The Presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush

In the 1988 presidential campaign, the Republican candidate, Vice President George Bush, was said to have the best resume in Washington. Bush won the Distinguished Service Cross during World War II, made a fortune in the Texas oil business, and then, went to Washington where he served as a Congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, envoy to China, and director of the CIA. His Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, was a serious, hardworking son of Greek immigrants.

Mudslinging and personal invective are nothing new in American politics, but the 1988 campaign was unusually vacuous and cynical. Real differences between the candidates were submerged in a battle over character, abortion, prison furloughs, school prayer, and patriotism. The campaign dramatized a development that had been reshaping American politics since the late 1960s: the growing power of media consultants and pollsters, who marketed candidates by emphasizing imagery and symbolism. At the end of a race that saw both candidates use negative campaigning, Bush was elected the 41st president of the United States with 56 percent of the popular vote.

In his inaugural address, Bush signaled a departure from the avarice and greed of the Reagan era by calling for a "new engagement in the lives of others." He promised to be more of a "hands on" administrator than his predecessor, and he committed his presidency to creating a "kinder, gentler" nation, more sensitive and caring to the poor and disadvantaged.

During his first years in office, President Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress addressed many issues ignored during the Reagan years. For the first time in eight years, the minimum wage was raised from $3.35 to $4.25 an hour. Congress amended federal air pollution laws in order to reduce noxious emissions and acid rain. In other actions, Congress prohibited job discrimination against the disabled, required nutrition labeling on processed foods, and expanded immigration into the United States.

In two areas, critics accused President Bush of reneging on his promise of a "kinder, gentler" nation. He vetoed a new civil rights bill bolstering protections for minorities and women against job discrimination on the grounds that it would lead to quotas. Bush also vetoed a bill that would have provided up to six months of unpaid family leave for workers with newly born or adopted children or for emergencies.

The first important foreign policy act of the Bush administration was an invasion of Panama, which the Pentagon called Operation Just Cause. The origins of the conflict stretched back to 1987 when a high Panamanian military official accused strongman General Manuel Antonio Noriega of committing fraud in the 1984 presidential election and of drug trafficking.

Bush dispatched a force of 10,000 troops to safeguard the lives of Americans and to protect the integrity of the Panama Canal treaties. Between 300 and 800 Panamanian civilians and military personnel died during the invasion; there were 23 American casualties. Noriega was forced out of power and deported to the United States to stand trial for drug trafficking.

In 1990, following the example of Eastern Europe, the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia announced their independence, and other Soviet republics demanded greater sovereignty. Nine of the 15 Soviet republics agreed to sign a new union treaty, granting far greater freedom and autonomy to individual republics. But in August 1991, before the treaty could be signed, conservative Communists tried to oust Gorbachev in a coup d'etat. Boris Yeltsin, the President of the Russian Republic, and his supporters defeated the coup, undermining support for the Communist Party. Gorbachev fell from power. The Soviet Union ended its existence in December 1991, when Russia and most other republics formed the Commonwealth of Independent States.

At 2 a.m., August 2, 1990, some 80,000 Iraqi troops invaded and occupied Kuwait, a small, oil-rich emirate on the Persian Gulf. This event touched off the first major international crisis of the post-Cold War era. Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, justified the invasion on the grounds that Kuwait, which he accused of intentionally depressing world oil prices, was a historic part of Iraq.

On August 6, 1990, President Bush dramatically declared, "This aggression will not stand." With Iraqi forces poised near the Saudi Arabian border, the Bush administration dispatched 180,000 troops to protect the Saudi kingdom. In a sharp departure from American foreign policy during the Reagan presidency, Bush also organized an international coalition against Iraq.

In November 1990, the crisis took a dramatic turn. President Bush doubled the size of American forces deployed in the Persian Gulf, a sign that the administration was prepared to eject Iraq from Kuwait by force. The president went to the United Nations for a resolution permitting the use of force against Iraq if it did not withdraw by January 15, 1991. After a heated debate, Congress also gave the president authority to wage war.

The allied ground campaign relied on deception, mobility, and overwhelming air superiority to defeat the larger Iraqi army. The allied strategy was to mislead the Iraqis into believing that the allied attack would occur along the Kuwaiti coastline and Kuwait's border with Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, American commander of the coalition forces, shifted more than 300,000 American, British, and French troops into western Saudi Arabia, allowing them to strike deep into Iraq.

Only 100 hours after the ground campaign started, the war ended. Saddam Hussein remained in power, but his ability to control events in the region was dramatically curtailed. The Persian Gulf conflict was the most popular U.S. war since World War II. It restored American confidence in its position as the world's sole superpower and helped to exorcise the ghost of Vietnam that had haunted American foreign policy debates for nearly two decades. The doubt, drift, and demoralization that began with the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal appeared to have ended.

In 1992, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton defeated George Bush and Texas businessman Ross Perot to become the first Democratic president in 12 years. The campaign was a bitter, three-way contest marked by intense assaults on the candidates’ records and character. President George Bush, whose popularity had soared to 90 percent after the Persian Gulf War, only received 38 percent of the vote--largely as a result of a stagnating economy. Clinton obtained 43 percent of the vote, while Perot received 19 percent.