43.) George W Bush 2001-2009

"I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." - George W Bush, World Trade Center Site, September 14, 2001

George W. Bush did not get the presidency he thought he would. He expected to be the tax, entitlement, and education reform guy. Not the war on terror guy.

But the deadliest attack in World History will do that to you.

Follow along as Bush rides a privileged upbringing to the Texas Governorship, wins the White House after the most controversial election of the past 150 years, then struggles with how to keep Americans safe in the years after 9/11 and how to stave off economic armageddon when the 2008 financial crisis sends the global economy into a free fall.

Bibliography
1. Bush - Jean Edward Smith
2. Obama: The Call of History - Peter Baker
3. Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush – Jon Meacham

Transcript

Welcome to abridged presidential histories with Kenny Ryan, episode 43, George W bush, the Decider

Before we get rolling, I should share that the W administration is the administration I have the most connections with.

One of Bush’s future attorney generals, Alberto Gonzalez, lived across the street from where I grew up on the outskirts of Austin. Bush’s press coordinator, Karen Hughes, spoke to one of my classes at westlake high school. And George W Bush spoke to one of my classes at SMU, when I was earning my MBA.

But that’s not all.

I had a friend who enlisted in Bush’s wars. He came home with PTSD. He killed himself.

So. If you’re the sort who is curious where my biases might be. Know that I’m carrying that around with me as I write and record today’s episode.

—

Have you ever thought you were signing up for one thing, and you got something entirely different instead?

If the answer is yes, you have that much in common with George W Bush.

When W won the American presidency, the United States was the world’s only superpower. The government was running a surplus. Everything was great. The next 4 years were going to be about tax, education, and entitlement reform. He was sure of it.

And then the largest terrorist attack in world history changed everything. From that moment on, Bush was a war president. And he was going to do everything in his power, constitutional or not, to make sure the United States never got hit again.

And if he could settle some family business with Saddam Hussein along the way? Well. What’s the worst that can happen?

—-

George W Bush was born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, to Barbara and George H.W. Bush - as in, future oil millionaire and president George H.W. Bush.

And let me tell ya, being the son of a wealthy and well connected future president is a great way to go through life if you can swing it.

Now, there’s a lot to get to in Bush’s presidency, so I’m going to do the sparknotes version of his life leading up to it. Bush was a poor student who loved to party, loved to drink, and loved to make friends. Despite his poor grades, he was admitted to the country’s most prestigious prep school, Andover, and two of its most prestigious universities, Yale and Harvard. But, in Bush’s own words, he didn’t learn a damn thing at Yale. A kind Yale classmate said Bush was a student of people, not books. A less-kind Harvard business school classmate said Bush was “the only Harvard business school graduate that I know of who ever left there without a goddamn job.”

But what he did have was family connections. Good ones. Bush dodged vietnam by joining the same Texas air national guard outfit that sheltered sons of Texas oilmen, businessmen, and 7 starters from the Dallas Cowboys. 

In 1977, Bush met a librarian, and left-of-center democrat, named Laura Welch at a Texas BBQ, fell in love, and got married. As one of his siblings put it, Laura’s entry into the family was like “Katherine Hepburn starring in Animal House.” The pair had 2 daughters together, Jenna and Barbara.

Bush also volunteered for his father’s political campaigns between jobs and he developed a real talent for firing up volunteers and talking to voters.

In 1985, Bush became an evangelical, and in 86, he went sober after a 40th birthday that involved wayyyy too much alcohol.

But Bush’s real break came when daddy became president in 88’. That’s when junior decided he wanted to buy the Texas Rangers, and enough businessmen thought it would be a good investment to get in with the son of the president that he was able to raise $75 million dollars to purchase the team, only contributing $500,000 thousand dollars himself.

But the ownership group did let Bush be the public face of the Rangers. Which is a great gig if you can get it.

Four years later, daddy lost the presidency to that Arkansas upstart Bill Clinton.

2 years after that, junior used his connections and political talents to chase a new dream: the governorship of Texas.

On Aug 30, 1994, Bush muscled his way into the Republican primary, aggressively using his name, wealth, and connections to scare 3 GOP rivals out of the race in a single day. From there, he had a clear shot at incumbent Democratic Governor Ann Richards.

Richards was a snarky and popular woman. Her 1988 Democratic convention speech was a crowd pleaser with the line, aimed at Bush’s father, “Poor George, he can’t help it, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

But Bush, I gotta give it to him, he was an effective and disciplined messenger. Bush ran on a platform of: education, juvenile justice, welfare reform, and tort reform, and it was all he talked about. As Richards teased after a debate, if you asked Bush what time it was, he’d tell you “we must teach our children to read.”

As for Bush, he refused to attack Richards, saying she’d make a great victim. “I don’t have to erode her likability, I have to erode her electability.”

And that disciplined messaging, along with new direct mail tactics from strategist Karl Rove, lifted Bush to the state’s largest Gubernatorial victory in 20 years, 2.35 to 2 million votes.

Governor of Texas … is a good job if you can get it. It has no executive responsibilities. No cabinet. The legislature meets just 140 days every other year. Bush’s typical workday was: get in around 8, duck out for lunch and a jog from 11:30-1:30, play video golf or solitaire until 3, then go home.

But that’s not to say every day was this easy. Bush worked across the aisle with Democrats on his 4 legislative priorities - education, juvenile justice, welfare reform, tort reform - and found enough common ground to get some wins. He was funny, charming, and decisive. He didn’t waffle. There are no waffles in Texas. And he became popular and respected by democrats and republicans alike.

In 1996, Bush celebrated a lopsided reelection and his 50th birthday. He reflected how 10 years earlier, he’d gotten so drunk at his 40th that he’d finally vowed to change. Now he was governor of Texas and owner of the Texas Rangers. And, wouldn’t you believe it, the state’s democratic Lieutenant Governor was there at the party, toasting Bush and predicting Bush would be the next president of the United States.

Hell. Why not? He went for it.

Bush approached the presidential campaign the same way he’d approached the governor’s race, he blitzed the republican primary with overwhelming resources and name recognition and then ran a disciplined campaign around a tight message. And the plan worked. 

Sure, Arizona Senator John McCain tried to put up a fight in the primaries, even shocking Bush in New Hampshire, but, well, Bush spent $35 million dollars to buy all the air time in South Carolina, and his supporters accused McCain of having an illegitimate black child - not true, btw - which was enough to sweep McCain out of the race. 

In the general election, Bush faced vice president Al Gore. And Bush could never have had a chance in the 2000 election if not for the political ineptitude of Al Gore.

If Bush sometimes stumbled on his words, Gore straight up lied about his record. We’ve all heard Gore claimed to invent the internet, but he also claimed to be the inspiration behind a popular 1970 romance novel, among other things. It was weird stuff. 

Gore nominated a conservative senator to be his VP, which drove many progressives toward third-party candidates.

And Gore ran away from the exceedingly popular Bill Clinton. Gore was afraid he’d be tainted by Clinton’s Lewinsky scandal, but that distance only served to sever Gore from Clinton’s sterling economic record. 

The economy was booming and Clinton was sitting there with a 66% approval rating. A Gore victory should have been a shoe in, but he ran poorly, Bush ran strongly - a charming and disciplined messenger - and that put them in position to contend one of the closest races in American history.

Get ready, it’s time for DRAMA.

On November 7, 2000, election day, Bush cast his ballot in Austin with Laura, then gathered the family for a celebratory dinner, but the mood turned sour. Major networks called Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania for Al Gore. The election was lost. Bush left the restaurant without eating, bowed in defeat. But when he reached the governor’s mansion, Karl Rove, told him to take heart. Florida had 2 time zones and the fiercely Republican panhandle hadn’t counted its votes yet. Sure enough, when those came in, the networks reversed their prediction and declared Florida too close to call. As the other 49 states reported their tallies, it became clear to all - the presidency of the United States would all come down to Florida.

At 1:15 am, Bush took a slight lead and the networks called Florida and the race for Bush. Al Gore called to congratulate Bush on his victory and concede, but asked Bush to give him 15 minutes to talk to his supporters before he’d make a public concession speech. Bush said alright and 15 minutes passed. Then another 15 minutes. At 2:30 am CT, Gore called again and said “circumstances have changed dramatically since I first called you. The state of Florida is too close to call.”

Are you saying what I think you’re saying? Let me make sure that I understand. You’re calling back to retract that concession?” 

“You don’t have to be snippy about it,” Gore said. 

“Well, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” Bush said before hanging up. 

Bush considered declaring victory, but his brother Jeb, governor of Florida, said the results were too close and urged him not to. Then Bush got some intel - the Gore campaign was dispatching a team of lawyers to organize a recount in Florida. Bush was urged to do the same and, with zero time to think, he tapped his dad’s old right-hand man, James Baker, former campaign manager and Secretary of State, to lead the charge. 

When dawn broke the following day, Bush led in Florida by 1,784 votes out of almost six million cast. Under Florida election law, this triggered an automatic recount. Each county ran its ballots through the machines again. When they were done, Bush’s lead had shrunk to 327 votes. 

Then the lawyers weighed in.

Gore’s campaign asked for hand recounts in the 4 Florida counties that were most strongly democratic, in other words, the counties where missed votes were most likely to be for Gore.

They also happened to be 4 counties whose ballots were a mess. Some used hole punchers, which raised the question, does a vote count if a hole isn’t fully punched? Others had confusing layouts that likely led thousands of voters to cast their ballots for third-party candidate Pat Buchanan when they thought they were voting for Al Gore.

Bush’s team sued to block those recounts, arguing ‘the more often ballots are recounted, especially by hand, the more likely it is that human errors will be introduced,’ which is a fair point.

Then Florida’s Secretary of State weighed in, saying the counties could only count ballots that had already been counted - in other words, if they found legitimate ballots that hadn’t been counted on accident, tough luck, don’t count ‘em - a big blow to the Gore campaign. Have I mentioned Florida’s secretary of state was not only a republican, but the chair of Bush’s campaign in florida?

Then Florida’s attorney general weighed in, saying Florida’s counties should ignore Florida’s secretary of state and continue counting votes. Have I mentioned Florida’s attorney general was a Democrat?

Then the state’s supreme court weighed in - also telling the counties to ignore the secretary of state and continue counting votes.

Have I mentioned every member of the Florida supreme court was appointed by Democratic governors?

After that, you had a near daily start-stop of various recounts in various counties as local officials attempted to navigate a quagmire of lawsuits and counter suits between the two campaigns, not to mention conflicting orders from the state’s attorney general, local courts, supreme court, and the 11th circuit court of appeals. At one point, republican staffers began pounding on the doors and windows of a courthouse where a recount was taking place, temporarily stopping it through physical intimidation.

It was a mess!

But, riding a series of wins at the state’s supreme court, team Gore appeared to be pulling ahead. 

Until the Supreme Court of the united states got involved.

Slowly.

Arguments were held Dec. 1

A temporary stay on the recount was ordered Dec. 9.

And on December 12, the United States Supreme Court ordered the Florida recount ended for 2 reasons:

• In a 7-2 decision, the supreme court said that because each county’s ballots were different, that meant each county’s recount process would be different, and, I kid you not, they said this violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment, which does not say anything about this.
• And, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme court ruled that there was no longer enough time to come up with a constitutionally sound recount method, so Florida wasn’t even allowed to try. The recount was closed.

Have I mentioned 7 of the 9 supreme court justices were republican appointees, including 2 appointed by Bush’s dad?

But the supreme court also issued a minority opinion, which argued, what are you talking about? The electoral college wasn’t scheduled to meet for another 7 days and, shoot, remember the Hayes-Tilden election? Back in 1876, a winner wasn’t decided until March 2! Also, time would not have run short if the Supreme Court had not issued a stay. Also also, the majority opinion flies in the face of longstanding tradition that the Supreme Court interpreted federal law, but state courts interpreted state law and this was unquestionably a question of Florida state law.

But, well, there was nowhere left to appeal. Gore conceded the next day. Bush officially won Florida by 537 votes, giving him a 271-266 electoral college victory, despite losing the popular vote 51 to 50.5 million.

So what’s the takeaway here? Well, Florida was a mess. If not for confusing ballot layouts in large counties, Gore probably would have won. If not for hanging chads, Gore probably would have won. If not for the U.S. supreme court blocking the recount, Gore probably would have won.

But ultimately, this is like complaining about the refs after your team blew a game. Al Gore ran a bad campaign. George W. Bush ran a good one. They all knew how the electoral college worked. They all knew what states they had to win. And Gore didn’t get it done.

2000 was the closest, most contentious election in 124 years. But it was finally over. George W. Bush had won the presidency of the United States.

And so, on January 20, 2001, 54-year-old George W Bush, the privileged son of a wealthy president who fell out of the national guard, went bust in the oil business, and traded Sammy Sosa from the Texas Rangers, but who discovered he was a natural at politics and became a bipartisanly popular governor of Texas, was sworn in as the 43rd president of the United States of America - the first son of a former president since John Quincy Adams in 1824. But what did the world, and the country, look like when Dubya. became president? Let’s look around.

Internationally, the world was experiencing a moment of American hegemony. No country came close to threatening the economic or military power of the United States of America. Sure, an ex-KGB officer named Vladimir Putin had recently become president of a beleaguered Russia, but they were no threat. Sure, some terrorists in Afghanistan dreamed of death to america. But what could they do? The United States felt secure.

Domestically, the American economy was booming. Unemployment was 4%, gasoline was $1.50 a gallon, and the federal government was on track to eliminate all federal debt within a decade if it stayed the course on taxes and spending. 

In other words, it was a great time to become president. He approached the job with 3 key lessons he’d learned from the failures of his father’s one-term presidency:

• Where Sr. sometimes seemed without conviction, Jr would always live by a strong creed
• Where Sr. had lost the conservative base, Jr. would always stand firm with the right
• And where Sr. had been attacked for appearing a wimp, Jr. would always project strength

Bush had campaigned on education, tax, and entitlement reform, and, just like when he became governor of Texas, he quickly set to work tackling all 3.

And I gotta say, Bush is a craftier politician than he often gets credit for. When he passed tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, he picked up democratic votes both times. When he reformed medicare in 2003, he picked up democratic votes again. And when he wanted to pass his signature No Child Left Behind education bill in 2001, he tapped none other than Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy to be his partner in the legislation, guaranteeing it passed by huge margins.

If domestic legislation is what Bush was remembered for, he’d be remembered as a very effective president at getting what he wanted.

But that’s not what Bush is remembered for.

At 8:55 am, September 11, 2001, Bush was walking into a Florida elementary school to promote No Child Left Behind when Karl Rove told him a plane of some sort had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. It was probably pilot error, Rove said. They were looking into it.

Minutes later, Bush was sitting in a second-grade classroom listening to a teacher read “The pet goat” to her students when an aid walked across the room to whisper something in Bush’s ear.

“A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.”

Bush sat unresponsive for 5 minutes, then interrupted the teacher to say, “Very impressive. Thank you all so much for showing me your reading skills.” And then he left. Bush later said he didn’t rush out because he didn’t want to cause a panic, but… I gotta tell ya, I remember a lot of people panicking that day, and not one person saying ‘don’t worry, Bush kept reading The Pet Goat, we’re going to be ok.’ 

National air traffic was grounded as Bush flew back to Washington DC, learning en route that a third plane had crashed into the pentagon and a 4th had crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside. Bush delivered his first televised Oval Office address that night: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” And then Bush met with his national security team.

The team had warned him something like this could be coming. Just 1 month earlier, he’d received an intelligence briefing titled “bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” which included the text ”FBI information since 1998 indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.”

But the National Security team had also insulated Bush from more dire warnings. When the counter terror chief warned National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on July 10 that ‘There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months,” she didn’t relay that urgency to Bush.

But, the night of September 11, there was urgency now.

And a clear enemy: Osama Bin Ladin, leader of the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

3 days later, in one of the most memorable moments of Bush’s presidency, he visited ground zero and started talking to a crowd. Someone shouted from the back “We can’t hear you!” Bush responded: 

AUDIO

Hours later, Congress adopted a joint resolution 98-0 in the Senate and 420-1 in the House authorizing the president to, “use all appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attack that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”

Everyone knew exactly who the resolution was talking about. Osama Bin Laden was holed up in Afghanistan, where the radical islamist Taliban government sheltered him and his terrorist network.

Less than a month later, the United States began bombing Afghanistan. Special forces deployed, followed by the army. 39 days after the first bombs were dropped, the Taliban capital of Kabul fell to the United States and its Afghan allies. Bin Laden wasn’t captured, but it felt like just a matter of time. Al Qaeda and Taliban survivors fled across the border to Pakistan, but instead of hunting them down or strengthening the new Afghan democracy the United States had installed, Bush’s attention drifted westward.

Toward Iraq.

The attempt to tie 9/11 to Iraq began less than 24 hours after the trade centers fell. 

In Bush’s first meeting with his national security team after the attack, he was told Al Qaeda was solely responsible and urged to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan, the 2 countries harboring or friendly to Al Qaeda. Bush thought that was a good start, but wanted more, quote, “This is an opportunity beyond Afghanistan. We have to shake terror loose in places like Syria and Iran and Iraq.”

The next day, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointed out there weren’t many good targets for the military to hit in Afghanistan. But, “In Iraq, we could inflict the kind of costly damage that could cause terrorist-supporting regimes around the world to rethink their policies.” 

Bush asked if the United States could handle the Afghanistan and Iraq missions at the same time. He was told yes.

It was 2 days after 9/11, and the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq were already being planned. When Secretary of State Colin Powell later told Bush that going after Iraq could cost the United States the support of its sympathetic allies, Bush cut him off, saying “at some point, we may be the only ones left. That’s ok. We are America.”

Bush began to publicly make the case for war with Iraq, using his first State of the Union to declare Iraq, Iran, and North Korea part of an “Axis of Evil.” At a West Point commencement ceremony, he said, “If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.”

The administration leaked intelligence - faulty intelligence - that Iraq was trying to get weapons of Mass destruction, WMD. They hit persuasive gold when they started telling anyone who would listen that, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

Still, Powell tried to talk Bush off of Iraq, saying, “When you hit this thing, it’s like a crystal glass. It’s going to shatter. There will be no government. There will be disorder, you break it, you own it…” But Bush waved the warnings away. Powell was sent to the UN, where his presentation on Iraqi WMD’s convinced many wavering americans - and wavering Congressmen - that Saddam must be toppled. 

On October 10, 2002, the house of Representatives authorized force in Iraq by a vote of 296 to 133. All but 6 Republicans were in favor, while Democrats were split. In the senate, the vote was 77 to 23, with only 1 republican and a minority of Democrats in opposition.

The UN was less convinced. It ordered Saddam to get rid of any WMD he still possessed and sent weapons inspectors to make sure he complied, but a problem emerged - how do you prove something that doesn’t exist, doesn’t exist.

It’s literally impossible. Like, imagine if I accused you of hiding WMD. You might be like “What? Where?” and I’d say “You know where.” And I might challenge you to prove you don’t have WMD somewhere, but how do you do that? No matter what you do, I can just accuse you of hiding the WMD ‘somewhere else.’ It’s impossible to prove something that doesn’t exist, doesn’t exist.

And other countries noticed the fallacy. Turkey, Germany, China, Russia, even France said they wouldn’t support an American invasion of Iraq. And Bush’s personal diplomacy did not help the situation. In a call with the president of France, Bush argued “Gog and magog are at work in the Middle East. Biblical prophecies are being fulfilled. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his peoples enemies before a new age begins.” 

France wasn’t going to touch this war with a 10-foot pole after that pitch.

But hey, Great Britain and a few others signed on, and Congress had already approved the war. Bush was ready to go.

On March 17, 2003, Bush declared Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had 48-hours to leave Iraq if he wanted to avert war. Saddam stayed put. On March 20, 2003, the United States invaded.

26 days later, it won.

Just like Afghanistan, the U.S. military deployed a flawless “shock and awe” strategy that rapidly captured Baghdad. Saddam tried to hide, but he was soon captured, tried, and executed by the Iraqi people for, you know, mass murder, among other crimes.

The U.S. army patted itself on the back and prepared to go home. Sure, they hadn’t found WMD’s, but they’d defeated Saddam! Any Iraqi threat to the United States was over. A transition team was prepared. A new government would be installed and the United States would get out.

But then. Inexplicably. Bush changed the mission.

On May 1, 2003, Bush, the old national guard pilot, landed a navy jet on an aircraft carrier that was sailing back from the Persian Gulf, stood before a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner, and declared a new mission - the United States would not leave iraq until democracy was established.

Which was not what the army had in mind at all. The Military’s plan was to topple Saddam and leave. Turning a nation that had known decades of dictatorship into a democracy? That’s a major challenge. And the person Bush put in charge was not up to it.

Enter Paul Bremer, a former consultant and state department employee with zero experience in the Middle East. Bremer moved into one of Saddam’s old palaces and did two very dumb things.

1. He disbanded the Iraqi army, which meant 670,000 men with military training were suddenly unemployed. This was great news for militia recruiters and terrible news for the U.S. military, which would have to fill the void between those militias and try to preserve the peace. 
2. Bremer purged all members of Saddam’s political party from the Iraqi government, which might sound good, but for the previous 25 years, Saddam’s party had been the only game in town. Every politician, social worker, teacher, you name it, were members of his party. Anyone with experience providing services Iraqis depended on was suddenly fired.

But the deeper challenges were beyond Bremer’s reach. 

Democracy is hard. It encourages people, every election season, to focus on the values that pull them apart rather than the values that draw them together. It encourages argument and debate. At best, it can be uncomfortable. At worst, it can be violent. We are failing to keep it civil in the United States, and we have 200 years of practice. In Iraq, where sectarian divisions are right there to be exploited by demagogues, the experiment in democracy got violent fast. Sunni’s, Shiites, and Kurds began fighting. Some in the administration discussed breaking Iraq into 3 separate countries, but Bush insisted on keeping it whole. And he wanted the US military to hold it together.

And then the Abu Ghraib scandal hit the news, and Americans soldiers went from liberators to occupiers in the eyes of many Iraqis.

What was Abu Ghraib?

Abu Ghraib was a prison in Iraq. A prison where Americans humiliated and tortured Iraqi prisoners. That, alone, is horrible. But it gets worse. This behavior wasn’t a one-off accident. It was American policy.

What!?

Back when the United States was rapidly winning its war in Afghanistan, it rapidly captured a large number of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. US policy, since the days of George Washinton, had been to oppose torture. But Bush saw Afghanistan differently. What if we captured someone who had intel on a pending terror attack. Should we really treat that guy humanely? Or was it ok to break a few rules, and perhaps a few bones, to get them to talk? 

Bush decided the priority was making them talk, and he turned to the Office of Legal Counsel, OLC, to give him the framework to do it.

The OLC is a funny office. It has the power to write secret legal opinions that exempt people from having to obey American laws. If the OLC says you are allowed to steal candy from babies, you can steal all the candy you desire. They print get-out-of-jail-free cards. It’s kind of crazy.

And the cards they printed for Bush said 2 things.

One: Afghans - and later Iraqis - weren’t Prisoners of War, entitled to protections, they were “unlawful combatants” - and the Geneva conventions don’t say anything about unlawful combatants, so you can totally torture them.

But, two: We weren’t torturing them. Noooo. No no no. We were deploying ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ 

What are some examples of enhanced interrogation techniques?

Waterboarding, forced nudity, locking prisoners in small boxes with insects, slamming them into walls, beatings - Oh it was totally torture. Bush just pretended it wasn’t.

Which brings us back to that iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib. The CIA encouraged Abu Ghraib guards to torture inmates, which they did.

When the Abu Ghraib story broke, pictures of smiling american soldiers humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners spilled into the public, incensing iraqis of all stripes, and horrifying the American people. Senator John McCain - remember him? Bush’s rival from the 2000 GOP primary - well, he was also a former Vietnam prisoner of war who had been tortured for 5 years by the North Vietnamese. As a result. He was very anti-torture. And he led a bipartisan effort to ban enhanced interrogation techniques, which bush tried to stop.

But Bush couldn’t stop it. The bill passed with a veto-proof majority, so Bush’s legal team gave him another way around it - signing statements. Basically, whenever Bush signed a law into effect, his team would issue a statement saying ‘this is how Bush will interpret and implement this law,’ which is to say, congress can pass laws, but Bush was going to do what he wanted. So McCain’s law might say torture was illegal, but Bush’s signing statement said McCain’s law only applied to prisoners of war and, oh yeah, these guys were unlawful combatants! So it didn’t apply.

Then the Supreme Court got involved, ruling that all detainees were protected by the Geneva conventions. But Bush got around this, too, by convincing allies in Congress to pass a law that said the president gets to define what torture is. And so Americans continued to ‘enhanced interrogate’ detainees right up until 2008, when the Supreme Court again ordered Bush to stop shortly before he left office.

With revelations of torture increasingly putting US forces in the crosshairs, Iraq went from bad to worse in 2006 when Sunni extremists bombed a Shiite holy site called the Golden mosque, triggered basically a Sunni-Shiite civil war in Iraq. Violence surged and casualties increased on all sides, including American. Bush had to make a decision, withdraw, or surge more troops.

Most of Bush’s experts wanted him to draw down. The army chief of staff told him a surge would break the army. So Bush fired him. 20,000 additional troops were sent to Iraq and deployments for soldiers already there were extended from 12 months to 15 to keep deployed numbers high. When morale plummeted, Bush asked the joint chiefs “Why do people join the military if they don’t want to fight?”

After more than a year of increased troop presence, violence did begin to drop, and then Bush approved the drawdown he’d previously rejected. He credited the surge with this success, but the bigger factors may have been Iran urging its proxies to stop fighting and Al Qaeda in Iraq being betrayed and evicted by its former iraqi allies after it freaked them out by declaring an uber repressive Islamic State of Iraq in the western desert. We’ll hear from this “Islamic State” in Obama’s episode.

By the end of Bush’s presidency, More than 4,000 U.S. Soldiers had died in Iraq and more than 30,000 had been injured there, while iraqi deaths exceeded 100,000. $600 billion had been spent in Iraq, $8.8 billion of which was unaccounted for. Nobody knew where it had gone. The American presence in Iraq was scheduled to end by 2012, a date Bush’s team negotiated with Iraqi leadership. We’ll find out if we hit that target when we get to Obama.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, a similar surge was suddenly needed. Because the United States had never secured Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, the Taliban and Al Qaeda had been able to flee into Pakistan, regroup, and return. Worse, the CIA’s “bomb first, ask questions later” approach to picking targets killed a lot of innocent civilians, turning Allies into enemies. By the end of Bush’s term, the Taliban was active in 33 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces and improvised explosive attacks were up from 80 a year in 2003 to 7,200 a year in 2008. Bush’s final act on Afghanistan was to recommend a 20,000 troop surge to the incoming Obama administration.

And that’s where we’ll leave the ‘war on terror.’

You might be wondering, what did Bush learn from this?

The answer may be revealed in the next crisis - the financial crash of 2008.

What happened here?

Well, generations earlier, Franklin Roosevelt implemented a number of banking regulations to make sure the Great Depression never happened again.

But as the years passed, bankers began itching for those regulations to be lifted. They could make so much more money if they were lifted! And so, under presidents of both parties, those regulations began to lift.

At the same time regulations were being weakened, the banking industry was inventing whole new ways of making money that FDR never would have dreamed of. In particular, banks began offering mortgages with really high rates to folks who couldn’t afford them, creating win-win situations for the banks -If the borrower paid off the mortgage, the bank made a lot of money! If the borrower failed to pay off the mortgage, the bank got the house, which they could then resell for lots of money! These subprime mortgages were then bundled, packaged, and sold as if they were much more dependable assets. As long as the value of homes continued to rise and not too many borrowers defaulted on their mortgages, nothing could go wrong.

About that.

In 2006, the number of borrowers defaulting on their mortgages began to go up and the values of homes began to go down. Whoopsie daisy.

Which meant banks were suddenly not getting the revenue they had expected to get from these subprime mortgages. Which was bad, because the banks had borrowed a ton of money to finance those subprime mortgages, and now they couldn’t pay those loans off.

And that’s when those big banks began to sound the alarms. They needed massive amounts of government money to help them pay their creditors, or they were going to fail, and if they failed, that was going to cause shockwaves across the financial world.

The first signs of panic came August 9, 2007, from France.

France’s largest bank announced that those repackaged and bundled subprime mortgages were worth $0, which put a hole in the balance sheets of banks across Europe. How big a hole? More than $130 billion dollars.

Asked if this was concerning, Bush said naw. 

3 weeks later, he showed he was at least a little concerned when he announced a bill to help Americans struggling to make mortgage payments refinance, but this did little to stop the bleeding. That same day, one of the nation’s largest subprime lenders went out of business with $45 billion in mortgage loans outstanding.

Not great.

It got worse.

In March, 2008, one of the 5 largest banks in the country, Bear Stearns, found itself on the verge of failure. It had invested too deeply in now-worthless subprime mortgages and was running out of cash to pay its lenders. If it didn’t get aid, it would fail.

Bush’s gut, which he had so often trusted on Iraq, told him to let Bear Stearns fail. If a business had been run poorly, why should American taxpayers have to bail it out? But then the secretary of the treasury, Henry Paulson, and the chair of the Fed, Ben Bernanke, presented Bush with a stark warning - If Bear Stearns failed, that wouldn’t be the end of it. Anyone Bear Stearns owed money to, well, without that money, they might also fail, and then anyone they owed money to might fail, on and on down the line. How many times have we seen this play out in this podcast? When a major financial institution fails, it takes innocent businesses and investors down with it.

And so Bush did the thing he’d always resisted on Iraq. He ignored his gut. He listened to the experts. He threw his political skill behind their plan, not his. 

Their plan was this: The federal reserve negotiated a deal for another massive bank, JP Morgan Chase, to buy Bear Stearns for $1.1 billion dollars - which sounds like a lot, but is a 94 percent discount off what Stearns had been worth just months earlier. Oh, and all those subprime mortgages that were now worth zero dollars? The fed paid $30 billion for them as a way. So JP Morgan was just getting the good stuff + $30 billion free dollars. 

Talk about buying on the dip.

But that didn’t end the crisis. A few months later, Fannie May and Freddie Mac called for help. Fannie May and Freddie Mac are 2 of the largest mortgage lenders in the United States, financing roughly two thirds of all home loans. They are private companies, but have government charters, which means everyone assumes their debt is backed by the U.S. government, even though it isn’t. The long and short of it is, if they ever defaulted on their debt, the world would assume the U.S. government was defaulting on its debt - even though it wouldn’t be! - and U.S. credit ratings would fall. And if US credit ratings fell, that would make future federal borrowing more expensive. Ie, imagine if your taxes went up solely because Fannie May and Freddie Mac didn’t pay their bills.

In the summer of 09, their bills totalled $5.2 trillion dollars. Debt caused by the subprime mortgage collapse. And Bush had to decide what to do, let them fail, or save the banks.

Again, treasury secretary Paulson made the case for saving the banks and presented a plan for how to do it - the government would seize an 80% ownership stake in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and grant them access to $200 billion dollars to keep them from going under.

Nothing about Bush’s conservative values said government takeovers of private business was a good thing, but Bush ignored his gut this time too, approving the plan to takeover and save the banks.

It looked for a moment like this might have saved the day, but then another of the Big 5 turned on the bat signal and cried for help.

Lehman Brothers. 

The treasury department tried to negotiate a buyout and 2 banks expressed interest, Bank of America and Barclays, but, unlike with Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, the treasury refused to sweeten the deal by absorbing Lehman’s subprime assets - possibly because the treasury secretary used to work for Lehman Brothers’ biggest rival. Refusing to cover the subprime assets caused the deal to fall apart. With no rescue on the way, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on September 15, 2008.

And that’s when the bottom really fell out from the economy. Unemployment began to rise from 4% to 10%. The Stock Market experienced one of its largest one-day drops on record, with financial stocks hit especially hard. AIG, the American Insurance Group, saw its stock plummet 60% and found itself, too, staring into the abyss of bankruptcy. Paulson told Bush that if AIG went down, it could take Morgan Stanley and several other large banks with it. He presented a plan for the government to save AIG by taking an 80% ownership stake in the company, effectively nationalizing it. Bush said ok.

But Bush’s economic advisors realized that being reactive wasn’t working. A proactive strategy was needed. So they presented one to Bush. The most controversial part of the plan was - TARP.

TARP stands for “Troubled Asset Relief Program” - a program that would give the treasurer $700 billion dollars to buy worthless subprime mortgage assets from banks. Buying those assets from banks would give banks the money they needed to balance their books and pay their bills. It would require a vote by Congress to make it happen.

Bush was told that if TARP didn’t happen, more banks would fail and the crisis would become worse than the Great Depression. 

Like most Americans, Bush didn’t like TARP on principle, but he told an advisor “If we're really looking at another Great Depression, you can be damn sure I'm going to be Roosevelt, not Hoover,” and he set about rallying support for the bill.

The good news for Bush was that the opposition party, the Democrats, were onboard. The bad news for Bush was that his party, the Republicans, were reluctant, but they were slowly getting inline. Until an unexpected phone call blew everything up. 

Our old friend John McCain - yup, the same guy Bush had beat out in 2000 and feuded with over torture - had just become the Republican candidate for president of the United States, and he was losing to Democratic nominee Barack Obama. So, 2 months before election day, McCain threw a hail mary. He publicly requested an immediate white house conference with congressional leaders to discuss TARP. Bush was furious, negotiations were in a delicate place, but he couldn’t publicly buck his party’s presidential nominee. McCain, Obama, and other congressional leaders were invited to the White House.

Bush opened the meeting by stressing the need for TARP. Secretary Paulson pressed for urgency. Then Bush turned to speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi, as was protocol in such summits, and Pelosi said Obama would speak for the Democrats. Obama said the Democrats had worked closely with Paulson to improve the TARP bill and were ready to act quickly. Then Bush invited McCain to speak… and McCain shocked the room by having nothing to say. He had called the meeting, thrown negotiations into chaos, and put the world economy in peril, all for, what, a political stunt? Bush called it the most ridiculous meeting he’d ever been a part of.

But boy did it have consequences.

The following Monday, TARP went to a vote in the house. Democrats supported it 140-95. Republicans opposed it 133-65. What’s that add up to? A 205-228 defeat. The stock market went into free fall, wiping out $1.2 trillion dollars in value. But Bush didn’t give up. He set about arm-twisting congressmen to get another vote and pass the bill less republicans be blamed for another great depression. He started adding riders to get the votes he needed - tax cut extensions for republicans, mental healthcare support for democrats, whatever it took to get the votes. The bill was reintroduced in the senate, where support was greater and it passed 74-25. Days later, the house voted again, and Bush’s hard work paid off - TARP passed 263 to 171. It was rushed to the White House and signed 2 hours later.

TARP didn’t end the crisis, but it did arrest the free fall. Instead of using the $700 billion dollars to buy assets, the treasury bought non-voting preferred stock in struggling banks, infusing them with cash that way.

The passage of TARP, the saving of Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were all actions that cut against the core of what Bush believed in. They were deeply politically unpopular. But when presented with compelling arguments that inaction would be costlier than action, Bush threw himself behind solutions. For many Americans, it was the final blow to a battered legacy. But, if Bush hadn’t acted. Well. It could have been worse.

On January 20, 2009, Bush left the white house for the last time. He retired to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, took up painting, and has largely been absent from the world stage since. 

So how had America changed during the 8 years of the Bush administration? Well, because Bush cut taxes, increased spending, and launched 2 wars without paying for them, instead of wiping out the national debt in less than a decade, Bush doubled it to $9 trillion dollars. The world’s greatest economy was now suffering its first depression since the great depression. And a country that had been at peace was now bogged down in 2 far-away wars. So. Not great.

On the invention front, social media came into its own with the launch of Facebook in 2004, Youtube in 2005 and Twitter in 2006. The iphone was launched in 2007! And Blackberries were popular for a hot minute. Oh, poor blackberries.

The final three Harry Potter books were released while Bush was in the White House, as were all 3 Lord of the Rings movies. My wife can still recite the words of Emimem’s Lose Yourself, which was released in 2003.

Internationally, the second antifada raged in Israel and the occupied territories from 2000 to 2005, resulting in Israel building a massive wall between itself and the west bank to reduce the number of suicide bombings. Israel ended its military occupation of the Gaza strip in 2005, which then held free elections at Bush’s urging, resulting in the election of Hamas, a terror group dedicated to the destruction of israel. That would turn out tragically for everyone in the region.

But all of that pales next to the tragedy in darfur, where black and arab populations engaged in a brutal war and genocide that killed hundreds of thousands of people. The conflict began in 2003. It wouldn’t end until 2020.

And there are 2 other topics from the Bush administration I want to hit on.

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall 40 miles east of New Orleans and quickly became one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history. Bush had expected local authorities to manage the hurricane without issue, just as they had when Katrina passed over Florida 4 days earlier. But this was different. Katrina hit at just the right point and with just the right force to overwhelm the levees that protect New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain and flood the city. 1,390 people died. 217,000 homes were destroyed. Civil order broke down. And Bush kept putting his foot in his mouth by saying FEMA was doing a good job.

Bush’s approval ratings plunged from 52% to 38% and never recovered.

I also want to talk about PEPFAR, Bush’s secret plan to combat AIDS. 

When Bush became president, the AIDS epidemic was infecting up to 25% of adults in some African countries. The U.S. was spending $500 million to help, but Bush thought it wasn’t enough. He asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious disease, to do better, so Fauci put together a plan to spend $15 billion over 5 years to get lifesaving drugs to 2 million people, prevent 7 million new infections, and provide care for 10 million AIDS victims and the kids they left behind. 14 African and Caribbean countries + Vietnam would be the beneficiaries, and the impact was huge. A stanford study estimates 1.1 million lives were saved in the program’s first 3 years. When PEPFAR was ready to expire, Bush renewed it with double the funding, $30 billion over another 5 years. It’s frankly one of the most generous acts of any president on the global stage, right up there with the Marshall plan, and it shouldn’t be forgotten.

That said, if you’re going to remember Bush for 3 things, I’d recommend:

1. Bush lost the popular vote, but won in the electoral college, after the Supreme Court stopped recount efforts in Florida during the 2000 presidential election.
2. After the terror attack of 9/11, Bush ordered the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, saw both countries go to hell on his watch, and ok’d the torture of detainees.
3. When the financial crisis struck, Bush ignored his gut, listened to his advisers, and bailed out banks and passed TARP, further tarnishing his reputation, but, honestly, probably saving the world from a greater depression than the one we got.

As for what can we learn from Bush? Well, listen to your advisors, especially when they are experts in fields you aren’t very familiar with. I would never diagnose my own illness, rewire my own house, or launch my own nation-building strategy without entrusting the work to experts. Bush ignored the experts on Iraq, with disastrous results, but listened during the financial crisis, potentially staving off a greater depression. Being the decider doesn’t mean not being the listener.

Thank you for listening to today’s episode of Abridged Presidential Histories.

If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and leave a 5-star review on your podcast-listening platform of choice.

If you’d like to support the show, you can look it up on Patreon, or go directly to www.patreon.com/abridgedpresidentialhistories. It helps me buy books and pay to host the show.

The music in today’s podcast is a public domain recording of the United States Army Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps. 

The primary biography for today’s episode was Bush, by Jean Edward Smith

In our next episode, we’re used to talking about history from an American perspective on this podcast. But how do presidential decisions change the lives of people far away from American shores? A conversation with an Afghan refugee - a woman who, thanks to the American invasion, was able to get an education and take on a role fighting domestic violence and abuse in the afghan government. A friend who lost almost everything when that government collapsed.

That’s next time, on Abridged Presidential Histories.