George W. Bush Born: Future Wartime President Arrives

George W. Bush served as the 43rd President of the United States from 2001 to 2009, a tenure defined by the September 11 attacks and their consequences. Born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, to George H. W. Bush, who would become the 41st President, he was raised primarily in Midland and Houston, Texas. He attended Yale and Harvard Business School, managed oil companies in Texas with mixed success, and co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team before entering politics. He won the Texas governorship in 1994, defeating the popular incumbent Ann Richards. The 2000 presidential election against Al Gore was the closest in modern American history. The outcome hinged on Florida, where the margin was so thin that the race went to the Supreme Court. Bush v. Gore, decided 5-4 on December 12, 2000, effectively ended the recount and gave Bush the presidency with 271 electoral votes to Gore's 266. Gore won the national popular vote by over 500,000. Nine months into his presidency, on September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda operatives hijacked four commercial airliners and attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people. Bush's response shaped the remainder of his presidency and American foreign policy for a generation. He launched the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, toppling the Taliban government that had harbored al-Qaeda. In March 2003, he ordered the invasion of Iraq based on intelligence, later found to be faulty, that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq War cost over 4,400 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, destabilized the region, and became the most controversial foreign policy decision of the early twenty-first century. His domestic agenda included tax cuts, the No Child Left Behind education law, and Medicare prescription drug coverage. His second term was consumed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, whose aftermath exposed failures in federal emergency management, and the 2008 financial crisis, the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.