Nixon officially stepped down two days later. In that capacity, on August 7, 1974, amidst the Watergate scandal, Bush formally requested that Nixon resign the presidency. ambassador to the United Nations, a role in which he served from 1971 to 1973, when he became chairman of the Republican Party. President Richard Nixon then appointed Bush the U.S. Senate but again was defeated in the general election. House of Representatives, where he served two terms. Two years later, he won a seat in the U.S. Senate seat from Texas but lost in the general election.

In 1964, Bush won the Republican nomination for a U.S. He graduated in 1948 then moved his family to Texas, where he began a prosperous career in the oil industry, eventually becoming president of an independent offshore oil drilling company. The Bushes went on to have six children: George, Robin, John (known as Jeb), Neil, Marvin and Dorothy.Īfter completing his military service in September 1945, Bush enrolled at Yale University, where he studied economics and was captain of the baseball team and a member of Skull and Bones, an elite secret society.

The couple had met as teenagers at a dance. On January 6, 1945, while on leave from the Navy, Bush married Barbara Pierce in Rye, New York. He later was rescued from the water by an American submarine. He flew 58 combat missions during the war and received the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery after his torpedo plane was shot down by the Japanese in the vicinity of the Bonin Islands in the Pacific on September 2, 1944.ĭuring that incident, Bush’s plane was hit and set on fire but he continued toward his target, a radio station, and successfully bombed it before parachuting out of his plane. When he received his wings shortly before his 19th birthday, Bush was the nation’s youngest commissioned pilot at the time. Naval Reserve to fight in World War II, which America had entered in December 1941. The younger Bush was raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, and graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1942.ĭid you know? A car bomb assassination plot against George Bush was foiled in Kuwait in 1993.Īfter graduation, Bush joined the U.S. George Herbert Walker Bush was born on June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts, to Dorothy Walker Bush and Prescott Bush, a banker who went on to represent Connecticut in the U.S.

George bush vice president 2000