George H.W. Bush

George H.W. Bush

George Herbert Walker Bush was born on June 12, 1924, in Milton,Massachusetts, to Dorothy Walker Bush and Prescott Bush a banker who represented Connecticut in the U.S. Senate from 1952 to 1963. George H.W. Bush was the 41st President of the United States from 1989-1993. Before he became President, he was a two- term vice president under Ronald Reagan from 1981-1989. Bush began his political career in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1967. He was also a World War II naval aviator and Texas oil industry executive. He also held government posts like CIA in the 1970s. In the presidential election of 1988, he defeated his Democratic rival Michael Dukakis. In his early life, Bush graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. After graduation he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve to fight in WWII. Bush was the nation's youngest commissioned pilot at that time. During the war, he flew 58 combat missions and received a Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery after his torpedo plane was shot down by the in the vicinity of the Bonin Islands in the Pacific on September 2, 1944. During that incident, Bush’s plane was hit and set on fire but he continued toward his target, a radio station, and successfully bombed it before parachuting out of his plane.After completing his military service in 1945, Bush enrolled at Yale University where he was the captain of the baseball team, studied economy and also was a part of an elite society called Skull and Bones. After graduating in 1948, he moved to Texas with his family where he began career in the oil industry and became the president of one. In 1964, Bush won the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat from Texas, but lost in the general election. Two years later, he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served two terms. In 1970, he ran for the U.S. Senate but lost again in the general election. He was appointed the ambassador of the United Nations by Richard Nixon until he Bush became the chairman of the Republican Party. When the Watergate Scandal came to the public, Bush asked Nixon to resign and he did likewise two days after. He was then appointed as the head of the U.S. Liaison Office in the People’s Republic of China by President Ford, and he served there until becoming director of the CIA in January 1976, but when Jimmy Carter was elected President, Bush resigned from CIA. In 1980 he ran for Republican presidential nominee, but was defeated by Ronald Reagan. After two terms as vice president under Reagan, Bush became the Republican presidential nominee in 1988. Bush defeated his rivals and captured 426 electoral votes and 53% of the popular vote. As president he was appreciated for improving the relationships between the United States and the Soviet Union. He signed an Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Gorbachev in 1991. When Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein launched an invasion and occupation of Kuwait in August 1990 and threatened to invade Saudi Arabia, Bush organized a military coalition of more than 30 countries who began a U.S. led air assault against Iraq in mid-January 1991. After five weeks of the air offensive and 100 hours of a ground offensive, Operation Desert Storm ended in late February with Iraq’s defeat and Kuwait’s liberation. While Bush gained support among the American public for his foreign policy initiatives, his popularity at home was spoiled by an economic recession. After promising “no new taxes” in his presidential campaign, he upset some by raising tax revenues in an effort to deal with a rising budget deficit.In 1992, Bush lost in the re-election to Governor Bill Clinton.