George Herbert Walker Bush (June 12, 1924 – November 30, 2018) was an American politician, diplomat, and businessman who served as the 41st president of the United States from 1989 to 1993. A member of the Republican Party, he also served as the 43rd vice president from 1981 to 1989 under President Ronald Reagan, and in various other federal positions prior to that.
Bush was born into a wealthy, established New England family. He was raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, and attended Phillips Academy before serving as a pilot in the United States Navy Reserve during World War II. After the war, he graduated from Yale and moved to West Texas, where he established a successful oil company. After an unsuccessful run for the United States Senate, he won election to the 7th congressional district of Texas in 1966. President Richard Nixon appointed Bush to the position of Ambassador to the United Nations in 1971 and to the position of chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973. In 1974, President Gerald Ford considered Bush as a potencial candidate for the vice presidency, but later appointed him as the chief of the Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China. In 1976, Bush became the director of Central Intelligence. Bush ran for president in 1980 but was defeated in the Republican presidential primaries by Ronald Reagan, who then selected Bush as his vice presidential running mate. The Reagan-Bush ticket defeated the Democratic ticket of incumbents Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale in the general election of that year in a landslide victory. Four years later, in 1984, Reagan and Bush defeated the Democratic duo of Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro in one of the biggest election landslides in American history.
In the 1988 presidential election, Bush defeated Democrat Michael Dukakis, becoming the first incumbent vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836. Foreign policy drove the Bush presidency as he navigated the final years of the Cold War and played a key role in the reunification of Germany.