Hi, I’m John Green, this is CrashCourse U.S. history and we’ve finally done it we
have reached the moment where we get to talk about the presidency of George HW Bush.
The 2nd most important man named George Bush ever to be President of the United States.
A man so fascinating that we did not give him a face.
Mr. Green, Mr. Green, so we’re almost in the present?
Well we’re never really gonna get to the present Me From The Past because we’re always
in the past.
But you are like 20 years in the past which is soon going to create a time paradox that
I can not possibly deal with.
So I’m just going to let Hank deal with that over on the science shows.
Intro Anyway despite like calendars and everything,
the 1990s really began in 1988 with the election of George Herbert Walker Bush, who had probably
the best resume of any presidential candidate since Teddy Roosevelt.
I mean he was a war hero, having enlisted in the Navy upon graduating from high school
and then going on to become the youngest pilot in Navy history.
He flew 58 missions in the Pacific during WWII and received the Distinguished Flying
Cross for completing a mission in a burning plane before ditching into the sea.
So just consider that the next time you complete a heroic mission in Call of Duty 4.
After the war Bush went to college at Yale, and then moved to Texas where he made millions
in the oil industry.
Then, he became a Congressman, and then ambassador to the UN, and then director of the CIA, and
then Vice President.
The guy had more careers than Barbie!
Plus like every great American politician George Bush grew up in hardscrabble poverty
working his way through the Depression…
just kidding he was the son of Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush.
But I guess after like 20 years of peanut farmers and former actors, America was ready
to have an aristocrat at the helm again, as long as he pretended to be from Texas.
Like certain Crash Course teachers wearing striped polo shirts George HW Bush was an
old school Episcopalion so he was never totally comfortable with like public professions of
faith.
So when it came down to pick his vice presidential candidate, Bush chose J Danforth Quayle aka
Dan.
A young, family values, senator from right here in Indiana.
Now these days of course Dan Quayle is primarily known for getting in an argument with a fictional
television character named Murphy Brown, and also for not being able to spell the word
potato, but once upon a time he was a promising young Republican.
Bush’s opponent in that 1988 was Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, who was perceived
as competent but kinda heartless and weak and a little bit clueless.
As this famous picture of him in a tank indicates he was not a war hero.
But at the beginning of the Democratic primary the leading contender was actually the reverend,
Jesse Jackson, who had a legitimate shot at being the first African American Democratic
Presidential nominee.
That would have to wait.
Because instead the Democrats chose the northern, liberal governor Dukakis and paired him with
Texas Senator Lloyd, I’m gonna make Dan Quayle look good, Bentsen.
Which I bring up primarily to point out that Texas actually used to have Democrats.
So negative campaign ads had existed before 1988 but the 1988 election took it to an entirely
new level and ushered in an era of going negative in politics.
Like everybody says they hate negative ads, but they also work like the Bush campaign’s
efforts to make Dukakis look weak on defense and crime were brutally effective.
The most infamous ad featured Willie Horton who while on furlough from prison committed
rape and murder.
And even though Dukakis’ Republican predecessor had actually started the furlough program,
the Horton crime occurred while Dukakis was governor.
The ad featured a terrifying photo of Horton and prisoners walking through a revolving
door and it worked.
Dukakis was regarded as a liberal who was weak on crime.
In fact, it was George HW Bush who was the first to use the word liberal as an insult
in American politics, which represents the larger shifts that were happening.
So in retrospect, possibly the most important thing about the 1988 campaign was George Bush’s
famous pledge at the Republican convention: “Read my lips, No New Taxes!”
No way that’s gonna come back to bite him.
So once he was President, it’s not surprising that Bush focused more on foreign policy than
domestic concerns.
I mean that was his background with the UN and at the CIA.
But it also makes sense in the larger historical context because the Cold War actually ended
during Bush’s presidency.
Even though no one ever gives him credit for it.
I mean the Berlin Wall came down, Poland’s military rule ended, the Velvet Revolution
happened in Czechoslovakia during Bush’s watch.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble The end of the Cold War was really a failure
on the part of the USSR rather than the result of successful American policies.
But it left the U.S. in something of a policy limbo.
I mean after all, the idea of a super-powerful malevolent Bowser Boss Soviet Union poised
to destroy the American Way of Life provided a comfortable structure for all our foreign
relations for almost 50 years as well as providing the reason for massive military build up and
all the jobs that came with it.
One positive result of the end of the Cold War was a reduction in nuclear weapons.
Under Bush the U.S. and USSR negotiated and implemented the START I and START II treaties,
which limited the number of warheads each country could possess to between 3,000 and
3,500.
I mean that was still enough to end human life on Earth several times over but it was
amazing progress.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War led the president to declare
the dawn of a New World Order, but calling it a New World Order didn’t make foreign
policy any easier.
Without the Cold War to orient us foreign policy issues were much more confusing and
messy.
So for example, Bush kept the United States out of Yugoslavia, which disintegrated in
1991, turning into a bloodbath.
But he sent troops into Somalia to help deliver food aid, resulting in the botched operation
described in the movie, and book, Black Hawk Down.
And then there was the foreign policy crisis that Bush handled decisively: Saddam Hussein’s
invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.
Bush brought the issue to the UN and ushered through a Security Council resolution that
set a deadline for Saddam to leave Kuwait.
When he didn’t meet the January 15, 1991 deadline, the U.S. had already put together
a coalition of 34 nations ready to make him leave.
America first launched a spectacular air war that destroyed much of the Iraqi defense capability.
And then our technological prowess was on display for the world on CNN, which featured
coverage of “smart bombs” blowing stuff up.
When ground troops led by General Norman z finally moved in, they were able to defeat
the Iraqi army in just 100 hours.
Thanks Thought Bubble.
So the Iraq war, I guess we now have to say first Iraq war, was a huge military success.
America lost fewer than 300 soldiers.
Iraq suffered somewhere between 1500 and 9500 killed in action.[1]
And the US’s military objectives had been achieved clearly and quickly.
And Bush claimed that the victory had forever banished the so called “Vietnam Syndrome,”
the reluctance to use American military power for fear of becoming bogged down in another
“quagmire.”
Now in hindsight, if the Americans had supported Iraqi efforts to topple Saddam Hussein and
build a new Iraq, we might have achieved that objective as well, but the mission under the
UN resolution was to get Iraqis out of Kuwait and so that’s what we did.
Bush didn’t want to take it any further.
Oh it’s time for the Mystery Document?
The rules here are simple I read the mystery document.
I either guess the author correctly or I get shocked.
“Five of the seven agree with President Bush that the war is just or at least necessary.
But not one wants to fight in it.
All are opposed to a draft, though a few said one might be necessary as a last resort.
They said they would gladly serve in non-military public service jobs.
“This might sound selfish, but I think it would be a shame to put America’s best minds
on the front line,” said Jason Bell, 20, a junior English major from Elizabethtown,
KY.
“If we have to go, we have to go, but I think it would be a shame.”
[2] Yeah, Jason Bell, that does sound selfish.
Alright Stan this is from like a newspaper or magazine.
I assume that you are using it to call attention to the fact that this was really the first
big American military initiative without a draft.
And it also reminds us that the war was not universally popular, I mean at least before
it was fought, after it was fought it pretty much was.
But I have no idea who actually wrote the piece in the mystery document, how would I
know that?
Is it a famous journalist?
Is it like David Halberstam?
No?
David Maraniss?
Who the hell is that?
Does he have a Wikipedia article?
Meredith does he have a Wikipedia article?
Alright apparently he does have a Wikipedia article.
He even won a Pulitzer Prize so congratulations sir.
Ahhh!
So the Gulf lifted the President Bush’s approval rating to an unheard of 89%.
And in April 1991 it looked like there was no way that George HW Bush would lose his
re-election bid, but he didn’t consider the domestic issues that were kind of important
to Americans.
We are very happy to talk about all the wars that we are fighting unless and until someone
raises our taxes!
So Bush wasn’t much interested in putting together a domestic agenda – he once called
it “the vision thing” – and anyway he would have had a hard time getting anything
through the Democratically controlled Congress.
So Congress continued to pass New Deal style “liberal” legislation including expanded
funding for Head Start and welfare, as well as a Family and Medical Leave bill (which
Bush vetoed twice) but eventually passed nonetheless.
With the Family Medical Leave Act of course America joined every other country in the
world in offering paid maternity and paternity leave to new parents.
What’s that?
We didn’t?
We still don’t?
We still don’t have that?
We still don’t have paid leave?
Oh god..
However you are no longer allowed to be fired for 12 whole weeks while you take unpaid leave
to care for your child.
That’s why Stan couldn’t replace me with text-to-voice software after my daughter,
Alice, was born.
But in news that actually was sort of cutting edge Congress also enacted the Americans With
Disabilities Act in 1991.
Before I talk about the recession that ended George Bush’s presidency I want to talk
about Rodney King.
Because this revealed huge fissures in the American population and called into question
the achievements of the rights revolution.
In April 1992 an all white jury in Simi Valley found three of four policemen not guilty of
beating black motorist Rodney King, even though the incident had been recorded on videotape.
After the verdict, Los Angeles erupted into the deadliest riots seen in America since
the New York City Draft Riots. 52 people were killed and 2,300 injured in rioting that caused
$1billion in property damage.
So obviously race remained a volatile issue in the U.S.
It was also an issue that Bush seemed unprepared to deal with like he toured burned out LA
neighborhoods but had little in the way of real comfort to offer, contributing to the
perception that he was this millionaire, Ivy League-educated, Washington insider who was
out of touch with regular Americas.
But the biggest issue to most Americans was money.
America fell into recession in 1990 and the slump lasted until 1992.
It might have been caused by the end of the Cold War and the subsequent reductions in
defense spending, or by Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s sluggish refusal to lower interest
rates, or maybe the economy just needed to reset at a lower number after growing every
year since 1982, or maybe macroeconomics is more complicated than who is President and
sometimes people unjustly get blamed or credited for things that they had very little to do
with.
Regardless, 4.5 million Americans lost their jobs and the unemployment rate rose from 5.3%
in 1989 to 7.5% in 1992, its highest level in almost a decade.
Along with the many thousands of manufacturing workers who lost their jobs in America’s
continuing de-industrialization, white-collar workers were thrown out of work, too, and
college graduates, of whom there were record numbers, couldn’t find work as they came
out of school.
Stop me if any of that sounds familiar.
One person who struggled to find a job after graduating during the Bush Recession was none
other than CrashCourse writer Raoul Meyer, who after sending 100 resumes out got 3 job
interviews and ended up working at a small independent school in Alabama, where he became
the teacher of … Me From the Past.
Now the recession was certainly bad for Bush politically, but what probably destroyed Bush’s
re-election hopes was the whole taxes thing.
In 1991, with tax receipts dropping and spending not slowing very much, President Bush did
something that now seems unthinkable: he authorized a tax increase.
And in doing this he called his conservative credentials into question.
Especially in the eyes of small-government-wanting-libertarian-leaning republicans.
They had never really trusted the faux Texan Bush anyway, but he had said, “Read my lips..”
and they believed him but it turned out he had no lips!
Now when coupled with Bush’s lukewarm support of the evangelical wing of the republican
party and his running mate’s inability to spell the word potato it all prompted a primary
challenge from conservative commentator Pat Buchanan.
Which he beat back easily, however some of the GOP voter base, especially the evangelical
Christians, stayed home on Election Day.
Then there was also a third party candidate, Texas Billionaire and muppet impersonator
H. Ross Perot, who won 19% of the vote (the best third-party performance since Teddy Roosevelt
in 1912) All of this came together to open the door
for a pudgy lad from Hope, Arkansas, who had never inhaled marijuana, and didn’t cheat
on his wife except for sometimes, named William Jefferson Clinton.
Looking back from today the fascinating thing about the George HW Bush administration is
that it seems like a weird interruption in a larger narrative.
For a couple decades we had seen increasing conservatism and rising partisanship and then
suddenly George HW Bush comes along and everybody kind of works together.
They didn’t always make good decisions when working together, but they did make decisions!
But what’s really fascinating to me is that if you’re from Eastern Europe or China this
period was one of the most important in history.
Whereas if you’re American arguably the most important thing the leader of this era
ever did was raise George W Bush.
For better and for worse America didn’t really change that much as a result of the
end of the Cold War.
But we’re creeping up now on the growth of the Internet which would change the way
that Americans and everyone else imagines history and everything else forever.
Thanks for watching.
I’ll see you next week.
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________________ [1] source for these numbers is Patterson,
Restless Giant p. 235.
[2] From “It’s Their War, Too” by David Maraniss Washington Post, 2/11/91