JUST AS IT HAD RAINED in Austin on election night, a cold drizzle fell on Washington as George W. Bush went through the rites of his inauguration on January 20, 2001. Some 300,000 stood in the muddy grass on the Mall under a pewter sky to watch the new president take office thirty-nine days after the Supreme Court rendered its judgment making it so. His left hand on the same King James family Bible his father had used for his own inauguration a dozen years to the day before, Bush, in a black overcoat and blue striped tie, recited the oath of office before kissing his wife and twin nineteen-year-old daughters, now college freshmen at Yale and the University of Texas. Bush’s parents watched just steps away from him, a tear falling down his father’s cheek. While the sting of his 1992 defeat had largely receded, remnants of it still lingered within George H. W. Bush even after his sons had successfully launched their political careers. Now, eight years after yielding the office to Clinton, who in turn had given it over to George’s first son, the page had finally turned.
After a divisive and breathtakingly close election, the new president sounded a message of unity, using the word civil or civility six times during his fourteen-minute inaugural address. “Civility is not a tactic,” he said just after noon. “It is the determined choice of trust over cynicism, of community over chaos. And this commitment, if we keep it, is a way to shared accomplishment.” To those abroad posing a threat to America, Bush had a far different message, one that portended the central crisis of his presidency. “The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake,” he warned. “America remains engaged in the world, by history and by choice, shaping the balance of power that favors freedom. We will defend our allies and our interests.”
Later in the day, as the rain-soaked inaugural parade wound down by late afternoon, the new president and first lady repaired to the White House, where they would take up residence for the next eight years, turbulent beyond their imaginations on that day. Earlier, George H. W. Bush had retreated from the parade-reviewing stand to the Queen’s Bedroom in the White House to escape the rawness of the weather. He was warming in a hot bath when he was interrupted by a knock on the door. “Mr. President,” an attendant said, “President Bush would like you to meet him downstairs to walk over to the Oval Office.” The elder Bush quickly toweled dry, threw on a suit and tie, and took the residence elevator to the ground floor to find that the president had already gone over to the Oval Office. The old man followed after him.
Andy Card, Bush’s chief of staff who had served as deputy chief of staff in the Bush 41 administration, was checking on the progress of the office’s hasty redecoration when George W. Bush arrived. “It was cold and dark outside, but it was warm and bright in that room,” Card recalled. “You could smell the paint drying; they had just painted it. And I’m just standing there, and George W. Bush comes in and he doesn’t say anything. And he walks in kind of puffed up.” Bush sat down in the black leather chair behind the desk, joking with Card about a vibrating feature in it that plugged into the wall. Several minutes later, the elder Bush arrived thrilled “again to walk in the terrace door” to his old office. “Mr. President,” he said, greeting his son. “Mr. President,” his son responded in kind, as he rose and embraced him, both men standing on the newly installed ivory rug adorned with the presidential seal. The forty-first president cried for a second time that day; the forty-third president cried a little, too.
Despite Bush’s promise that his administration would not be “George H. W. Bush, Part Two,” he brought back more Bush 41 alumni than just Cheney and Andy Card. Colin Powell served as secretary of state; Condoleezza Rice, as national security adviser; and Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Armitage, as deputy secretary of defense and deputy secretary of state respectively. Bush 43 also brought in members of his own team: Don Evans was appointed as secretary of commerce; Karen Hughes oversaw communications strategy; and Karl Rove was his chief political strategist.
His appointment of Donald Rumsfeld as his secretary of defense, however, sent a signal that this was not his father’s White House. Rumsfeld had crossed George H. W. Bush during the Ford administration, preventing him from being considered as Ford’s pick for running mate in 1976, and it didn’t escape the attention of Bush 41 loyalists. “Dad didn’t tell me directly [about his disapproval of Rumsfeld], but I think at times Mother reflected his point of view,” Bush 43 said, “and I could hear the buzz amongst the old Bush [41] hands: ‘I can’t believe [it], Rumsfeld this, Rumsfeld that!’” As with other gossip in the Bush 41 camp, 43 disregarded it. “Their history didn’t bother me, because I was looking for competency,” he contended. Specifically, Bush wanted to reorganize the Department of Defense and, after FedEx CEO Fred Smith declined the post, concluded that Rumsfeld was the best man for the job.
In addition to his confidence in Rumsfeld’s ability as an administrator, Bush had other reasons for choosing Rumsfeld. According to Card, when 41 was making staffing choices he named John Sununu as his chief of staff to show Jim Baker, “You’re not the copresident.” Card saw the appointment of Rumsfeld in “the same way.” Appointing Rumsfeld would show the Bush 41 team—maybe his father, too—that 43 was his own man. As 43 was quick to point out, it was something he had done throughout his life, forming relationships with those whom his father or those around him regarded as enemies. They included former Texas governor John Connally—who had consistently tried to block his father in Texas politics and within the Nixon administration, where Connally had served as secretary of the treasury—and Ross Perot Jr., the son of Ross Perot, his father’s nemesis in the 1992 election. Politics, Bush 43 understood, often meant strange bedfellows, and he was confident that his father, who he knew would never question his loyalty, knew that, too.
While many of his predecessors, including Bill Clinton, had done their best to stay in the headlines and lead national television news coverage, Bush’s approach was to plod along quietly and competently. In the first placid month of his administration, Bush turned his attention toward domestic matters. The federal funding of embryonic stem cell research became an area of singular focus for Bush, testing the definitions of his compassion and conservatism. Scientists argued that government-funded embryonic stem cell research was needed to cure myriad diseases including diabetes, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s. Among those who advocated it was Nancy Reagan, whose husband, now in his ninety-first year, was in the last stages of Alzheimer’s disease, unable to recognize anyone but her. On the other side of the issue were evangelicals and other conservatives who equated stem cell research with abortion, considering embryonic stem cells a form of life that warranted protection. In a rare televised address in early August, Bush announced a compromise, banning the harvesting of new embryonic stem cells for government-funded research but allowing research to be done using stem cell lines that had already been destroyed.
Tax cuts were another early hallmark of the Bush 43 administration. As in Texas, Bush advocated tax cuts under the Keynesian economic doctrine, adhered to by Kennedy and Reagan before him, that prescribed them as a short-term means of stimulating economic growth and curbing recession. In May, Congress passed a tax cut to the tune of $1.3 trillion. The measure, proposed as a temporary fix, would become a lasting policy fixture as the federal deficit, like it had under Reagan, distended throughout Bush’s White House tenure. It was a clear signal that Bush was not going to fall prey to his father’s “no new taxes” political blunder. He would also steer away from other mistakes his father had made, giving less power to his chief of staff than his father had given his (prior to the ouster of John Sununu) and appointing proven conservatives to the U.S. Supreme Court—in his case, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Sam Alito—unlike his father’s choice of David Souter.
Internationally, it wasn’t what Bush did in his first months as president that garnered the most attention but what he didn’t do. In March, he refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas as a means of combating global warming. Bush’s rejection of the treaty, based on the “incomplete state of scientific knowledge” on climate change, was seen as his bent toward isolationism. But as future events of his presidency would reveal, Bush was no isolationist. America, as Bush foretold in his inaugural address, would remain engaged in the world.