Bush, George

Bush, George (Herbert Walker)

(born June 12, 1924, Milton, Mass., U.S.) 41st president of the U.S. (1989–93). Bush was the son of Prescott Bush, an investment banker and U.S. senator from Connecticut. He served in World War II as a torpedo bomber pilot on aircraft carriers in the Pacific, flying some 58 combat missions; he was shot down by the Japanese in 1944. After graduating from Yale University in 1948, he started an oil business in Texas. He was elected to a Republican seat in the U.S. House of Representatives (1966–70) and later served as ambassador to the UN (1971–72), chief of liaison to China (1974–76), and head of the CIA (1976–77). In 1980 he lost the Republican Party nomination for president to Ronald Reagan. Bush served as vice president under Reagan (1981–89), whom he succeeded as president, defeating Michael Dukakis. He made no dramatic departures from Reagan's policies. In 1989 he ordered a brief military invasion of Panama, which toppled that country's leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega. He helped impose a UN-approved embargo against Iraq in 1990 to force its withdrawal from Kuwait. When Iraq refused, he authorized a U.S.-led air offensive that began the Persian Gulf War. Despite general approval of his foreign policy, an economic recession led to his defeat by Bill Clinton in 1992. His son George W. Bush was elected governor of Texas in 1994 and president of the U.S. in 2000. Another son, Jeb Bush, was elected governor of Florida in 1998.

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Bush, George (Herbert Walker) (1925–  ) forty-first U.S. president; born in Milton, Mass. He enlisted as a Navy combat pilot in World War II and was rescued by a submarine when his plane was shot down in the Pacific. He returned to graduate from Yale and then went to Texas in 1948 where he made a fortune in the petroleum industry. He entered politics as a Republican and served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1967–71). After his second failure to gain election to the U.S. Senate, he was appointed U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations (1971–73) and then chairman of the Republican National Committee (1973–74). He became the first chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in China (1974–75) and then director of the Central Intelligence Agency (1975–76). He failed in his run for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1980 but was picked to be Ronald Reagan's vice-president (1981–89). He won the presidency on his own (1989–93) and proved to be adept at conducting foreign affairs, whether showing restraint as the Communist governments of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe collapsed or exercising initiative in organizing an international response to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. But as the nation slid into a major recession, he failed to take action, and, with the economy in the doldrums, he lost his reelection bid in 1992 and retired to pursue his personal interests in Texas and Maine.