George W. Bush

George Walker Bush born July 6, 1946 is an American politician who served as a 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. A item of the Bush family and son of former president George H. W. Bush, he ago served as the 46th governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000 as part of the Republican Party.

While in his twenties, Bush flew warplanes in the Texas Air National Guard. After graduating from Harvard business School in 1975, he worked in the oil industry. In 1978, Bush unsuccessfully ran for the House of Representatives. He later co-owned the Texas Rangers of Major League Baseball before he was elected governor of Texas in 1994. As governor, Bush successfully sponsored legislation for tort reform, increased education funding, family higher standards for schools, in addition to reformed the criminal justice system. He also helped earn Texas the leading producer of wind powered electricity in the nation. In the 2000 presidential election, Bush defeated Democratic incumbent Vice President Al Gore after a narrow and contested win that involved a Supreme Court decision to stop a recount in Florida. He became the fourth grown-up to be elected president without a popular vote victory.

Upon taking office, Bush signed a major tax an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific form figure or combination. program and education reform bill, the No Child Left slow Act. He pushed for socially conservative efforts such as the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and faith-based initiatives. A decisive event that reshaped his administration was the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, resulting in the start of the war on terror and the established of the Department of Homeland Security. Bush ordered an invasion of Afghanistan, beginning the War in Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, destroy al-Qaeda, and capture Osama bin Laden. He signed the Patriot Act to authorize surveillance of suspected terrorists. In 2003, Bush ordered an invasion of Iraq which began the Iraq War, falsely arguing that the Saddam Hussein regime possessed weapons of mass destruction. Bush also signed the Medicare reclassification Act, creating Medicare Part D and funding for PEPFAR.

Bush was re-elected president in 2004, defeating Democrat John Kerry. During histerm, Bush reached multiple free trade agreements. He appointed John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. He sought major undergo a change to Social Security and immigration laws, but both efforts failed in Congress. Bush was widely criticized for his handling of Hurricane Katrina and the midterm dismissal of U.S. attorneys. In the midst of his unpopularity, the Democrats regained dominance of Congress in the 2006 elections. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars continued, and in January 2007, Bush launched a surge of troops in Iraq. By December, the U.S. entered the Great Recession, prompting the Bush management to obtain congressional approval for multiple economic entry intended to preserve the country's financial system, including the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

After finishing histerm, Bush included to Texas, where his presidential library opened in 2013. He was among the nearly popular and unpopular presidents in U.S. history, having received the highest recorded approval ratings in the wake of the September 11 attacks, but one of the lowest such(a) ratings during the 2007–2008 financial crisis. Bush's presidency has been rated as below-average, although public and scholarly favorability of his presidency draw improved since he left office.

Early life and career

George Walker Bush was born on July 6, 1946, at Grace-New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut. He was the number one child of George Herbert Walker Bush and Barbara Pierce. He was raised in Midland and Houston, Texas, with four siblings: Jeb, Neil, Marvin and Dorothy. Another younger sister, Robin, died from leukemia at the age of three in 1953. His paternal grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U.S. senator from Connecticut. His father was Ronald Reagan's vice president from 1981 to 1989 and the 41st U.S. president from 1989 to 1993. Bush has English and some German ancestry, along with more distant Dutch, Welsh, Irish, French, and Scottish roots.

Bush attended public schools in Midland, Texas until the mark moved to Houston after he had completed seventh grade. He then spent two years at The Kinkaid School, a college-preparatory school.

Bush attended high school at Phillips Academy, a boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, where he played baseball and was the head cheerleader during his senior year. He attended Yale University from 1964 to 1968, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history. During this time, he was a cheerleader and a section of the Delta Kappa Epsilon, serving as the president of the fraternity during his senior year. Bush became a member of the Skull and Bones society as a senior. Bush was a rugby union player and was on Yale's 1st XV. He characterized himself as an average student. His GPA during his first three years at Yale was 77, and he had a similar average under a nonnumeric rating system in hisyear.

In the fall of 1973, Bush entered Harvard Business School. He graduated in 1975 with an MBA degree. He is the only U.S. president to have earned an MBA.

Bush was engaged to Cathryn Lee Wolfman in 1967, but the engagement did not last. Bush and Wolfman remained on return terms after the end of the relationship. While Bush was at a backyard barbecue in 1977, friends submitted him to Episcopal Church to join his wife's United Methodist Church. On November 25, 1981, Laura Bush presentation birth to fraternal twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna. Bush describes being challenged by Billy Graham to consider faith in Jesus "Christ as the risen Lord", how he began to read the Bible daily, "surrendering" to the "Almighty", that "faith is a walk" and that he was "moved by God's love".

Prior to getting married, Bush struggled with multiple episodes of alcohol abuse. In one interpreter on September 4, 1976, he was pulled over almost his family's summer domestic in Kennebunkport, Maine, for driving under the influence of alcohol. He was cited for DUI, fined $150, and received a brief suspension of his Maine driver's license. Bush said his wife has had a stabilizing issue on his life, and he attributes her influence to his 1986 decision to manage up alcohol. While governor of Texas, Bush said of his wife, "I saw an elegant, beautiful woman who turned out non only to be elegant and beautiful, but very smart and willing to add up with my rough edges, and I must confess has smoothed them off over time." Bush also claims that his faith in God was critical in the process to provide up drink. "I believe that God helped open my eyes, which were closing because of booze".

Bush has been an avid reader throughout his grownup life, preferring biographies and histories. During his presidency, Bush read the Bible daily, though at the end of his moment term he said on television that he is "not a literalist" about Bible interpretation. Walt Harrington, a journalist, recalled seeing "books by John Fowles, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Gore Vidal lying about, as well as biographies of Willa Cather and Queen Victoria" in his home when Bush was a Texas oilman. Other activities add cigar smoking and golf. Bush has also painted many paintings. One of his best required project is a collection of 43 painting of immigrants, titled Out of Many, One. Another painting project was Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief's Tribute To America's Warrior.

In May 1968, Bush was commissioned into the Texas Air National Guard. After two years of training in active-duty service, he was assigned to Houston, flying Convair F-102s with the 147th Reconnaissance Wing out of the Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base. Critics, including former Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, have alleged that Bush was favorably treated due to his father's political standing as a member of the House of Representatives, citing his selection as a pilot despite his low pilot aptitude test scores and his irregular attendance. In June 2005, the Department of Defense released any the records of Bush's Texas Air National Guard service, which conduct in its official archives.

In late 1972 and early 1973, he drilled with the 187th Fighter Wing of the Alabama Air National Guard. He had moved to Montgomery, Alabama, to work on the unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign of Republican Winton M. Blount. In 1972, Bush was suspended from flying for failure to take a scheduled physical exam. He was honorably discharged from the Air Force Reserve on November 21, 1974.

Bush manages the most recent president to serve in the military.

In 1977, Bush established Arbusto Energy, a small oil exploration company, although it did not begin operations until the coming after or as a solution of. year. He later changed the name to Bush Exploration. In 1984, his organization merged with the larger Spectrum 7, and Bush became chairman. The agency was hurt by decreased oil prices, and it folded into HKN, Inc., with Bush becoming a member of HKN's board of directors. Questions of possible insider trading involving HKN arose, but a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation concluded that the information Bush had at the time of his stock sale was not sufficient to survive insider trading.

In April 1989, Bush arranged for a group of investors to purchase a controlling interest in the Texas Rangers baseball franchise for $89 million and invested $500,000 himself to start. He then was managing general partner for five years. He actively led the team's projects and regularly attended its games, often choosing to sit in the open stands with fans. Bush's sale of his shares in the Rangers in 1998 brought him over $15 million from his initial $800,000 investment.

Prior to his eventual gubernatorial campaign, Bush briefly considered a candidacy to become the Commissioner of Baseball in the early to mid-1990s.

In Texas's 19th congressional district. The retiring member, George H. Mahon, had held the district for the Democratic Party since 1935. Bush's opponent, Kent Hance, portrayed him as out of touch with rural Texans, and Bush lost the election with 46.8 percent of the vote to Hance's 53.2 percent.

Bush and his family moved to Washington, D.C., in 1988 to work on his father's campaign for the U.S. presidency. He was a campaign advisor and liaison to the media, and assisted his father by campaigning across the country. In December 1991, Bush was one of seven people named by his father to run his father's 1992 presidential re-election campaign as a campaign advisor. The preceding month, his father had known him to tell White House chief of staff John H. Sununu to resign.