Air National Guard

After graduating from Yale in 1968, Bush enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard, which allowed him to avoid active military duty in Vietnam. Bush was certified as a fighter pilot, flying the F-102 with the 147th Fighter Wing, but accusations that he was given a coveted spot in the Guard because of family connections and that he failed to serve his full six years would later shadow Bush's political career.

Oil Business Career

Bush followed his father into the oil business, opening Arbusto ("bush" in Spanish) Energy in 1978 in the same Midland building in which he father started in the 1950s.

But Arbusto went bust and was bought out in 1983 by Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation. When Spectrum started losing money, it was bought in 1986 by Harken Energy, thanks largely to Bush's connection to the firm (his dad was Ronald Reagan's vice president at the time). "I'm all name and no money," Bush said at the time.

Spectrum was bought by Harken in a stock deal and, in 1990, Bush sold his 212,140 Harken shares for $4 a share, earning more than $800,000. Bush sold the stock just eight days before Harken ended the second quarter with a massive loss and the stock dipped to $2.37 a share, sparking an insider-trading investigation of Bush by the Securities and Exchange Commission. It took no action against Bush.

Baseball Team Owner

Bush used the proceeds from the sale of his Harken stock to buy a stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team in 1989. His $600,000 share was small compared to others in the investment group, but Bush was made a managing partner and, because of his famous name, became the group's public face.

Political Career

Bush's entry into politics followed a well-trod family path. His grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U.S. senator from Connecticut. His dad served as a diplomat and as CIA director before becoming vice president and then president. His brother, Jeb, became governor of Florida.

In his first bid for office, Bush ran in 1978 for a West Texas congressional seat, which he lost to Democrat Kent Hance. Bush worked on his father's 1988 and 1992 presidential campaigns as a senior adviser and liaison with the media, but didn't run again himself until 1994 when he defeated Democratic incumbent Ann Richards to become the 46th governor of Texas.

When he ran for re-election as governor in 1998, Bush was already viewed as a possible Republican presidential candidate.In June 1999, he announced his 2000 campaign for the White House.

Presidential Elections

In his first presidential race, Bush ran for office in 2000 as a "compassionate conservative," pledging in the wake of a sex scandal that enveloped President Bill Clinton to "restore dignity and honor to the White House."

Despite a virtual coronation by GOP kingmakers, Bush suffered a serious setback in his bid for the GOP nomination when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) beat him in the New Hampshire primary.Bush went on the attack against McCain,beat him and, with Dick Cheney as his vice presidential running mate, went on to face Democratic Vice President Al Gore in the general election.

In an election that will go down in history, Bush lost the popular vote to Gore, but won enough electoral votes to win office two months after the election when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a five-to-four ruling, stopped a third recount of ballots in the crucial state of Florida on Dec. 8, 2000.

Bush won re-election in 2004 by soundly defeating Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.).

Sept. 11 Terrorist Attacks

On Sept. 11, 2001, Bush was reading to school children in Sarasota, Fla., when Chief of Staff Andy Card walked over to him and whispered in his ear, "America is under attack." Al-Qaeda terrorists had flown jetliners filled with fuel and passengers into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. A fourth crashed in a Pennsylvania field.

Bush responded to the attacks by declaring a "war on terror." Through legislation and executive fiat, Bush ordered the military invasion of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda's base of operations, starting inOctober 2001;vastly expanded the government's domestic police and intelligence-gathering powers; created the Department of Homeland Security;and established a detention camp at a U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where "enemy combatants" suspected of terrorist activities were held indefinitelyand interrogated in ways that many critics describe as torture, including the repeated use of simulated drowning or "waterboarding."

Iraq War

Nearly a year after the 9/11 attacks, Bush began making the case for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, which he said was part of the "war on terror."

Initiating a new "preemptive strike" doctrine, the Bush administration claimed Iraq represented a threat to the U.S. because Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons; ties to terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda; and a well-established record of brutality and animus toward America. U.S. forces led the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003.

Public support for the invasion was high at the start- though 70 percent of Americans then erroneously believed that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks - but began to decline steadily after no weapons of mass destruction were found, stability remained elusive and U.S. casualties mounted.

Bush, from the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and under the banner "Mission Accomplished," declared on May 1, 2003 - just two short months after the invasion officially began- the end of major combat operations in Iraq, an event that would come to symbolize the administrations misjudgments in the lingering war. Military and intelligence experts later claimed that Iraq distracted from the "war on terror" and that the invasion itself transformed Iraq into a haven for terrorists, including al- Qaeda.

Economic Crisis

Like his father, Bush left office under the cloud of an economic recession, this one the worst since the Great Depression. A year after an economic decline began in December 2007,the nation's largest financial institutions, including Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and insurance giant American International Group began to collapse, the result of massive failures in an over-extended sub-prime mortgage marketand the instability of exotic derivatives in which large financial institutions invested heavily.It would become the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Bush responded to the crisis by pushing Congress in late 2008 to pass a $700 billion bailout package for the financial institutions, many of which the administration deemed "too big to fail," meaning their collapse would cause significant further harm to the U.S. economy.The Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, was created to buy failing assets from the banks and, eventually, to begin directly buying preferred stock in some of the nation's largest financial institutions.

The economic crisis, soon dubbed The Great Recession,like the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, continued well after Bush departed office on Jan. 20, 2009, just as Democrat Barack Obama, the nation's first African American president, was being sworn in.

Post-Presidency

In contrast to his number two, Dick Cheney, the former president kept a relatively low-profile during his first year out of office, delivering few speeches and pledging not to publicly criticize his successor.

"I'm not going to spend my time criticizing him. There are plenty of critics in the arena," Bush said. "He deserves my silence."

Bush went so far as to rebuff some conservatives, including radio host Rush Limbaugh, who said publicly that they want Obama to fail. "I love my country a lot more than I love politics," Bush said. "I think it is essential that he be helped in office."

Bush is at work on his Presidential Library, which will be built on the campus of First Lady Laura Bush's alma mater, Southern Methodist University, in Dallas. The library will also house the George W. Bush Policy Institute, a think tank intended to advance conservative principles, and the George W. Bush Foundation. Groundbreaking is scheduled for the fall of 2010 with the opening slated for early 2013.

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