George Herbert Walker Bush, the forty-first President of the United States, suffered from an identity crisis. Frequently appearing in the political cartoon "Doonsbury" as nonentity whose presence could only be detected by a small cluster of lines indicating speech, President Bush tried to be all things to all people and, as a result, became impossible to comprehend. Willing to capitalize on President Reagan's overwhelming popularity, but uncomfortable with the idea of being overshadowed, President Bush had a tendency to make strong declarations that had no basis in reality. Statements like "Read my lips. No. New. Taxes" helped him win the 1988 election, but were later responsible for his 1992 defeat. He also declared himself "the Education President" or "the Environmental President," though he proved to be neither, keeping the American public baffled during his four years in office. Working with many of the same press people as Reagan did, President Bush tried to follow the Reagan formula of good television making for inspiring leadership, but lacked the thirty years of acting experience which had made his predecessor successful. To many people, President Bush's speeches seemed over-rehearsed and insincere. Though an enigma in terms of domestic policy, President Bush proved himself as a capable and successful statesman on the international front. He handled the international chaos created by the disbanding of the Soviet Union with tact and considerable diplomatic skill. Unfortunately for President Bush, however, an ailing economy, worsened by the Savings and Loan Bank failure, high unemployment, urban unrest caused by racial inequality, a frighteningly poor public education system, and a fear that the United States had lost its status as the number one economic power to Japan, were the prevailing issues of the 1992 presidential election in which President Bush lost to Bill Clinton.
George Herbert Walker Bush was born June 12, 1924 in Milton, Massachusetts. He was the second child of five born to Dorothy Walker and Prescott Sheldon Bush, a partner in the Wall St. investment firm of Brown Brothers, Harriman and Company who would later serve as a member of the United States Senate. George Bush was raised in Greenwich, Connecticut where he received his elementary education from private schools. In 1938 George Bush entered Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, an exclusive preparatory school. George played baseball and soccer and was president of his senior class when he graduated in 1942. After graduation George Bush enlisted in the Navy where he became a pilot with the torpedo bomber squadron VT-51, stationed on the carrier U.S.S. San Jacinto. On September 22, 1944, Bush's plane was shot down after an attack on a Japanese radio station near the island of Chicki Jima in the Pacific. Bush parachuted safely into the ocean where he was rescued four hours later by the U.S.S. Finback. Bush was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his bravery. After a few more months as a bomber pilot, Bush was stationed at the Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia where he worked as an instructor until his discharge in August of 1945.
On January 6, 1945 George Herbert Walker Bush married Barbara Pierce, the daughter of George Pierce, publisher of Redbook and McCall's. The couple had four sons and two daughters; Robin Bush died of leukemia in 1953.
George Bush enrolled at Yale University as a student of economics in September of 1945. As captain of Yale's baseball team, Bush led his team to the College World Series two years in a row. George Bush was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Honors Society upon graduating Yale in 1948.
After graduation, George Bush moved to Odessa, Texas where his friend Neil Mallon got him a job as an equipment clerk at the Dresser Institute oil company. He was promoted to machinery assemblymen, transferred to California, and later promoted to sales. Bush quit Dresser and returned to Texas where he settled with his family in the town of Midland and formed the Bush-Overby Oil Development Company with his friend John Overby. In 1953 Bush - Overby merged with Zapata Petroleum Corporation. The following year Bush became president of subsidiary Zapata Off-Shore Company drilling off the Gulf of Mexico. The off-shore operation was granted its independence from Zapata Petroleum in 1959. Bush remained president and settled his family in Houston.
George Bush officially entered politics in 1962 when he became chairman of the Republican Party of Harris County, Texas. In 1964 he made a bid for the United States Senate, but lost to the Democratic incumbent Ralph Yarborough. In 1966, after a recent census had afforded Texas another seat in the House of Representatives, George Bush defeated his Democratic opponent Frank Briscoe in a bid for the newly-created position. In the House, Bush became a member of the Ways and Means Committee and voted conservatively on most issues. He became a strong supporter and a close friend of Richard Nixon. Bush was reelected unopposed in 1968, but defeated in 1970 by Democrat Lloyd Bensten. After leaving the Senate Bush received an appointment as United States Ambassador to the United Nations from President Nixon. President Nixon resigned as chairman of the Republican National Committee upon his reelection as President in 1972 and asked Bush to give up his position as ambassador to the United Nations in order to serve as the new chairman of the Republican National Committee. The Watergate Scandal broke soon after George Bush had become chairman. Bush believed that Nixon was innocent, but avoided public commentary on the issue. After the Oval Office tapes ensured the President's impeachment, George Bush wrote a letter which called for the President's resignation. The letter was delivered to President Nixon on August 7, 1974. President Nixon announced his resignation the following day.
When Gerald Ford became President, George Bush had his eye on the Vice Presidency, but the job went to Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York. In order to keep the party together, President Ford offered Bush his choice of positions. George Bush elected for the directorship of the United States Liaison Office in Beijing, the capital of the People's Republic of China. The following year, President Ford appointed Bush director of the Central Intelligence Agency and assigned him the task of cleaning up the Agency's image. During the years of the Watergate investigations numerous assassination plots and other highly illegal activities had been revealed to the general public, and public outrage began to threaten that organization's funding. George Bush achieved great success in reversing the negative image of the CIA before being replaced by the Carter administration in 1977. After leaving the CIA, Bush retired from politics for short while. He returned to his home in Houston and became the chairman of Houston's First International Bank.
On January 5, 1979 George Bush founded the George Bush for President Committee and began campaigning full time for the 1980 election. He won the Iowa caucuses in January 1980, but lost the following New Hampshire Primaries to Ronald Reagan, the former governor of California. During the campaign Bush attacked Reagan's conservatism and called his economic plan "voodoo economics." Bush disagreed with Reagan's stand against legalized abortion and against the Equal Rights Amendment. He also disagreed with Reagan's plan to cut federal taxes. Bush lost the nomination to Reagan at the Detroit Republican National Convention in July of 1980 and accepted the nomination to the Vice Presidency after the position had been offered to former President Ford, who rejected. The Democrats re-nominated President Carter and Vice President Walter Mondale. During the campaign Bush played down his differences with Reagan's opinions. The Reagan/Bush team beat the Carter/Mondale team by an overwhelming margin in the popular vote and by 489-49 in the electoral college.
As Vice President Bush played a low-key role in the Reagan Administration. He made numerous diplomatic trips overseas and attended more than his share of state funerals on the President's behalf. Vice President Bush became acting President once in March of 1981 when President Reagan was recovering from an assassination attempt, and again in July of 1985 when President Reagan was recovering from a cancer operation. Vice President Bush also served as chairman of the National Security Council's crisis management team and as chairman of a special investigative committee established to gather information on drug smuggling and illegal immigration in Florida. Bush was re-nominated for Vice President under President Reagan in 1984, and the Reagan/Bush team defeated their democratic opponents Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro by a landslide in the general election.
At the New Orleans Republican National Convention in August of 1988, Vice President Bush defeated his challengers Senator Robert Dole of Kansas and Pat Robertson, a former television evangelist, for the Presidential nomination. Bush surprised the convention when he chose unknown Senator J. Danforth Quayle of Indiana for his Vice Presidential running mate. The Democrats nominated Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts for President and Senator Lloyd Bensten of Texas for Vice President. Bush ran on a platform that promised to continue President Reagan's domestic and foreign policies. Dukakis ran on a platform protesting the Reagan Administration's cutting of social service programs, and the tremendous federal deficit it had incurred. Bush criticized Dukakis for being a "card-carrying liberal" who was out of touch with the American people. Late in the race the Bush campaign ran a television commercial which accounted the case of Willie Horton, a violent criminal who had been let out of jail on Governor Dukakis's prison reform program only to commit more violent crimes. The commercial used the picture of Horton, an African American male with the well-beaten look of a convict, to capitalize on white America's fear of poor urban blacks. The commercial, along with President Reagan's support, enabled the Bush/Quayle team to defeat the Dukakis/Ferraro team by a small margin in the popular vote and by 538-426 in the electoral college. George Bush became the forty-first President of the United States on January 20, 1989.
Shortly after President Bush took office, a scandal surrounding the nation's Savings and Loan Bank was exposed. Over the past decade more than a thousand Savings and Loan banks had failed due to rampant mismanagement and fraud resulting from a failure to regulate. Among those running for cover from the scandal was the President's son, Neil Bush. President Bush introduced legislation to rescue and rebuild the Savings and Loan banks, a plan which would ultimately cost tax payers hundreds of billions of dollars. In March of 1989 the Exxon Valdez, a large oil tanker, was entering the Port of Valdez, Alaska when it collided with a reef that ripped a gaping hole in its hull. More than 11 million gallons of crude oil were spilled into the Prince William Sound, destroying wildlife along the Alaskan coast. When the Exxon Corporation failed to sufficiently clean up the oil, President Bush sent in American troops to do the job. In November 1990, Congress passed the Bush Administration's proposal to amend emission standards in the Clean Air Act of 1970; the amendment failed to limit carbon dioxide emissions which are responsible for global warming. Also in November 1990, Congress passed President Bush's plan to raise federal income taxes to deal with the federal deficit and to help bail out the failed Savings and Loan banks. In the spring of 1992 a California motorist with a video camera video taped several police officers beating Rodney King, an African American motorist. When an all-white jury found the first four officers to go to trial in the case "not guilty" of using excessive force, rioting occurred in Los Angeles and other major United States cities. The rioting in Los Angeles left 53 people dead and caused over a billion dollars in property damage. President Bush was forced to send in 5,000 National Guard troops to restore order. The Bush Administration later passed legislation to provide federal funds to clean up and rebuild areas hit by the rioting. The following April, the remaining two officers were found guilty of violating King's civil rights.
The biggest domestic issue of the Bush administration was the slumping economy. The President's inability to cooperate with an all Democratic Congress delayed legislation aimed at getting the economy back on its feet. The President and Congress did not agree to recognize the recession which it later determined had begun in July 1990 until late in 1991.
In foreign affairs, President Bush ordered United States troops into Panama in December of 1989 to overthrow the government of General Manuel Antonio Noriega and to bring Noriega to the United States to face charges of drug smuggling. Noriega escaped U.S. troops and evaded capture for a number of weeks before surrendering in January of 1990. In 1992 an American court found him "guilty" of drug trafficking and sentenced him to forty years in prison. Guillermo Endora was declared the new president of Panama.
In August 1990 Iraq invaded neighboring Kuwait. President Bush sent U.S. troops over to the Kuwaiti border to put pressure on Iraq's new leader, Saddam Hussein, to leave Kuwait. The President also sent U.S. troops to the Saudi Arabia/Iraq border to defend the Saudis against a possible Iraqi attack. Shortly after the invasion of Kuwait, the United Nations sanctioned an embargo of Iraqi trade, and President Bush sent the United States Navy over to the Persian Gulf to enforce the embargo. In November of 1990 the United Nations delivered an ultimatum to Iraq to leave Kuwait by January 15, 1991 or face military action. Iraq failed to comply, and on January 16, 1991 (January 17 Iraq time) President Bush started a bombing campaign on Iraq and Kuwait which he called Operation Desert Storm. A second ground campaign phase of Operation Desert Storm went into effect on February 23, 1991 (February 24 Iraq time). The ground campaign successfully drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait within one hundred hours. Soon after Iraq's defeat, the Kurds, a small group living under Iraqi rule, began a rebellion which was to fail. In April of 1991 United States troops set up a safe zone in Iraq for Kurdish refugees. The United States provided food, clothing, and protection for the Kurds until July of 1991, when the bulk of American troops were withdrawn from Iraq.
A major concern of the Bush Administration in regard to foreign affairs was the unbalanced rate of import over export. In January of 1992, President Bush traveled to Japan to try and secure a lifting of Japanese restrictions of American imports. In December of 1992, President Bush signed the North American Free Trade Agreement which provided for the gradual lifting of trade barriers between the United States and Mexico. A similar agreement with Canada had been signed by President Reagan in the late 1980's.
Perhaps the most notable success of the Bush Administration was the ending of the Cold War. President Bush's meetings with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began in 1989 on a Soviet ship anchored off the coast of Malta. In May of the following year, Gorbachev visited Washington D.C. where the two leaders signed a treaty outlawing all chemical weapons, and several other treaties for the improvement of trade relations between the two nations. Gorbachev and Bush met in Helsinki, Finland in September of 1990, and again in Paris, France in November of 1990, to discuss the situation in Iraq. The talks ended with the Soviet's agreeing to back the United States' efforts to force Iraq from Kuwait. The Paris meeting also resulted in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe which called for the destruction of certain classes of non-nuclear weapons in Europe. The treaty was not signed until 1992. In July of 1991, President Bush traveled to Moscow were he and Gorbachev created the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), which reduced long range nuclear missiles by a third. In September of 1991 President Bush announced that the United States would destroy the majority of its short range nuclear weapons on the condition that the Soviets responded by doing the same. The Soviets agreed to destroy their own short range nuclear missiles two days later. Also in September of 1991, President Bush formally recognized the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as free and independent states and encouraged the Soviet Union to do the same. The recognition of the Baltic states' independence by the Soviet Union two days later signaled other Soviet states to declare their own independence. One month later the Soviet Union no longer existed. A loose Commonwealth of independent states was set up in the Soviet Union's place, and President Bush quickly established diplomatic relations with the new nation. President Bush was also quick in resigning the START I treaty with the four former Soviet states of Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belorushad which possessed the bulk of the nuclear arsenal of the former Soviet Union. In April of 1992, President Bush was successful in driving a bill through Congress which provided Russia with $12 billion aid for the construction of a free market economy. In June of 1992, President Bush met with Russian President Boris Yeltsin to sign START II, which cut the number of nuclear arms possessed by both nations to half of what it had been under START I.
President Bush secured the nomination of his party at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston. Vice President Dan Quayle was re-nominated to the Vice Presidency. The Democrats nominated Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas for President and Senator Al Gore of Tennessee for Vice President. Millionaire Ross Perot ran as an independent candidate with former U.S. Navy Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale as his Vice Presidential running mate. Both Perot and Clinton accused the President of being out of touch with the needs of the American people on almost every domestic issue. The President stood behind his strong record in foreign affairs, but it was not enough to win the election. President Bush lost the election to Bill Clinton. George Bush retired to his home in Texas. The George Bush Library is under construction in Texas.
