death of his sister Robin from leukemia in 1953. He grew up mostly in Midland, Texas, then went east: Phillips Academy in Andover from 1961 to 1964, where he was head cheerleader, and Yale from 1964 to 1968, where he took a history degree, ran Delta Kappa Epsilon, joined Skull and Bones, and carried a 77 average through his first three years. He served in the Texas Air National Guard from 1968, flying Convair F-102s out of Ellington Field, and was honorably discharged in November 1974 — a record critics later attacked over his low pilot aptitude scores, irregular attendance, and a 1972 suspension for missing a physical. In between he took a Harvard MBA, finishing in 1975, still the only president to hold one.

He married Laura Welch, a teacher and librarian, on November 5, 1977; their twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna, were born in 1981. He was arrested for drunk driving near Kennebunkport in 1976 and stopped drinking in 1986, crediting his wife and his faith.

Oil, Baseball, and a Loss

Bush founded the oil exploration outfit Arbusto Energy in 1977, ran for Congress in Texas's 19th district in 1978 and lost 53.2 to 46.8, and watched his company absorbed into Spectrum 7 and then Harken Energy. The business that made him was baseball: in April 1989 he assembled the investor group that bought a controlling interest in the Texas Rangers for $89 million, put in $500,000 of his own, and served five years as managing general partner, sitting in the open stands at games. The 1998 sale of his stake returned more than $15 million.

Austin

In 1994 he unseated the popular Democratic incumbent Ann Richards, 53.5 to 45.9, on welfare reform, tort reform, crime, and schools, guided by Karl Rove, Karen Hughes, and Joe Allbaugh. As governor he signed $2 billion in tax cuts, presided over 152 executions, lowered to fourteen the age at which juveniles could be tried as adults, raised teacher pay, and signed a 1999 renewable portfolio standard that helped make Texas the country's leading wind-power producer. In 1998 he took a record 68 percent of the vote, the first Texas governor elected to two consecutive four-year terms, with second-term approval running between 62 and 81 percent.

Five Hundred and Thirty-Seven Votes

The 2000 campaign turned on Florida. Bush lost the national popular vote by 543,895 — the first president since Benjamin Harrison in 1888 to take office having lost it — and won the electoral college 271 to 266 after the Supreme Court halted the statewide hand recount in Bush v. Gore on December 9, leaving an official Florida margin of 537 votes out of roughly six million.

The War Presidency

He arrived with a $237 billion surplus and a projection of $5.6 trillion more over a decade, and pushed through a $1.35 trillion tax cut, followed by another in 2003. The No Child Left Behind Act, signed in early 2002 with Ted Kennedy's support, made federal aid contingent on testing. Then September 11 reorganized the presidency around the war on terror: the USA PATRIOT Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, and Osama bin Laden's escape at Tora Bora that December. In January 2002 he named North Korea, Iran, and Iraq an "axis of evil." The invasion of Iraq followed on March 20, 2003; Baghdad fell on April 9, and Bush declared major combat over on May 1. The Center for Public Integrity later counted more than 900 false administration statements about the Iraqi threat over two years, and Iraq Body Count has recorded well over 160,000 civilian deaths in the war and civil conflict that followed. In 2003 he also launched PEPFAR, the emergency global AIDS relief program, and signed the Medicare prescription drug benefit. He beat John Kerry in 2004 with 50.7 percent and 286 electoral votes.

The Collapse

The second term began with a failed push to partially privatize Social Security and ended in wreckage. Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005; the federal response, and the appointment of FEMA administrator Michael Brown, became the political tipping point from which Bush never recovered. His 2007 immigration reform died on a 46–53 cloture vote. He ordered a surge of 21,500 troops into Iraq in January 2007 and vetoed a withdrawal deadline that May. On his final Iraq visit in December 2008, an Iraqi journalist threw both shoes at him. By then the economy was in the longest post-war recession: 1.9 million jobs lost in the last four months of 2008, Lehman Brothers gone, AIG rescued for $85 billion, and TARP enacted to stop the collapse. He left office with the Dow at 7,949, having entered at 10,587, and among the least popular presidents on record.

Why George Is Called a Genius

The word is essentially never used about Bush, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. For most of his presidency the opposite was the standing caricature — the mediocre Yale average, the malapropisms, the incuriosity his own Treasury secretary complained about. Historians and scholars generally rank him a below-average president. What he did have, and what his rivals consistently underrated, was political nerve and message discipline: the ability to reduce a decision to a sentence, repeat it without variation, and act on it before the argument was finished. That capability produced the Ground Zero bullhorn, the fastest reorganization of the federal government since 1947, and PEPFAR — the achievement even his critics tend to concede, an initiative he willed into existence against the grain of his own party's spending instincts. It also produced Iraq. The same refusal to relitigate a decision that made him decisive in September 2001 made him deaf to contrary intelligence in 2003, slow on Katrina in 2005, and unable to change course until the surge in 2007. Decisiveness is not intelligence, and Bush's career is the cleanest available demonstration that the two can come apart entirely.

Legacy

Bush went home to Texas, largely stopped commenting on politics, took up painting, and produced portrait series of wounded veterans and of immigrants, alongside the global health and education work of the Bush Institute. Public opinion of him has recovered somewhat since 2009. The historical verdict has not: the surveillance state, the debt, and above all the Iraq War remain the terms on which his presidency is argued.

Achievements

• Governor of Texas (1995–2000)
• President of the United States (2001–2009)
• President-elect of the United States (2000–2001)
• president
• Grand Cross with Collar of the Order of the Three Stars — 2005
• Collar of the Order of the Star of Romania
• Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana, 1st Class — 2012
• Grand Cross of the Order of Vytautas the Great
• Educated at Yale College and The Kinkaid School