George W. Bush

Robin Bush died of leukemia in October 1953, at three. Her brother was seven, and the family was in Midland, Texas, where his father was drilling wells. He went east for the rest of it — Phillips Academy, then Yale, where he ran the Delta Kappa Epsilon house and was tapped for Skull and Bones, and a history degree in 1968. He took a commission in the Texas Air National Guard the same year and an MBA from Harvard in 1975. Then he went back to Midland, started Arbusto Energy in 1977, married Laura Welch that November, ran for Congress in 1978 and lost to Kent Hance, and spent the next decade watching the oil business take his companies one at a time.

Eight years. Two hundred thirty-three days in, the towers came down, and everything after took its shape from that: Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the insurgency behind it, Hurricane Katrina, and a banking collapse in his last four months. He also signed No Child Left Behind, the Medicare drug benefit and PEPFAR. BriefHistory works through that record and the arguments it started. What this page adds is the 30 years before it and the 17 since.

He stopped drinking the morning after his 40th birthday in 1986 and has never publicly explained it beyond saying it had become a problem. A 1976 arrest for driving under the influence near Kennebunkport, which cost him a 150-dollar fine, stayed out of the papers until five days before the 2000 election. In between he made the only large money of his own life on baseball: 500,000 dollars into the group that bought the Texas Rangers in 1989, and more than 15 million out of it when the team sold in 1998, on the strength of a stadium the city of Arlington had paid for. As governor of Texas from 1995 he presided over 152 executions. He then ran in 2000 against nation building.

He left office in 2009 at 35 percent favorable in Gallup, and went quiet. He painted — 66 portraits of wounded veterans in 2017, 43 of immigrants in 2021 — opened the Bush Center at Southern Methodist University in 2013, and stayed almost entirely out of party politics. By June 2017 Gallup had him at 59 percent, the number having risen fourfold among Democrats. Scholars moved him too, from fifth-worst in a 2010 survey to twelfth-worst in 2018. Almost none of that is a reassessment of Iraq. PEPFAR, the AIDS program he began in 2003, is credited by the State Department with roughly 25 million lives saved, and it is the piece nobody contests. He turned 80 in July 2026.

George W. Bush's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• No Child Left Behind Act law
  Federal testing mandates, unwound by Congress in 2015 2002
• PEPFAR law
  The AIDS relief program credited by the State Department with saving about 25 million lives 2003
• Medicare Part D law
  The prescription drug benefit, and the largest entitlement expansion since 1965 2003
• Decision Points book
  A memoir built around 14 decisions instead of a chronology 2010
• George W. Bush Presidential Center building
  Dedicated at Southern Methodist University with every living president present 2013
• Portraits of Courage book
  66 paintings and a four-panel mural of 98 veterans of the wars he ordered 2017

• July 6, 1946 aged 0 Born in New Haven while his father was finishing at Yale
• October 1953 aged 7 His sister Robin dies of leukemia at three He was seven. The family was living in Midland.
• May 1968 aged 21 Enlists in the Texas Air National Guard He flew the Convair F-102 out of Ellington Field and was discharged in 1974.
• November 5, 1977 aged 31 Marries Laura Welch in Midland They had met at a backyard barbecue three months earlier.
• November 7, 1978 aged 32 Loses a House race to Kent Hance His only defeat. He took 46.8 percent.
• 1989 aged ~43 Assembles the group that buys the Texas Rangers He put in 500,000 dollars and took out more than 15 million when the team sold in 1998.
• January 17, 1995 aged 48 Sworn in as governor of Texas Over two terms he presided over 152 executions.
• January 20, 2001 aged 54 Takes the oath as the 43rd president
• April 25, 2013 aged 66 Dedicates the Bush Center in Dallas Obama, Clinton, Carter and his father were all on the platform.

• George H. W. Bush 1924–2018
  41st president who managed the end of the Cold War and assembled the coalition for the Persian Gulf War. son of
• Dick Cheney 1941–2025
  Vice president who expanded the office's power and directed post-9/11 war policy. chose as running mate
• Colin Powell 1937–2021
  General, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and secretary of state who shaped post-Cold War military and diplomatic policy. appointed
• Condoleezza Rice b. 1954
  First Black woman to serve as Secretary of State after directing national security policy under George W. Bush. appointed
• John Roberts b. 1955
  Chief justice during major decisions on health care, elections, executive power, abortion, and administrative law. appointed
• Al Gore b. 1948
  Vice president and 2000 presidential candidate who became a leading advocate for climate policy. defeated