George W. Bush Signed Photograph.

George Walker Bush (born 1946) served as the forty-third President of the United States from January 2001 to January 2009, presiding over what proved to be one of the most consequential and contested periods in modern American history. The son of the forty-first president, George H.W. Bush, and a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Business School, he served as Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000 before defeating Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. The defining event of his presidency came on September 11, 2001, when coordinated terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda killed nearly three thousand people and fundamentally reoriented American foreign and domestic policy. In the months and years that followed, Bush launched the War in Afghanistan to dismantle al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban government that had harbored it, signed into law the USA PATRIOT Act and oversaw the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and in March 2003 ordered the invasion of Iraq. His domestic legacy includes the No Child Left Behind Act, the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act, and the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which is widely credited with saving millions of lives in sub-Saharan Africa. Since leaving the White House, Bush has largely withdrawn from partisan politics, taking up oil painting and publishing a memoir, Decision Points (2010), as well as a portrait collection of world leaders and American veterans.