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In 1977, President Bush (43) was introduced by friends to Laura Welch, a school teacher and librarian. Bush proposed to her after a three-month courtship and they were married on November 5 of that year (a day before the 14th anniversary of a motor vehicle fatality in which a car driven by Mrs. Bush ran a stop sign and killed a classmate of hers who was driving the other car.)The Bushes settled in Midland, Texas. In 1981, Laura Bush gave birth to fraternal twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara.
Prior to his marriage, Bush had multiple episodes of alcohol abuse. In one instance, on September 4, 1976, he was arrested near his family's summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine for driving under the influence of alcohol. He pleaded guilty, was fined $150 and had his Maine driver's license suspended until 1978. Bush said that his wife was a stabilizing influence on his life, and credits her for his 1986 decision to give up alcohol.
Bush ran unsuccessfully for congress in 1978. He was elected Governor of Texas in 1994, defeating popular incumbent Ann Richards. He was reelected in 1998, and ran for president in 2000.
The 2000 election was perhaps the most controversial in history, with the outcome depending on the state of Florida. The closeness of the Florida outcome led to a recount. The initial recount also went to Bush, but the outcome was tied up in courts for a month until reaching the U.S. Supreme Court. On December 9, in the case of Bush v. Gore, the Court reversed a Florida Supreme Court ruling ordering a third count, and stopped an ordered statewide hand recount based on the argument that the use of different standards among Florida's counties violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The machine recount showed that Bush had won the Florida vote by a margin of 537 votes out of six million cast. Although he received 543,895 fewer individual votes than Gore nationwide, Bush won the election, receiving 271 electoral votes to Gore's 266.
Bush went on to win re-election in 2004. The highlight of his term in office was the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. This in turn led to a war of retaliation in Afghanistan against the Taliban government, and a second war in Iraq, commenced to find weapons of mass destruction purportedly stored by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for intended use against the United States. An invasion of Iraq failed to locate any such weapons and the invasion was apparently based on faulty intelligence.
Bush went from having the highest presidential approval ratings after the time to the September 11th attacks, to almost the lowest. It was also on his watch that a the worst financial crisis since the great depression occurred in 2008, requiring a $170 billion economic stimulus package and a bailout of the American International Group (AIG). Bush was also criticized for his administration's inadequate response to Hurrican Katrina in August of 2005.
In his post-presidency, Bush has been active on the speaker's circuit, doing post-hurricane relief work with former President Clinton, and writing his upcoming book Decision Points. The George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum is under construction on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, but no date has been set for its opening yet.
