George Herbert Walker Bush

George Bush was born in 1924 in Milton, Massachusetts. A graduate of Yale University, he was a Navy fighter pilot in World War II and after 1953 headed an oil-drilling firm in Texas. In 1966 he was elected to the first of two terms as a Republican representative from Texas. He was ambassador to the UN (1971-73), chairman of the Republican National Committee (1973-74), chief of the U.S. liaison office in China (1974-75), and director of the CIA (1976-77). After losing the 1980 Republican presidential nomination to Ronald Reagan, Bush served as his vice president (1981-89).

In 1988, Bush and running mate Dan Quayle defeated Michael Dukakis in the presidential election. Faced with escalating budget deficits, he abandoned his electoral pledge of "no new taxes" and accepted a tax package that was designed to reduce the deficit but largely failed to do so as recession and an anemic recovery combined to produce the lowest growth rate since the Great Depression.

In foreign affairs, he ordered an invasion of Panama (1989) to depose Manuel Noriega, and in 1990 he committed the U.S. to the reversal of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, which was achieved (1991) in the Persian Gulf War. Bush signed (1991, 1992, 1993) nuclear Disarmament agreements with the USSR and Russia that called for substantial cuts in nuclear arms and (1992) the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.

In 1992 he was defeated in his bid for reelection by Democrat Bill Clinton. His eldest son, George Walker Bush, born in 1946 in New Haven, Connecticut, worked in the oil industry and was managing partner (1989-94) of the Texas Rangers baseball team before his election as governor of Texas in 1994.