American Experience (1988–…): Season 32, Episode 7 - George W. Bush: Part 2 - full transcript

Roger, 10-4.

After the worst terrorist attack

in U.S. history, Americans
turned for hope and reassurance

to a recently elected president

many had thought
was unprepared for the office.

The heir of a political dynasty,

George Walker Bush had led a
wayward life in his youth,

until he found religion
and a focus.

George W. Bush has a famous name
and a wealthy family

but, until he's 40,

nobody thinks
he's going anywhere.



Thank you, brother.

After two terms
as the governor of Texas,

he became president in 2000,

following a controversial
election victory.

He intended to be
a domestic president.

That's where his concentration
was, and he hardly had a chance.

Almost out of the gate,
you know, he's hit with 9/11.

Standing atop the rubble

of the World Trade Center
in New York,

just days after the attack,

Bush conveyed strength
in the face of fear.

George, we can't hear you!

I can hear you!

The president called upon
Americans



to unify
around a common purpose...

I can hear you, the rest of
the world hears you...

A global war on terror.

And the people who knocked
these buildings down

will hear all of us soon.

I think he believed

that he had been chosen
for this task.

That he had been somehow chosen

to be president
of the United States

at this crucial moment.

Not even perhaps knowing
why he had been chosen,

but that here he was.

In the days after 9/11,
Bush's popularity soared.

Then a series of major crises
and fateful decisions

unleashed forces that would
shake his confidence

and change the course
of his presidency.

♪ ♪

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which may not be suitable
for all audiences.

Viewer discretion is advised.

Three, two, one, launch.

My fellow citizens,

at this hour,

American and coalition forces
are in the early stages

of military operations
to disarm Iraq,

to free its people,

and to defend the world
from grave danger.

On March 19, 2003,

President George W. Bush
announced

the start of the war in Iraq.

The air bombardment
continued overnight.

Then, 50,000 ground troops,

led by the I Marine
Expeditionary Force

and the Army's V Corps
swept into Iraq.

Go, go!

♪ ♪

Get the off the road!

The people of the
United States and our friends

and allies will not live at the
mercy of an outlaw regime

that threatens the peace with
weapons of mass murder.

We will meet that threat now.

May God bless our country
and all who defend her.

At first, the war unfolded far
better than Bush expected.

U.S. soldiers advanced
rapidly up the Euphrates Valley,

crushing pockets of resistance.

This entire campaign
is like none other

in U.S. military history.

One of the fastest advances
probably

in the history of warfare ever,

not just modern warfare.

American forces found

that Saddam's vast army had
largely melted away.

In the town of Zawbaa,

Iraqi citizens are tearing down
posters of Saddam Hussein

and American troops are being
treated as liberators.

♪ ♪

And within just three weeks...

Yeah, let's go!

The first detachment of Marines

reached the heart
of the capital, Baghdad.

There's no TV
in the Oval Office,

so I went to the outer oval,
and there's a TV in there,

and I could see the rope around
Saddam's statue

and the tank pulling it over,

and I said, "President,
you should watch this."

So he came out, and we watched
that statue come down.

The president was
interested in seeing

how the crowd
wanted the statue down.

He took it in as a pretty
important moment.

But he didn't say much.

After taking Baghdad

with an army less than a third
the size of the force

that Bush's father had assembled

to defeat Saddam Hussein
in 1991,

the mood in the administration
was euphoric.

The scenes of free Iraqis

celebrating in the streets
are breathtaking.

Watching them,
one cannot help but think

of the fall of the Berlin Wall

and the collapse
of the Iron Curtain.

The U.S. military and its allies

have gone in there so swiftly,

just like Donald Rumsfeld
had said.

Yes, America!

Yes, yes, Bush!

You can have the sound down.

You don't have to listen
to anything.

You see those images

and it's people celebrating.

♪ ♪

On May 1, a buoyant George Bush

flew out to the U.S.S. Lincoln,

moored just off the coast
of San Diego,

to salute returning troops.

This was, this was a fun
experience for the president.

He was really looking forward
to the Abraham Lincoln. Why?

Because he was going to fly on a
plane and land on the carrier,

so he was excited.

Yes, I flew it!

The intention was to show off

the end of the war.

Good job.

They were very careful

about the lighting,
I remember they, they...

They wanted the light to be
that sort of golden-hour light,

so he landed
in the late afternoon.

It looked great.

Major combat operations
in Iraq have ended.

In the battle of Iraq,

the United States
and her allies have prevailed.

Though the president
did not say so

in his scripted remarks,

a large banner behind him
proclaimed the war over.

Bush makes his speech,

and the speech wasn't quite as
triumphal as the setting,

but what people remember
is the setting.

Within weeks, however,

the situation on the ground in
Iraq had already taken

an unanticipated turn.

What we'd been told to expect
is,

we're going to defeat
the Iraqi army.

Many of them
will come over to our side

because they will welcome us.

And instead, of course,
the minute Saddam left,

his subordinates left,
then their subordinates,

and ultimately all order,

all government collapsed.

We had been told there would be

some Iraqi generals that would
wave the white flag

and come in behind us and say,
"We'll direct traffic,

"we'll turn the water on,

we'll keep
the electricity going."

And the bureaucrats
were good bureaucrats,

and they would show up
and do their job.

And the truth is, the
white flags didn't get waved,

the troops didn't show up,

and the bureaucrats
didn't return to work.

As Iraq ground to a halt and
became a free-for-all,

homes and stores,

museums, hospitals,

and electric plants were looted.

The Iraqis, who had been
repressed for so long,

saw suddenly
all the instruments of power,

and of the state disappear,
and this was a moment,

whether it was to go in
and get light bulbs

or to steal a million dollars
from a bank,

it was an opportunity

a lot of people couldn't avoid,
and when you saw

other people doing it,
everyone started doing it.

The American government
was there

with its troops
and didn't think it was its job

to be the police for Iraq.

It wasn't there
to stop the looting.

Freedom's untidy,

and free people are free to make
mistakes and commit crimes

and do bad things.

They're also free to live their
lives and do wonderful things.

And that's
what's going to happen here.

"Free people are free to make
mistakes."

Um, as if we bore no
responsibility,

and as if this shouldn't have
been expected.

It was an incredible thing
to say,

as if the success of this

unbelievably ambitious
and risky enterprise

didn't depend on what was
happening right then

in the streets of Baghdad,

as if it was already
a done deal.

♪ ♪

In Washington,

hawks, led by Vice President
Dick Cheney

and Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld,

counseled Bush to pull
U.S. troops out of the country

and turn the government over
to a compliant Iraqi leader

as quickly as possible.

Secretary of State Colin Powell

and the president's
national security adviser,

Condoleezza Rice, warned that
to leave so precipitously

would spell disaster.

Rumsfeld and Cheney's idea
was "in and out."

And all of a sudden,
Powell and Dr. Rice jump in

and grab the president and say,

"No, you have occupational
responsibilities

"under international law.

"We gotta stay, and we gotta
try to do something

for the Iraqi people
and for Iraq."

Bush is undecided,

and all of a sudden
the president leans, leans,

and makes the decision that
we're staying.

Bush made the decision,

but left the details to others.

Most importantly, he didn't
provide the extra troops needed

for an occupation.

There was a decision to be lean

and count on others showing up

to secure the peace,

and I think
that was probably naive.

There was not as much discussion
that I remember

in the National Security Council
about the process

of organizing a government
and identifying leaders.

Bush left the job
of running Iraq

to a civilian administrator,
Jay Garner.

But with no troops under his
direct command,

Garner was powerless
to stop the looting.

The problem was that they had
underestimated

the forces they were
setting loose.

This was a country that had been
torn by sectarian differences

for many years, that have been
kept under the boiling pot

by a totalitarian dictatorship.

Today, hundreds protested

against the arrest
by U.S. soldiers

of one of their religious
leaders.

Once we got rid of that,

the sectarian differences
suddenly came to the fore.

Shiite, Kurdish, Sunni groups
were now

free to fight for power
in the vacuum that had emerged

with the toppling
of the government.

As protests intensified

and the looting worsened,
Garner floundered.

So Bush decided to step in.

♪ ♪

Rather than addressing the
underlying issue

of troop numbers, however,
he chose to make

a change in leadership.

And just three weeks after
Garner had arrived in Baghdad,

Bush nominated

a diplomat-turned-
management-expert

named Jerry Bremer
to replace him.

Jerry Bremer had been a
well-respected diplomat

and lieutenant
of Henry Kissinger,

but had never done anything like
what they were asking him to do,

and he becomes the viceroy,
in effect, of occupied Iraq.

Today, it's my honor to announce

that Jerry Bremer
has agreed to become

the presidential envoy to Iraq.

After just one meeting,

Bush had decided that Bremer
was the man for the job,

even though he had no experience
in the Middle East.

He's a can-do type person.

He shares the same values

as most Americans share,
and that is our deep desire

to have a, an orderly country
in Iraq

that is free and at peace.

This is the dysfunctionality

of the
decision-making team again.

Jerry Bremer gets called in
because Jay Garner is not

big enough, he's not, you know,
a name.

And the president tells Jerry
in the Oval,

"You have carte blanche."

♪ ♪

Bremer arrived in Baghdad

with the full authority
of Bush behind him.

The problem was, Bush hadn't
clearly articulated

what he wanted.

Bush made the decision,

very much like George W. Bush,

very much like this kind of
Harvard Business School

way of doing things, that, look,
you know, "I'm going to...

"I'm going to put the right guy
there,

and I'm going to leave the
details to him."

The new U.S. civil administrator
for Iraq

are meeting here with
Iraqi leaders.

We agreed we need to do
some work

in restoring law and order.

There was no decision made

on a single strategy on how
we're going to do this,

and then,
with the appointment of Bremer,

it all got delegated to Baghdad.

Bremer used to brag
that he was Bush's man.

Well, in practice, he was
supposed to report to Rumsfeld,

but Rumsfeld never felt like he
had control over him, so...

But at the end of the day,
the responsibility for that

has to rest in the White House.

Bremer moved immediately

to assert his control.

Bremer makes very quickly

a couple of extremely fateful
decisions.

His first order
was to fire members

of Saddam's Ba'ath party from
their government jobs.

Many were public servants
and teachers,

Ba'athists in name only.

They didn't solve any problem.

They only speaking
and we didn't need

speaking only, we need works.

A week later,

Bremer issued his second order,

which disbanded
the entire Iraqi army, security,

and intelligence infrastructure.

Suddenly you had hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis,

armed Iraqis,
with a very keen motive

to try to make trouble
for the Americans,

and no stake in

what the Americans said they
were there to do.

Bremer's decisions marked
a radical change

of course in Iraq and went
directly against the plans

that Bush had signed off on
just weeks earlier.

But, comfortable with his
decision

to delegate authority to Bremer,
Bush said nothing.

Bush gives
a lot of leeway to Bremer.

He believes he shouldn't be

over-micromanaging
from 8,000 miles away.

And so when people tell him,
wait a second,

"Why is Bremer doing this, he
hasn't cleared that with us?",

Bush backs him up...
Bush stands by him.

As Iraq continued to spin
out of control

and Bremer struggled
to restore order,

the occupation entered
a new phase.

Today, American forces endured

one of the most violent days

since President Bush said
the major fighting was over.

On May 26,

a team of two American Humvees
was patrolling the highway

between Baghdad and the airport

when they drove over
what appeared to be a backpack

lying in the road.

The Humvee in front of us,
we seen it, like,

it hit, like, a bump,
and it exploded.

It's about the biggest explosion
I've seen since the war started.

It was a huge explosion.

The explosion killed
a 25-year-old Army private

named Jeremiah D. Smith.

It was the first
of what would become

regular attacks
on coalition forces

using improvised explosive
devices,

or I.E.Ds.

I.E.D.!

Let's go!

Look for a target!

Things started to really turn
for the president.

After the war was over,

after we "won,"
after major combat was over,

after we hoped war was over,
war all of a sudden resumed.

It's a car bomb.

The fedayeen and the now
guerrilla-style attacks

that increasingly started to
take the lives

of American servicemen and women
in Iraq,

it started
to grow and grow and grow.

Reports of casualties
came in daily.

Yesterday, two ambushes

left four American troops dead.

One U.S. Special Operations
soldier killed,

eight others wounded.

Four dead and 13 injured

in three separate attacks.

Smoking, hurry up!

Let's go!

Hey, their vehicle's on fire!

In the eight weeks since Bush's

"Mission Accomplished" speech
aboard the U.S.S. Lincoln,

67 American soldiers had died

and another 201
had been injured.

U.S. forces were facing a
well-organized insurgency

spearheaded by
former Iraqi soldiers

that Bremer had dismissed.

But in Washington,
the president and his team

refused to admit it.

Can you tell us why you're so
reluctant to say

that what's going on in Iraq now
is a guerrilla war?

Um, I'll do my best.

I guess the reason I don't use
the phrase "guerrilla war"

is because there,
there isn't one,

and it would be
a misunderstanding

and a miscommunication to you

and to the people of the country
and the world.

But, for all the arguments

over how to characterize
the conflict,

the uptick in attacks on
American forces was undeniable.

The White House is aware

that governing Iraq
and containing unrest

through the hot summer months
may be costly in American lives,

and critics will continue
to pose the question

of whether America won the war

only to lose the peace.

Three months in,

George W. Bush's war in Iraq

was already very different
from his father's Gulf War.

He had taken Baghdad with no
clear objective

and only one ally, the British.

This was in stark contrast to
the international coalition

that his father had assembled.

Now, facing growing
difficulties,

Bush doubled down on his
commitment there.

Instead of just disarming
Saddam,

he placed new emphasis
on the goal

of establishing a democracy
in Iraq.

Having liberated Iraq
as promised,

we will help that country
to found

a just and representative
government, as promised.

Our goal is a swift transition
to Iraqi control

of their own affairs.

People of Iraq will be secure

and the people of Iraq will run
their own country.

The president early on
did see evidence

that this was going to be a
struggle,

but he continually looked
on the bright side

of how Iraq would blossom after
the invasion.

It is a quality in Bush

that is appealing to some
people, which is his optimism,

his belief in the inherent
goodness in people.

But that very innocence about
themselves, about America,

about our capacity to do harm
as well as good, was fatal.

I mean, it was a religious faith
in America's goodness.

And I think Bush saw himself

and the country
as agents of a great purpose,

whose unimpeachable goodness

would carry it through
to the other side.

As the attacks intensified,

the non-stop questions about
progress in the war

began to exasperate
the president.

Today, President Bush said
foreign fighters,

Ba'ath party members,

and Iraqi criminals should take
their best shot,

because U.S. forces will answer.

There are some who feel like
that if they...

attack us, that we may decide to
leave prematurely.

They don't understand what
they're talking about

if that's the case...
Let me finish.

There are some who feel like,
that, you know,

the conditions are such that
they can attack us there.

My answer is, "Bring 'em on."

We got the force necessary

to deal with
the security situation.

Of course we want...

As we left the Roosevelt Room,

I walked back into the Oval
with the president,

and I said, "Mr. President,

"think of how 'Bring it on'

"sounds to a mom or a wife
who's got a husband or a son

"who's fighting for us in Iraq,
'Bring it on.'

You want to send that signal
that, 'Attack us'?"

It's the cowboy persona that he
projects, right?

From his point of view,
he's trying

to embolden his own troops.

But it also projects
a certain cockiness

that strikes some as
the wrong way to go.

He's actually asking for a fight

that's not necessarily
going to develop.

With his daily briefings
from Iraq

containing a steady drumbeat
of reports on casualties,

Bush turned
to a different mission:

the AIDS crisis in Africa.

♪ ♪

In Senegal, the first stop on a
five-day trip to the continent,

he visited Gorée Island,

where slaves had been weighed
and measured

before they departed through
what was known

as "The Door of No Return."

One of the largest migrations
of history

was also one of the greatest
crimes of history.

The heart of the trip
was Bush's announcement

of a bold commitment of U.S. aid
to fight the pandemic.

Africa has the will to fight
AIDS,

but it needs the resources,
as well.

Over the next five years,

my country will spend
$15 billion

to fight AIDS around the world,

with special focus here on the
continent of Africa.

Though there was little appetite
in Congress

for such a huge program of
foreign aid,

Bush forced the issue.

The money was supposed to care
for ten million people

living with H.I.V./AIDS,
and provide antiretroviral drugs

for two million people infected
with H.I.V.

The program became known by its
acronym, PEPFAR.

I don't think the president
expected,

certainly none of us expected,

that one of the main initiatives
of the Bush administration

would turn out to be an assault
on the AIDS pandemic in Africa,

but I think the president saw it
as a moral imperative.

One of the essential commitments

that he talked about again
and again

in the context of PEPFAR is the
biblical phrase,

"To whom much is given,
much is required."

I think that explains a lot
about the Bush presidency,

this feeling that America
is blessed

and that we have
a responsibility to others

based on that blessing.

It's comparable to the
Peace Corps

and other efforts that defined
America's role in the world.

Not a lot of presidents
can say credibly

that, "A decision I took

saved millions of lives,"
and that one did.

It was just one of the biggest
things that happened

in the last 20, 30 years.

Bush must go, now!

We're going to be chasing Bush
until we chase him out of Iraq.

No more Bush!

By June, opposition
to the war was building at home

and around the world.

At the root of the protesters'
anger

was the belief that Bush
had lied

about Iraq having weapons
of mass destruction.

Why did the U.S.
go to war in Iraq?

9/11 was an excuse.

No imminent threat,
no weapons of mass destruction.

Now the administration keeps
changing its story,

but they can't change the facts.

Inside the administration,

officials were confident
that they would find

Saddam's biological, chemical,
and nuclear weapons.

Is it curious to you

that, given how much control

U.S. and coalition forces

now have in the country,
they haven't found

any weapons of mass destruction?

Not at all.

The area in the south
and the west and the north

that coalition forces control
is, is substantial.

It is, happens not to be
the area

where weapons of
mass destruction were dispersed.

We know where they are,
they're in the area

around Tikrit and Baghdad

and east, west, south,
and north, somewhat.

As U.S. forces took control of
more of Iraq,

Bush had an Army unit search
these areas for WMD.

They scoured arms depots
and abandoned bases,

sending daily reports back
to the White House.

Well, I'll never forget,
there was one meeting

in the Oval Office where he was
getting an update from the field

about an Iraqi military base
in the western portion of Iraq,

in the middle of a desert,
that was excessively reinforced,

had a lot of people at it,
and it just didn't seem right.

Why would they have,
in the middle of nowhere,

all these forces?

And we thought, bing,
we found it.

We thought we found where
they've got the WMD.

We thought all along that we
were going to find them.

We were all continually stunned

when week after week goes by,

and we haven't found
weapons of mass destruction.

It, it literally felt like it
was humanly impossible

for us not to find anything.

As the search dragged on,

Bush demanded to know exactly
who was in charge.

No one gave him an answer.

There was this
Keystone Cops moment

where everybody is pointing
at each other,

and it's, uh, nobody wants
anything to do with it.

Rumsfeld says, "I'm running
a military operation here.

I'm not the guy who's supposed
to be in charge of this."

Bremer is trying to constitute
a new government.

That's not his
number-one priority.

Frustrated, Bush brought in

America's leading expert on
Iraq's nuclear weapons,

David Kay.

Kay hadn't been involved

in making the case for the
invasion.

But in the 1990s,
after the Gulf War,

he had uncovered a secret Iraqi
nuclear weapons program.

Now he was asked to pick up
the search again.

The president was unhappy

with the military's role
in doing it,

and they wanted someone who had
not been involved

in the initial assessments.

And so, I said yes, foolishly,
I guess.

In mid-June, as Kay prepared to
travel to Baghdad,

he went to the C.I.A.
headquarters

in Langley, Virginia,

to pore over the intelligence
reports about Iraq's WMD.

This was the same evidence that
Secretary of State Colin Powell

had used to make the case for
war in his speech

to the United Nations
just four months earlier.

It was literally a case of the
hair on the back of your neck

sort of goes up, you're,
"Something's not right here,"

because it was hearsay,
it was communication intercepts

that were...

"Nebulous" is the most generous
way...

They were quite unclear
as to what they meant.

They certainly didn't seem to
point necessarily to WMD.

So you worked on missiles?

Once in Iraq,

Kay found that
Vice President Cheney

and his chief of staff,
Scooter Libby,

were monitoring his every move.

I would be asleep

and I'd get someone pounding on
my door

saying, "The White House is
on the line."

It was usually Scooter Libby.

And sometimes, it was something
as insane as

a set of coordinates

for where they thought
the WMD was.

Raw intelligence is something
that you do not give to amateurs

or the uninformed,

because it's easy
to make mistakes.

We had enough to do
without that sort of

interference from Washington.

Kay had a team of 1,400 experts

looking for Saddam's WMD.

The longer he was in Iraq

without announcing that he'd
found them, however,

the more the pressure grew on
the administration

to justify the invasion.

Is U.S. credibility on the line

over weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq?

Uh, I'm not exactly sure
what that means.

I mean,
Iraq had a weapons program.

Intelligence throughout
the decade showed

they had a weapons program.

I am absolutely convinced,
with time,

we'll find out that they did
have a weapons program.

♪ ♪

Then, in early July 2003,

the American public saw the
first crack in the case for war.

Today, a former
U.S. ambassador said

the administration may have
taken the country to war

under false pretenses.

Did the Bush administration
exaggerate

some of the intelligence on
Saddam's weapons program

in order to justify war with
Iraq?

♪ ♪

A retired U.S. ambassador,
Joseph Wilson,

had been sent by the
administration to Niger

to investigate claims that Iraq
had sought to buy uranium there.

In a widely read op-ed piece in
"The New York Times,"

Wilson said the claim was false.

People often forget
or underestimate

how important it was,

but it went to the heart
of the Iraq question.

Did the administration mislead
the public in some way?

Did it intentionally deceive the
American people

in order to go to war?

Furious at Wilson,

the White House began publicly
discrediting him

and his conclusion.

But the effort backfired,
and the fallout

further hurt Bush's credibility.

This week, the White House
was forced

to admit the Iraq-Niger
connection was bogus.

As a result, critics have
sharpened their charge

that the administration may have
misled the public

in making the case for war.

New questions tonight

about whether the administration
ignored its own experts

to hype more alleged evidence
against Saddam Hussein.

The final nail in the coffin

of the hunt for Iraq's WMD came
in January 2004,

when David Kay told Bush

the intelligence reports
had been wrong.

There were no WMD.

50 percent of
the American people

have said that they think the
administration

exaggerated the evidence

going into the war with Iraq.

Weapons of mass destruction,
connection to terrorism.

Are the American people wrong,
misguided?

There is no doubt that Saddam
Hussein was a threat.

Again, I'm just trying to ask...

and these are supporters,
people who believed in the war

who have asked the question.

Well, you can keep asking
the question,

and my answer is going to be
the same: Saddam was a danger,

and the world is better off
'cause we got rid of him.

It's hard for someone like
George W. Bush,

who views himself as a decider,
who views himself as

not swaying from side to side,

seeing the world
not in shades of gray...

which it usually is... but seeing
it in black-and-white terms.

It's hard for him to say,

"I made a bad decision."

The harder it got,

the more he bore down

and persisted, because it was
all a test of his resolve.

It was all about his mettle.

And I think that happens to
presidents during war.

I mean, Johnson felt that
Vietnam was a test

of whether he could stick it out

and not be the first American
to lose a war,

but it's dangerous when
it becomes personal.

It's dangerous when you can't
allow doubt to enter,

because doubt can lead to
course corrections

or changing your mind or not
doing it in the first place,

and none of that entered.

As he had done since childhood,

George Bush deflected
unpleasantness with humor

to defuse the tension
around the search for WMD.

There's a White House
Correspondents' Dinner

where the president is expected
to give a humorous talk,

and he tries to make fun of it.

Those weapons of mass
destruction gotta be somewhere.

Nope, no weapons over there.

In the room that night,
people laughed

and thought it was funny,

but the next day, a lot of
people woke up and said,

"There's nothing funny
about this."

Saddam Hussein was a bad guy,

and getting rid of him might
or might not have been

worth doing anyway,
but that wasn't the reason

people thought that they were
going to war.

I believe

that George W. Bush
is an honest man,

in the sense that he doesn't go
around lying to people,

except insofar as he's not
willing to face the truth.

That doesn't make him a liar,

but it means sometimes that he's
saying things that aren't true,

and that's what happens

when you're someone who is not
fully in possession of the truth

and not willing to engage

in the rigors of finding out
whether or not

what you're
about to say is the truth.

My view,
in the great question of whether

they were lying to the rest of
us or lying to themselves,

is that they
were lying to themselves,

and they were doing it because

the alternative is difficult.

To face the truth,

to change your mind,
to change your actions,

that didn't fit
their political plans.

It didn't fit their characters.

The ongoing war in Iraq

was never far
from Bush's thoughts.

And by the spring of 2004,

he was getting more and more
reports

about one town in particular:

Fallujah, the City of Mosques,

which had emerged as the
epicenter

of the Sunni insurgency against
U.S. forces.

Fallujah has been one of the
most dangerous places

in Iraq for U.S. troops.

Protests against U.S. forces
here are frequent

and sometimes violent.

On March 31, 2004,

insurgents ambushed
four Americans who worked

for a U.S. military contractor,
Blackwater.

They were burned,

and their charred bodies were
dragged through the streets,

then hanged from a bridge.

The president
did not want it to be ignored.

This was not just another
day in a battle.

He wanted us to have a response,

and he wanted people in Iraq to
see that there was a response,

but he also wanted the world
to see

that this wasn't going to stand.

This collection of killers
is trying to shake

the will of the United States.

America will never be
intimidated

by a bunch of thugs
and assassins.

Usually content

to delegate such decision-making
to others,

instead, Bush ordered

the commencement of a large-
scale attack on Fallujah

over the objections of local
Marine commanders.

The Marines have Humvee patrols

going out across the city.

All day and all night,

they have come under fire.

The political fallout was
immediate.

Some members of the interim
Iraqi government resigned.

Even British Prime Minister
Tony Blair,

Bush's staunchest ally,
counseled against the mission.

The Brits are saying,

"Whoa, wait a second, this is
a disaster, we need to stop."

And then Bush pulls back out.

And this sort of in-and-out,

scattershot kind of decisions on
Fallujah,

it's not his finest moment of
the war, that's for sure.

Fallujah was emblematic of the
fact the Bush administration

didn't understand Iraq.

It saw Iraq only through

the prism of Saddam Hussein,

a dictator,
and it knew so little about

what Iraq was, who its people
were, where their hearts were,

what their identity sources
were,

what they wanted,
that they really blew it.

On the same day that Marines

were pummeling the
Sunni stronghold of Fallujah...

American troops came under
sustained attack

from a Shia uprising in other
parts of Iraq.

Armed militants, led by a fiery
cleric, Moqtada Al-Sadr,

seized control of major towns
in the South

and even parts of Baghdad.

The uprising was massive,

and it was devastating
for the Americans because

one sectarian enemy was a lot to
handle, but two,

and you pretty much have
the whole of Iraq against you.

So, suddenly, what had seemed
like a very painful,

but slowly upward path toward
reconstruction

and creating
a sovereign Iraqi government

looked like, um, just a war.

This week has been
one of the deadliest

for U.S. troops
over the past year.

Earlier today, at least one
Marine died in the city...

killing two U.S. servicemen.

In Baghdad...

♪ ♪

As attacks
on U.S. troops intensified,

questions about Bush's handling
of the war took a back seat

in the media to profiles
of American casualties.

Beaver Dam is in mourning.

One of its native sons perished
serving his country in Iraq.

A man who died too young,

three days after his
25th birthday.

A devoted husband, loving son,
and brother.

He loved music,

he loved entertaining people,
he did magic tricks.

148 soldiers were killed in
April 2004

in more than
50 separate attacks,

more than all
the casualties suffered

in the original invasion.

By sunrise, two Americans

and two suspected attackers
had been killed.

Aides often found President Bush

staring at the list of
casualties on the blue sheet,

the first thing he saw

when he arrived in the
Oval Office each morning.

As he read the names,

he knew that he would soon
confront

many of these soldiers'
grieving families.

Whenever the president would
travel outside of Washington,

we would always find out

how many families of
the fallen were present

in that area and we would then
invite them

to visit with the president.

Sometimes it'd just be out
in the hangar,

and he would listen
to the families

talk about
their lost loved ones.

He sent these people to war.

It was his decision that led to
people being wounded

or losing their lives,
and he knew

he had to join those families
and take whatever it was

those families wanted
to say to him.

Sometimes it was loving,
sometimes it was religious.

Sometimes it was compassionate.

Sometimes it was angry,
and he knew he had to take it.

♪ ♪

Most of the families
were very happy

to see the president, overjoyed,
right?

The honor that was so great.

But there was one family...

Their son
was not going to make it.

And he was on life support,
and this mom was so mad.

And she railed at the president
and yelled and yelled,

and he didn't try to leave.

And the husband said,

"Mr. President, thank you,"
you know,

tried to calm his wife down,
the president said,

"It's okay, I, I can stay,"
and he said,

"No, we thank you,"
and shook hands, continued on.

We saw about five more patients
after that.

But I'll never forget that we
get on the helicopter,

Marine One, to head back,
and he says,

"That momma sure was mad at me,"

and he looked at me, and I said,
"Yes, sir."

And he looked out the window,

and I saw this one tear came
down his cheek,

and he said,
"And I don't blame her a bit."

And we got back to the
White House,

and it was back to business.

For all Bush's efforts to focus
on other issues,

the fight against Al Qaeda
and the war in Iraq

required his full attention.

In April 2004,

"The Washington Post" obtained
secret memos written after 9/11

which laid out a legal
justification

for using what Bush's
administration called

"enhanced interrogation
techniques."

They were designed to extract
information

about imminent attacks from a
small number of Al Qaeda leaders

being held in undisclosed
locations around the world.

They thought
in those beginning days,

and even maybe
the beginning years,

that there might be another
attack any day now,

and they needed to figure out
who this network was

and how to find them
and how to kill them.

What they did with the captives
is,

they hid them in
foreign countries.

They didn't want to allow the
Red Cross or the U.N.

to monitor their conditions.

They didn't necessarily want to
treat them humanely, either,

and that's where you get

the so-called "enhanced
interrogation techniques."

When news of the extreme
techniques broke,

Bush again dug in,
defending his policy.

Mr. President,
I wanted to return

to the question of torture.

What we've learnt from these
memos this week

is that the
Department of Justice lawyers

and the Pentagon lawyers have
essentially worked out

a way that U.S. officials
can torture detainees.

We're a nation of law,
we adhere to laws.

We have laws on the books.

You might look at those laws,

and that might provide comfort
for you.

They had defined torture as
organ failure or death.

And so anything short of that,

especially if it's monitored
by a doctor

so that the guy can't die,
then that's not torture.

So I think Bush
is convinced that,

although we're treating people
harshly,

we're not torturing anyone.

And you've got to really, really
think about that hard,

because how on Earth could
anybody think

that we
weren't torturing anyone?

As Bush's war on terror grew,

hundreds of low-level detainees
were sent to Guantánamo Bay.

Many had nothing to do with
Al Qaeda

or the attacks of 9/11.

Still, soldiers began using

enhanced interrogation
techniques

on these detainees, too.

All this was kept secret until

the morning of April 28, 2004.

The Arab world woke up today

to shocking photos
that apparently show U.S. troops

abusing detainees at a prison
outside Baghdad.

With the insurgency
in Iraq gaining ground,

American troops had been filling
up the prison called Abu Ghraib

with suspected bomb makers
and guerrilla fighters.

For months, reports of abuse
at Abu Ghraib

had made their way up
the chain of command

all the way to
Secretary Rumsfeld,

who had done little until dozens
of explosive photos

were leaked to the press.

Some of those prisoners were

piled on top of each other
naked.

The most horrific photograph
shows one of the Iraqi detainees

standing on a box,
and he had been told

if he fell off the box,
he would be electrocuted.

The pictures have led
to charges against

six United States soldiers,
and the images

may have damaged the American
mission in Iraq.

"It's wrong, wrong,

100 percent,
and a crime," says Khalil.

"You came to liberate us from an
unjust dictator,

who killed and tortured us."

Later investigations
would reveal

that the abuse of prisoners at
Abu Ghraib

was a direct result of
Bush's decisions.

Commanders in Iraq were advised

to "Gitmo-ize"
interrogations there

to gain intelligence
on the insurgency.

What we found was
that there was a migration

of the tactics used by a small
number of C.I.A. operatives

against the suspects
in the black sites.

It migrated over to this
unit of low-level soldiers

not trained in interrogations
or even prisoner guarding.

They were bored, and cruel.

Abu Ghraib was devastating
for the administration.

It showed the kind of rot

that was occurring in Iraq under
American occupation,

and it showed how far off we had
come from American ideals.

The behavior of American
soldiers at Abu Ghraib

shook Bush, but to him,
there was no connection

with his decision to approve
harsh interrogation techniques

on Al Qaeda suspects.

I didn't like it one bit.

But I also want to remind people

that those few people
who, who did that

do not reflect the nature
of the men and women

we've sent overseas.

With no satisfactory response

forthcoming from
the secretary of defense,

calls for Rumsfeld's
resignation mounted.

I think the president
of the United States

should fire the
secretary of defense, Rumsfeld.

I ask the speaker of the House

to command an open session here
on the floor of the House

for Secretary Rumsfeld to come
and tell us

why he was hiding reports
for two months,

why no one knew about
the reports,

and why these kinds of heinous

and ridiculous acts
are going on.

We want peace over war...

♪ ♪

12 days after the Abu Ghraib
images went public,

Bush met
with his secretary of defense.

Rumsfeld handed Bush
a letter of resignation,

but the president refused it.

Instead,
with Rumsfeld at his side,

he praised his defense secretary

in front of
the assembled press corps.

Mr. Secretary,
thank you for your hospitality.

And thank you for your
leadership.

You are courageously leading
our nation

in the war against terror.

You're doing a superb job.

You are a strong
secretary of defense,

and our nation owes you
a debt of gratitude.

On Abu Ghraib, really, nobody is
held responsible.

There are charges against
the low-level soldiers

that carried this out, but,
from Rumsfeld on down,

nothing happens;
on the contrary,

Bush exonerates him in public.

No one was held accountable

for the program of torture
or enhanced interrogation

at the black sites or the prison
at Guantánamo Bay, either.

Bush and most of
the president's closest advisers

held to a deep-rooted conviction

that the brutal interrogation
techniques were necessary.

I can say that questioning
the detainees in this program

has given us information that
has saved innocent lives

by helping us stop new attacks.

The procedures were tough,
and they were safe

and lawful and necessary.

When the U.S. Senate conducted
an investigation

of the interrogation program,
however,

it found that the tactics had
done untold damage to America

and had not been effective
in averting attacks,

despite claims by the C.I.A.

It's not legal,
and whether you call it

enhanced interrogation
or whatever,

it's not legal under U.S. law,

it's not legal under
international law,

and it's certainly,

I would say to George W. Bush,
not legal under God's law.

The torture was just a stain

on our national soul.

There are 34 coroner's reports,

34 that say "homicide."

We killed 34 people
in detention.

Now, only a few of those have
been revealed

and a few people
have been punished for it.

But that's the ultimate torture,
I mean, that's even

their definition of torture...
We murdered people.

I don't think there's any
evidence

that torture or the black sites
kept us safer.

On the contrary, I think there's
a lot of evidence

that it made it much more
dangerous for every American

who went overseas,
who fought overseas,

because the stories
that came out

about the Abu Ghraib
mistreatment

and the Guantánamo mistreatment
were the best recruiting tools

that Al Qaeda ever got,
no question about that.

They have picked up people on
the battlefield,

they've listened to people
talking through surveillance,

and they absolutely know that
that mistreatment

fueled a new generation
of recruits,

and they are still using all
those images to do that.

♪ ♪

With the Iraq War taking
such a dark turn,

Bush was tested in ways
he had never anticipated.

He turned to history, devouring
books on wartime presidents,

most notably Abraham Lincoln.

♪ ♪

In public, he was careful to
keep such introspection hidden,

always looking ahead,

and never second-guessing
decisions he'd made,

despite mounting pressure to
acknowledge mistakes.

I remember vividly

a primetime press conference in
the East Room.

Thank you, Mr. President.

After 9/11, what would your
biggest mistake be,

would you say, and what lessons

have you learned from it?
Hmm.

I wish you'd have given me this
written question ahead of time,

so I could plan for it.

Uh...

And I believe it was
John Dickerson

who posed this question,
and it really got the president

in one of those cases that he
sometimes would call,

"Well, I got myself
in a rhetorical cul-de-sac."

John, I'm sure historians will
look back and say,

"Gosh, he could have done it
better this way or that way."

Uh...

But what he was tempering,

that he did not
and would not do,

is to call this a war a mistake.

You know, I just, uh...

I'm sure something will pop
into my head here

in the midst of this
press conference,

with all the pressure of trying
to come up with an answer,

but it hadn't yet.

He thinks that what they are
trying to say

is it was a mistake
to go to war.

He won't admit that, that's not
something he will say.

So he stumbles over the answer,
and it becomes

kind of this indelible moment
of his presidency.

As the summer of 2004
approached,

Bush turned his attention away
from Iraq

and began planning
for his re-election campaign.

Four more years!

After all the difficulties
with the war,

he relished traveling
the country

and being among his supporters.

There was a lot riding
on the '04 campaign,

for George W. Bush
and for his father.

This would be the vindication
of the Bushes.

The Adams,
the only other family thus far

to have produced two presidents,

they were two
one-term presidents.

If George W. Bush won in '04,

the Bushes would have achieved
something

no other political family had in
American history:

re-election.

With America so deeply polarized
over Iraq,

Bush and his team knew that
re-election would be a struggle.

Bush's approval rating is at 63
in the spring of 2003,

and by election day, it was 51.

Now, when we planned for the
re-election, we did not think

that the glory days
are gonna last forever.

We knew we were in for a tough
race and planned accordingly.

Bush and Rove decided to
energize their base

by having the president
come out forcefully

against same-sex marriage.

I believe in the sanctity
of marriage.

He called for
a constitutional amendment,

and Republicans placed votes
on the ballot

in several key states.

And he allowed his political
guru, Karl Rove,

to play on misunderstanding
and bigotry.

And it was done cynically
in order to ensure

turnout in places where
opposition to the war

made George W. Bush's chances
iffy.

Opposition to the
Iraq War had become

a defining issue for Democrats,

and their candidate, Senator
John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran,

made it the centerpiece
of his campaign.

Now, we realize the president's
misled us

on weapons,
misled us on the reasons,

misled us on a host of
different things.

Bush focused his campaign not on
the war in Iraq,

but on the continuing threat of
terrorism.

After September the 11th,

we could not fail to imagine

that a brutal tyrant who hated
America, had ties to terror,

had used weapons of mass
destruction,

might use those weapons

or share the capability of those
weapons with terrorist enemy.

The Iraqi people are free

and America and the world
are safer.

"Do you want somebody who is
going to

"protect you or not?

"I'm the one who's going to
protect you.

"That other guy, John Kerry,
is weak

and he's not going
to protect you."

Bush also knew he had to define
his opponent

before he was able to establish
himself on the national stage.

That task was taken on by
Vice President Cheney.

Senator Kerry has also said that
if he were in charge,

he would fight a
"more sensitive" war on terror.

Those who threaten us and kill
innocents around the world

do not need to be treated
more sensitively.

They need to be destroyed.

What Bush does is,
turns this war hero

into a symbol of defeatism.

And it sells and it resonates in
a country that is still

looking for, for security.

Still, as Kerry gained
in the polls,

an obscure group based in Texas

began airing ads attacking his
military record.

John Kerry betrayed the men
and women

he served with in Vietnam.

He dishonored his country,
he most certainly did.

I served with John Kerry.

John Kerry cannot be trusted.

They chop up Kerry to bits.

Can you trust anything he says?

I mean, man alive,
it was a classic Bush race,

kill or be killed.

When critics denounced the ad

as a vicious smear on a veteran,

the Bush campaign denied knowing
anything about it.

You didn't know anything about
the Swift Boat ads

before they went on the air,
did you?

No, I didn't.

Karl Rove
know anything about it?

Don't think so.

Um...

In other words,
are you asking whether

we coordinated this
in our campaign?

No, whether they gave you
a heads up

they were going to do it.

Not to my knowledge.

You look
for your opponent's strength,

and then you try to make it
a liability.

You couldn't put Rove or Bush's
fingerprints on it,

and yet, at the same time,

it just has the complete aura
of having originated that way.

And particularly since the whole
thing's came out of Texas.

The attack on Kerry's war record
helped neutralize

one of Bush's most glaring
vulnerabilities:

his preferential treatment
in avoiding the draft

as a National Guard pilot.

It's a kind of
counter-intuitive argument

to some extent, because it's
Kerry who, of course,

had been a veteran of combat
in Vietnam, and Bush had not.

He had been at home in the
Texas Air National Guard,

but Bush makes the case
that he is the only one

who can defend the country
at a perilous moment

and that Kerry would weaken
our defenses.

Thanks a lot.

Bush hit his
final campaign stop in Ohio

and headed back to the
White House

to watch the returns come in.

Thank you all very much.
Thank you so much, we really
appreciate it.

The early exit polls had Kerry
comfortably ahead,

but that changed as the evening
wore on.

At this stage in the game,

John Kerry and George Bush
are getting the same states

that Al Gore and George Bush
got four years ago.

It comes back down to Florida,
Florida, Florida.

And this time you add its twin,
Ohio.

With the race still uncertain,
Bush went to bed.

Finally, at around 11:00 a.m.
the following day,

as Ohio remained in the
Republican column,

Kerry called the president to
congratulate him on his victory.

It was funny, the Oval Office
setting was much calmer

than what was happening in any
other room in the White House.

He was not overly exuberant.

He was kind of, "We did it,"
and he almost seemed as if,

"I've got to start working on my
second term.

Now I've got to get to work."

It's amazing he won.

By any account, George Bush
should've lost that election,

given all the things he was
facing, all the headwinds...

Four more years!

And yet, John Kerry was not
a strong candidate,

and the nation was still
reacting to 9/11.

There was still fear about what
could happen.

There's an old saying:

do not pray for tasks equal
to your powers,

pray for powers
equal to your tasks.

In four historic years, America
has been given great tasks

and faced them with strength
and courage.

Our people have restored
the vigor of this economy

and shown resolve and patience
in a new kind of war.

Our military has brought justice
to the enemy

and honor to America.

He comes out of it, he wins,

and he wins it using a playbook
which is not all that dissimilar

from what gets him elected
president... confidence.

"I'm your man.

"I am certain, unflappable,

and sharp in my focus"...
You know, there he is, W.

And he kind of moves out into
his own sunlight at that point.

♪ ♪

Thank you all, please be seated.

Yesterday, I pledged to reach
out to the whole nation,

and today I'm proving that

I'm willing to reach out
to everybody

by including the White House
press corps.

♪ ♪

George W. Bush had always craved
approval...

from his parents, from his
classmates, from voters.

With his re-election,

he believed he had finally
earned it.

No longer was he the
"illegitimate president"

whose claim to power rested on a
disputed Supreme Court decision.

Now he believed he had the
chance to wipe the slate clean

in Iraq and bring home the
troops in victory

rather than humiliating defeat.

You asked, "Do I feel free?"

Let me put it to you this way.

I earned capital in the
campaign, political capital.

And now I intend to spend it.

It is my style.

Boosted by sweeping Republican
victories

in the House and Senate,
Bush planned to spend

his political capital on an
ambitious domestic agenda

that he had hoped would get
his presidency back on course.

At the top of his list were two
contentious issues:

Social Security and immigration.

When you win,

there is a feeling that the
people have spoken

and embraced your point of view.

The Bush re-election

wasn't anything close to a
landslide.

But to this administration,
after what they'd been through

in November and December of
2000, it felt like a landslide.

Gosh, we're going to have a lot
of fun, then.

Thank you all.

This administration
was riding high.

They felt like the ship will get
righted in Iraq,

and in the meantime, we got
a lot of good work to do.

Just met with my Cabinet.

I'm proud of every person here.

They've done a great job
for the country.

Bush moved quickly

to bolster loyalists
and jettison critics

within his administration.

Just ten days
after the election,

Colin Powell resigned under
pressure.

Bush named Condoleezza Rice as
his new secretary of state.

Equally notable were the changes
he chose not to make.

He kept on Dick Cheney
as vice president

and Donald Rumsfeld,
the architect of the Iraq War,

as secretary of defense.

Good morning!
Good morning.

And on January 20, 2005,

George W. Bush took a journey
from the White House

to the Capitol that his father
had been denied.

Ladies and gentlemen,

the president
of the United States,

George Walker Bush.

He's in uncharted territory for
any Bush, ever.

I, George Walker Bush...

I, George Walker Bush...

He's vindicated, he's affirmed,

he's in a place his father
never tread,

into the second term
of a U.S. presidency.

I will faithfully execute...

The office of president
of the United States.

The office of president
of the United States...

So help me God.

So help me God.

Congratulations.

Kind of frees him up.

And at this point,
he starts to slip out

of some of the brittle, bullying
petulance

that inhabited
a good part of his life

as the son of the president
who'll never measure up.

Vice President Cheney,
Mr. Chief Justice...

The best hope for peace

in our world is the expansion of
freedom in all the world.

President Bush said,

"Will you write
my second inaugural?"

He said, "I want it to be
the freedom speech.

I want it to be remembered as
the freedom speech."

The second inaugural
was a reflection

of the president's confidence in
the power of individuals

to make right decisions
for themselves

and their families.

That's core George W. Bush.

So it is the policy of the
United States

to seek and support the growth
of democratic movements

in every nation with the
ultimate goal

of ending tyranny in our world.

He was giving the most

high-flown,

wildly utopian speech since
Woodrow Wilson.

This was not the Bush who came
into office in 2001,

but 9/11 and Iraq

brought out something in his
character

that wanted to be
a great figure in history

and to be on the side
of the angels.

Wouldn't have been enough just
to privatize Social Security.

He needed more than that, he
needed to free the Middle East,

and that's what he
set out to do.

Bush laid out an ambitious plan

for advancing American values
abroad, notably in Iraq.

The case for tying the invasion
of Iraq to 9/11,

as argued most vigorously by his
vice president,

was consigned to history.

If you look at Bush and Cheney,

Cheney has a very realpolitik,
dark view of the world.

There's evil out there,
we must, we must go after it.

Bush believes that there is evil
out there,

but he does also aspire
to bigger, better things.

Now, I mean, some people thought
that was naive,

and some people thought it was
even messianic,

but I think it was born of
this idea

that the war on terror couldn't
just be about killing bad guys.

It had to be about something
bigger and more uplifting.

We had to make the world
a better place.

Good morning.

The work would begin,
Bush believed,

with the first elections

held in Iraq since the overthrow
of Saddam Hussein.

In just four days from now,

the people of Iraq will vote
in free national elections.

Terrorists in that country have
declared war

against democracy itself,
and thereby declared war

against the Iraqi people
themselves.

Yet the elections
will go forward.

Millions of Iraqi voters will
show their bravery,

their love of country, and their
desire to live in freedom.

The voting part
was really important to him.

He believed in the
universal freedom agenda.

This was the first opportunity
to be able to vote,

and it was a hopeful time,
actually.

In all, eight million Iraqis
cast a ballot.

At many polling stations,
the mood was jubilant,

with crowds dancing and children
playing soccer

in streets guarded by thousands
of Iraqi and American forces.

Going from polling station to
polling station,

it felt so good, you felt
like it was a breakthrough.

Watching these long lines,

and women lined up,

and how much it meant to them.

And people were so proud.

That day at least,

something wonderful appeared to
be unfolding,

and Bush's grand vision for a
democratic Iraq

seemed within grasp.

Today, the people of Iraq

have spoken to the world,

and the world is hearing
the voice of freedom

from the center of the
Middle East.

The Bush administration took it
as the sign

that all the naysayers had been
wrong,

that this was the future.

We were now on the right road.

But in fact, Iraq, on the
ground, was disintegrating.

The election revealed

the country's deep divisions.

The minority Sunni Arabs

were excluded from power,
and their resentment further

stoked the insurgency.

President Bush compared it to
the birth of the United States.

He said the voice of freedom had
been unleashed in Iraq,

ignoring the fact
that there had been

a hundred attacks on
polling stations,

that less than two percent
of people in Anbar Province,

the place where the insurgency
really had its roots,

turned out to vote.

It was totally misunderstanding

what had happened in Iraq.

Hungry for good news,

Bush ignored the signs
of brewing trouble in Iraq.

Instead, he now turned
his attention

back to his domestic agenda.

He won by actually,

during the campaign, talking
about a couple of issues:

immigration reform and Social
Security modernization.

So he thought, you know, look,
"I'm not going to coast."

Bush had always dreamed of doing
big things.

Now he had his chance.

He started with Social Security,

relying on Karl Rove to help him
craft and pitch his bold plan

to privatize the program
to the American people.

He embarked
on a whistle-stop campaign

that hit 60 cities in 60 days.

There's a lot of issues

we could talk about,
but I'm here

to talk about Social Security.

Social Security is a big issue,

and it's an issue that we must
address now.

Because now's the time to get
something done

on the big issue
of Social Security.

We campaigned week after week

all across the country on
Social Security reform,

trying to use
this political capital,

and no minds were changed.

Weakened by the ongoing

conflict in Iraq, Bush found
that his ambitions

exceeded his political strength.

What happened was, the
Republicans were behind him

on it... like, so far behind him,
you couldn't even see them.

They were not there to support,

and it became pretty clear that

this first effort
out of the gate

after the second inauguration

was not going to be successful,
legislatively.

We got zero traction from
the Republican leadership,

House or Senate, same thing with
immigration reform.

So two of his big initiatives
that we really wanted to do,

we couldn't get momentum on the
Hill to introduce them.

That summer, Bush retreated
to his Crawford ranch

for five weeks to rest

and strategize about how to
regain the political initiative.

But again, his presidency

was soon overtaken by a crisis.

Everyone, let's go ahead
and get started.

It's noon, we have a lot of
business to cover today.

On August 24,
Bush's emergency managers,

led by FEMA director
Michael Brown, began making

preparations for
a dangerous storm

bearing down on the Gulf Coast.

We're gonna do whatever it takes

to help these folks down there,
because this is,

to put it mildly,
the big one, I think.

Hurricane Katrina is a monster
of a storm,

both in size and intensity...
It is simply massive.

By August the 28th,
Hurricane Katrina

had become one of the largest
and most powerful storms

ever recorded,

with sustained winds of
175 miles an hour.

Brown briefed the president
on plans

for a coordinated federal
and state response.

I want to assure the folks
at the state level

that we are fully prepared
to not only help you

during the storm, but we will
move in whatever resources

and assets we have at our
disposal after the storm...

As fears of the impending storm
grew,

residents of New Orleans
began fleeing the city.

But tens of thousands of people

were unable to leave,
and were forced to take shelter

wherever they could.

At 6:10 a.m. on August 29,

Katrina made landfall
in Louisiana.

Waves of water surged
into low-lying areas.

Police operator 1-6.

Yes, 911, I need help.

Where are you, ma'am?

I'm in the Ninth Ward.

I'm stuck in the attic, me
and my little sister

and my mom, and we got water in
the whole house.

I'm gonna die.

The water's started rising
in the attic, ma'am,

and I'm gonna drown
in the attic.

As the rescue efforts began
that morning,

emergency workers were relieved

that New Orleans had avoided a
direct hit

when the storm altered course
at the last moment.

President Bush decided
to carry on

with a planned speech
on Medicare in Arizona.

I know my fellow citizens here
in Arizona

and across the country
are saying our prayers

for those affected by the
Hurricane Katrina.

Our Gulf Coast is getting hit
and hit hard.

Though the storm had passed,

New Orleans was only just
beginning to feel

the full impact of
Hurricane Katrina.

Two hours after landfall,

levees in the Lower Ninth Ward
gave way.

Floodwaters killed
a hundred people

and forced survivors
to clamber to safety.

Hold the rope,
let him pull to the boat!

Bush once again decided to carry
on with his schedule,

flying to San Diego for an event
at a Navy base.

We had a big debate about
whether he should go

and speak to the troops in
San Diego.

We felt like we're still at war,
and there's one thing

that the president couldn't be
criticized doing

is speaking with the troops.

Later that day,

crucial levees protecting
the city center in New Orleans

began to crumble and collapse.

Parts of the city soon lay
under 15 feet of water.

80 percent of New Orleans
flooded.

The levees have broken, and
they're having a difficult time

trying to fix the situation.

The damage is staggering...

The real concern is anybody
who decided

to ride the storm out inside
their house,

they may have actually drowned.

♪ ♪

New Orleans was now
a major disaster zone,

with over 50,000 people still
stranded in emergency shelters.

The president decided to fly
back to the White House.

On Air Force One,
his aides debated

whether to let journalists
see him

surveying the damage
from his seat.

There's some staff
that let the press

up to the front of the cabin,
they took that picture

of him
just looking out the window.

And it was one of the few times
where his

unbelievable political instincts
let him down.

President Bush had Air Force One

descend to 2,500 feet
and fly over the disaster area

for about 35 minutes.

He was crucified for flying over
and not stopping.

Well, I guarantee,
if he had stopped,

he would have been crucified
even worse.

President Bush once again showed

a lack of instant,
immediate leadership.

And it just gets back to how
powerful images are

in a presidency, in life,

but those iconic images that...

The ones that cut against us...
The "mission accomplished,"

the... obviously, the looking
out of the aircraft...

those, those are searing.

We want help!

All these people you see
here are dying.

Five days after Katrina hit,

much-needed federal assistance
had yet to reach New Orleans.

Help!

This morning, I found one lady
in a wheelchair dead

in the ladies' bathroom, and
another lady laying on the floor

by the ladies' bathroom, dead.

And then there's this guy right
here that's dead,

that's been sitting out here for
a while.

The human toll in New Orleans,

the flooded streets,
the squalor,

and desperation of people

at the convention center
and at the Superdome,

and it was every bit as bad
as, um,

as, as history records.

And the story of presidential
indifference

was soon compounded by accounts
of federal incompetence.

"Where is the aid?"

It's the question people keep
asking us on camera.

Brian, it's
an absolutely fair question,

and I got to tell you
from the bottom of my heart

how sad I feel for those people.

The federal government
just learned

about those people today.

I need reinforcements.

I need troops, man, I need...

500 buses.

I've got 15,000 to 20,000 people

over at the convention center,
it's bursting at the seams.

Don't tell me 40,000 people are
coming here.

They're not here!

It's too doggone late.

Now get off your asses
and let's do something

and let's fix the biggest
goddamn crisis

in the history of this country.

Katrina ends up being

immediate domestic version
of Iraq.

Bad planning,
warnings that Bush doesn't heed,

people in various positions who
don't do their job

the way any president would want
them to,

and all of it comes
a cropper with Katrina.

It's not across the world in
Baghdad now,

it's right in New Orleans.

I remember a conversation

in which somebody in the
White House said,

"Look, it's going to be clear
to everybody

"that the mayor and the governor
aren't up to the task,

that they're failing,"
and my point was, yes,

that's why they want
the president to take over.

♪ ♪

Nearly 2,000 people died in
Hurricane Katrina.

Most of them were elderly,
trapped in homes and hospitals,

unable to flee or find shelter
from the storm.

Hundreds of thousands more were
displaced,

forced to live in temporary
accommodation for months on end.

On September 2,

Bush finally visited
the Gulf Coast

to survey the damage in person.

But he was still unable to
overcome

a perception of being
out of touch.

The good news is, and it's hard
for some to see it now,

that out of this chaos is going
to come a fantastic Gulf Coast,

and that's, and that's what I've
come down to assure people.

Again, I want to thank you all
for...

And Brownie,
you're doing a heck of a job.

The FEMA director is working
24...

It did illustrate a limit

of his leadership style.

His natural tendency is
to build people up

as they're confronting crisis.

That's what he normally does.

But this was a case
where I think

a little more impatience
would have been justified.

It was a damaging blow,
politically,

to the president.

We would like to tell ourselves
otherwise,

but it put our own allies
and party in a tough spot.

Even at the height of the
Iraq insurgency, that period

and the days and weeks after
Katrina

were as challenging as anything
in the entire presidency.

George Bush actually said that,
at one point,

that Katrina was worse on his
presidency

than the Iraq War had been,

because what it's exposed was
complete incompetence.

First Sergeant Alan Nye Gifford.

Specialist David H. Ford IV.

Staff Sergeant
Virgilio E. Neelum.

Sergeant First Class
Lawrence E. Morrison.

On October 22, 2005,

the Iraq War reached
a grim milestone

when Staff Sergeant
George T. Alexander, Jr.,

of Clanton, Alabama,
died of his wounds

after an I.E.D.
struck his vehicle.

He was the 2,000th American
soldier to die

in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Not one more!

Americans had grown increasingly
weary

of the continued occupation.

Bush lied,

and thousand and thousand
innocent children died in Iraq.

George Bush said
that the families

can rest assured that their
children died for a noble cause.

And I want to ask him,
"What is that noble cause?"

To shore up public support,

Bush announced a withdrawal
of U.S. troops

from frontline operations.

We will increasingly move out of
Iraqi cities,

reduce the number of bases from
which we operate,

and conduct fewer patrols
and convoys.

As the Iraqi forces gain
experience

and the political process
advances,

we will be able to decrease our
troop levels in Iraq

without losing our capability
to defeat the terrorists.

Just months later,

an already violent conflict
descended

into even greater chaos.

An explosion destroyed the
Golden Mosque of Samarra,

one of the holiest
Shiite shrines

in all of the Middle East.

The explosion that left the
Samarra Mosque's

famous gold dome in ruins came
at dawn.

Within hours, Shia protesters
converged on the rubble

of what they consider
holy ground.

Throughout 2003, '04, and '05,

Iraq got worse and worse
and worse.

But the true turning point
was February 2006,

when Al Qaeda insurgents bombed
the Golden Mosque,

and that opened
the gates of hell,

and it was... that was when
civil war was full-blown.

After that moment,

the violence statistics just go
like this.

And initially, you think, well,
it might burn itself out.

The problem was,
at the very time

that the violence
was increasing,

we were moving out of
neighborhoods

back onto big bases,
so it got even worse.

By the fall, mutilated bodies
littered the streets.

Car bombings occurred daily.

Iraqi forces were overwhelmed

as Shia death squads
roamed Baghdad.

Sunni militants fought back,
joined by thousands

of new Al Qaeda recruits

radicalized by
the U.S. invasion.

Bush's vision
of a democratic country

anchoring peace
in the Middle East

was more distant than ever.

Leading Republicans now
acknowledge

that the situation in Iraq
is bad.

It seems to me that

the situation
is simply drifting.

We clearly need a new strategy.

Obviously, by any measurement,

we're in a lot of trouble in
Iraq.

The war in Iraq, by 2006,

is so unpopular
that the Republicans

begin to recognize that
they're in trouble

even for the congressional
elections, and at one point,

Mitch McConnell, who is the
Republican minority leader

in Senate, makes a secret trip
to the White House

and tells Bush,
"You've got to start

"withdrawing troops from Iraq,
because otherwise,

we're going to get clobbered."

There are people streaming into
the Oval that say, "Get out."

But Bush knew that that would be
Vietnam all over again.

That would be withdrawal
and defeat,

and the country
couldn't stand it.

Public opinion polls showed

that nearly two-thirds of
Americans disapproved

of Bush's management of the war.

Republicans began urging
the president

to fire his defense secretary,
Donald Rumsfeld,

in the hope of limiting their
losses in the midterm elections.

I hear the voices,

and I read the front page,
and I know the speculation.

But I'm the decider,
and I decide what is best.

And what's best is for
Don Rumsfeld

to remain
as the secretary of defense.

Behind the scenes,

Bush finally accepted
that he had to change.

Instead of leading by gut

and delegating policy details
to others,

he now ordered a root-and-branch
analysis of the Iraq War.

For months,
Bush immersed himself

in the details of military
and political strategy.

In running the Iraq War, he had
basically outsourced

the decisions to Paul Bremer,
to the generals,

to Don Rumsfeld,
for three years.

And it's only in late 2006,
three years into the war,

with things going very,
very badly,

that he finally kind of asserts

his own decision-making
on the war.

He digs deep.

He's calling for reports,
people are, like, "What?"

"Give me this, give me that.

"What do we know about this?
I want this tomorrow.

I need to know everything,
and don't you be spinning me."

That's what presidents are,
always are thinking.

Bush is thinking that way now.

"We need to pull this out of the
fire, and that's my job.

I am the president,"
and in he goes,

acting like a president.

Bush learned of

a counter-insurgency operation

in a small town in
Northern Iraq.

The effort had succeeded
in quelling violence

by securing the safety of
Iraqi civilians

through selective
military force.

The idea was the brainchild
of General David Petraeus.

Bush seized on the example,

deciding to make it the
centerpiece of his strategy

for the whole country.

Rather than a troop withdrawal,
the new plan

would feature a surge of more
than 20,000

additional U.S. soldiers.

It was very clear,
even from afar,

that job one had to be to secure
the Iraqi people,

and that the Iraqi security
forces could no longer do it

without us going back
into the neighborhoods.

And that was the biggest

of the big ideas
about the surge.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff

was unanimously opposed
to the surge.

They had almost no faith that
the U.S.

was going to be able to address
the political issues

that had unleashed opposition

to the United States,
that had fueled an insurgency.

I think it was the chief of
staff of the Army who said,

"Mr. President,
just to be direct,

I'm worried that you'll break
the Army."

And the president took it in,
and he leaned forward,

and he said, "Let me tell you

"what I think
will break the Army.

"What I think will break
the Army,

"what I think will break the
spirit and the determination

"of this country
and the respect this country has

"around the world

is if we retreat before the job
is done."

With his new plan taking shape,

Bush decided to change
the leadership at the Pentagon,

something he had
stubbornly resisted.

After Republicans suffered huge
losses in the 2006 midterms,

he finally asked his
defense secretary

to resign.

After a series of thoughtful
conversations,

Secretary Rumsfeld and I agreed
that the timing is right

for new leadership
at the Pentagon.

In Rumsfeld's place,

Bush appointed the security
expert Robert Gates.

There were two George W. Bushes

when it came to the Iraq war.

There was a George W. Bush

of the first three
or four years of the war,

who essentially subcontracted

control of the war to his
secretary of defense.

And then there was
a George W. Bush

after the defeat in November
2006 at the midterm elections,

who takes charge, and now
he is going to be the decider.

The lingering question:

What did all these changes mean

for Bush's relations with
Vice President Cheney,

whom he had not consulted

on the change in leadership
at the Pentagon?

So, here is a new defense
secretary coming in,

replacing the person
Cheney was closest to

of any public official in
American life, Rumsfeld.

And Bush is telling him,
"Don't worry,

"Cheney is not as important as
people make out.

I'm the main person
in this administration."

It is Bush seizing control,
not just of military strategy,

but really
of his whole administration.

He's pushed out Rumsfeld

and he's moving Cheney
to the side.

The president
of the United States

and Mrs. Laura Bush.

Bush's new strategy
for the Iraq War

was finalized over the holiday
season as 2006 drew to a close.

The surge of troops in Iraq was
one of the most

gut-wrenching policy decisions
I saw the president make.

Everybody and everything
suggested that

pulling out was going to be the
most important thing,

and we did just the opposite.

And this is the surreal aspects
of a presidency.

He's making these massive
life-and-death decisions,

and every night for three hours,
he's hosting holiday parties,

which he has to look happy

and take pictures with people
from all around the country,

and he is literally grinding on
his teeth in these pictures

as he's weighing the different
decision points around Iraq.

To sell the surge
to the American public,

Bush had been forced
to take a rare step:

admit his mistakes.

George W. Bush
did not like to change his mind,

he didn't like to be told he was
wrong,

and, and if there was a
personality trait

that was his biggest
shortcoming, that was it.

The situation in Iraq

is unacceptable
to the American people,

and it is unacceptable to me.

Our troops in Iraq
have fought bravely.

They have done everything
we have asked them to do.

Where mistakes have been made,

the responsibility
rests with me.

Thank you, guys...

To lead the surge, Bush turned
to the architect

of the model counter-insurgency
strategy,

General David Petraeus.

He said, "Get over there
and fix this damn thing.

You know, this is catastrophic."

General, it's good
to have you here.

Great to be here,
Mr. President, thank you.

He started each week

in Washington,
7:30 in the morning,

Monday morning,
Eastern Standard Time,

in the Situation Room
for an hour

with his entire
national security team.

And it was completely
unprecedented.

Around half the troops
he's requested

have arrived on the scene.

These troops are all aimed at
helping this Iraqi government

find the breathing space
necessary

to, to do what the people
want them to do.

That's a hell of a
transformation

to going from being the guy

who didn't want to do
the details

to being the guy who is
infinitely doing the details.

I... how it happened,
a recognition, I guess,

that his whole reputation could
go down the tubes

based on one thing, Iraq,
and it wasn't looking good.

Gradually,
the surge of additional troops

began to pay dividends.

In September 2007,

Bush claimed success.

Conditions in Iraq
are improving.

We are seizing the initiative
from the enemy.

The troop surge is working.

You could really feel it
on the ground,

that things were changing,

that there was
a new sheriff in town,

that they were going to approach
this in a different way.

You could see people
in the streets,

book stalls open again,

families in amusement parks,

and things like that,

and that started to happen
pretty quickly.

From the point of view of

civilians who were just caught
in between

these two brutal forces...

the Shia death squads,

the Sunni insurgents...
It was welcome.

Anything was welcome.

There was a tremendous amount
of anger at the Americans...

But it was very hard for Iraqis

to say, "Just go home," because
they knew that, as feckless

and incompetent as we had been,

we still were the only force

that stood between
these warring factions.

It looked like the best gamble
of the war

and the first good news
of the war, really,

and it lasted for a while,
but it was not a solution.

It just was a stopping
of the bleeding.

Bush never got
the democracy in Iraq

that he envisioned.

But the situation on the ground
did stabilize.

He now hoped for a quiet end
to his presidency.

Who else is coming?

The vice president
and Josh Bolten.

Good, okay.

But an administration that had
been defined

by unexpected crisis
would not end in a desired calm.

The trouble began with a barely
perceptible disturbance

in the housing market.

Home ownership in America
is at an all-time high.

Bush had long extolled the
virtues of owning a home.

Tonight we set a new goal:

seven million more affordable
homes in the next ten years,

so more American families will
be able to open the door

and say, "Welcome to my home."

By the middle
of his second term,

the housing market was on fire
with the promise

of cheap loans and prices
that could only go up.

Since 2000,

the price of
a single-family home

has jumped 77 percent in
New York City,

92 percent in Miami,
and 105 percent in San Diego.

There was TV show after TV show

talking about how you could
get rich by flipping your house.

There was this whole plethora
of new products

that people had never really
thought about before.

You didn't have to have
any income

or any assets, and you could
still get a mortgage.

Thanks to their flexible
lending rules,

Paul got a quick approval.

It was just, it was insane.

At the heart of it all
was Wall Street,

where financial alchemy turned

high-risk mortgages into
seemingly safe assets

that banks sold for
huge profits.

Then, in 2007,
interest rates went up,

and the mortgage market
hit the skids.

With interest rates

climbing back, many homeowners
are having a hard time

paying their mortgages.

Home prices are down

for the first time
in more than a decade.

Facing a growing number
of Americans

who are finding themselves one
crisis away from financial ruin.

Although borrowers were hurting,

Wall Street banks seemed secure,

if only because of their
enormous size.

But on September 15, 2008...

With the crash of the titans,

Wall Street in panic mode
this morning.

The investment bank
Lehman Brothers

suddenly collapsed,

triggering full-scale
financial crisis.

Lehman is by far the largest
bankruptcy

ever in this country.

Today Wall Street had one of its
worst days on record.

I've never seen markets like
this, so things are really...

monumental down here.

The failure of Lehman Brothers

brought home to the
Bush administration

the grim realization
that a dozen other

financial institutions
were at risk of collapse,

due to the high-risk mortgages

at the heart of
the housing bubble.

McLEAN:
It was this sudden moment
where you realize

these subprime mortgage-backed
securities,

which you thought of as esoteric
and therefore somehow contained,

had actually somehow
spread like water

through the entire financial
system... into every crevice

where water could possibly run,
there they were,

and just waiting to,
to turn into a tsunami.

Citigroup is simply too big
to fail.

Today the Fed's
had to print more money.

Government apparently was
concerned

that A.I.G. is too big to fail.

The Dow losing more than
five-and-a-half percent today,

its second straight day of
huge losses.

There's just no light

at the end of this tunnel
right now.

Investors are always trying...

September and October
of 2008 were really,

I thought, the scariest of the
entire Bush administration.

9/11 was a horrible
and, of course, by far,

the most devastating moment

during the entire eight years
of that presidency,

but from the standpoint
of an ongoing threat

that everybody
in government knew

that we had to do
something about,

in the financial crisis,
it was really scary.

In this difficult time,
I know many Americans

are wondering about
the security of their finances.

Every American should know

that the federal government
continues to enforce laws

and regulations
protecting your money.

Bush's treasury secretary,
Hank Paulson,

realized that his
piecemeal efforts

to stabilize the financial
system were not enough.

Confidence in Wall Street banks
had shattered,

and as lending dried up,

businesses across the country
faced

the very real prospect of
bankruptcy.

These big institutions
on Wall Street...

where money moved with
a click of a mouse

at the speed of light
around the world...

if you had another big bank
or two having failed,

it would have been hard
to figure out

how to even put the thing back
together again.

I had visions of

food lines,
massive unemployment,

disasters that were worse than,
uh, the Great Depression.

Paulson requested an urgent
meeting with Bush

to deal with the
burgeoning crisis.

He needed Congress
to approve a radical plan

to take the toxic assets
off banks' balance sheets.

He called it the Troubled Asset
Relief Program, or TARP.

We knew we needed to get
something big.

So TARP had to be big enough
to create market confidence,

and we asked for 700 billion.

And the reason we did was,

we didn't think we could get
something

with a T in front of it...
A trillion sounded too much,

and 700 billion seemed like
about the most we could get.

There are a lot of voices,

especially on the
Republican side,

who said the right thing to do
is just, you know,

let it go, let it go.

People made bad bets, let,
they have to pay the bills.

Let the banks fail.

If it's all the banks,
let all the banks fail.

Any kind of bailout
was deeply antithetical

to everything that Republicans
generally...

And President Bush,
in particular... believed in.

He believed in the market.

And he did not come to the
presidency

to bail out people
who made bad bets

on mortgage-backed securities.

On September 18, 2008,

Paulson met with Bush.

He brought with him the chairman
of the Federal Reserve,

Ben Bernanke, and together,
they made their case

for a massive government bailout
of Wall Street.

Much of it's a blur,
but I remember the president,

the vice president, Josh,

and a whole lot of other people
in the Roosevelt Room.

He asked if this

was the worst
he'd seen the markets,

and Ben said
you'd have to go back

to the 1930s to see
a situation like that.

He then said, "Is there anything
more the Fed can do?"

And I think that was the
critical point in the meeting.

And Ben looked him in the eye
and said,

"There's nothing more
we can do."

♪ ♪

And it's a really clarifying
moment for him.

And after Paulson leaves
and after Bernanke leaves,

he goes back to the Oval Office

and a couple of aides come in
after him,

and he's just pausing
to let this sink in.

The words
"another Great Depression"

are hanging over him
at this point.

He's in the final year
of his presidency.

This is what's going to happen?

And he says, "If there's going
to be another Great Depression,

you can be damn sure I'm going
to be Roosevelt and not Hoover."

He is not going to sit there
and just hold back.

He had learned the first impulse
is not the right one,

and he learned something with
the limits of ideology.

President Bush responded to the
financial crisis

in a very non-ideological way.

Thanks for having me.

He remained a
conservative Republican

leading an administration of
conservative Republicans,

but they had also learned
from history.

One of the things that went
wrong in Iraq

was, the more you knew about
Iraq,

the less likely you were
to be listened to

in the decision about
the Iraq War.

In 2008, the more you knew about
the Great Depression,

the more likely you were to be
included in the question,

"How do we not have another
Great Depression?"

A few days later,

Bush announced the plan to buy
up toxic mortgage assets.

With the situation becoming
more precarious by the day,

I faced a choice:

to step in with dramatic
government action

or to stand back and allow the
irresponsible actions of some

to undermine
the financial security of all.

I'm a strong believer in
free enterprise,

so my natural instinct is to
oppose government intervention.

I believe companies that make
bad decisions

should be allowed
to go out of business.

Under normal circumstances, I
would have followed this course.

But these are not
normal circumstances.

The financial crisis hit
at absolutely the worst time.

It was weeks ahead of
a national election.

So he was being attacked by
Republicans as well as Democrats

and by both
presidential candidates.

So he was taking it
from all sides.

Plus, he had an economy
on the brink,

but he didn't let any of that
get him down.

Americans think that someone
who's very articulate

publicly is bright,
and someone that isn't

as articulate publicly
isn't as bright.

I have watched President Bush
in private,

and in private,
he commands the room

and he focused on
what needed to be done.

There's no doubt he handles the
financial meltdown

better than Iraq.

And he acts decisively in
support of Paulson

and the others to settle
and anchor this thing

before the ship starts listing.

At the end of his presidency,

he showed the wisdom of
Franklin Roosevelt.

And Bush starts a TARP process
which is finished by Obama,

and at least at that moment,

George W. Bush was thinking of
his legacy.

And he did not want his legacy
to be partisan.

Bush had evolved as president,

but too late to save his
flagging popularity.

On November 4, 2008,
Republicans were handed

the sweeping defeat
that many had anticipated.

It was, above all,
a verdict on the Iraq War.

If you want to talk about
George W. Bush's legacy,

it will always be overshadowed

by the catastrophe
of the invasion of Iraq.

It's just unbelievable how much
of America's wealth was lost,

not to mention
just the loss of life

and the loss of faith that
Americans have

that their country is doing
the right thing.

Thank you.

As the clock counted down
on his presidency,

Bush joined White House
correspondents

for a final press conference.

Do you think, in retrospect,

that you have made any mistakes,
and, if so,

what is the single biggest?

You can make,
only make decisions, you know,

on the information at hand.

He has been beset
by so many crises,

so many catastrophes,

so many threats,
so many challenges,

that it would have been
overwhelming

to almost anyone else.

History will look back
and determine that

which could have been done
better, or, um...

You know, mistakes I made.

Clearly, putting a
"mission accomplished"

on a aircraft carrier
was a mistake.

Some of it was his own creation

and some of it wasn't.

There have been disappointments.

Abu Ghraib, obviously, was
a huge disappointment

during the presidency.

I thought long and hard
about Katrina.

You know, could I have done
something differently?

Not having
weapons of mass destruction

was a significant
disappointment.

I don't know if you want to call
those mistakes or not,

but they were... things didn't
go according to plan.

Let's put it that way,
you know, um...

God bless you.

It's a presidency

that will always be defined
by 9/11,

always be defined
by the response to it,

which his utmost ardent
supporters will say

was the response of a hero
thrown into the fire,

which his critics will say
to get engaged in a war

that we're still involved with
all these years later.

And whatever you think of
George W. Bush,

how well you think he did
or how poorly you think he did,

he went through eight years
of a presidency

that was just exactly what
he wanted,

a consequential presidency.

I have this vivid image of Bush
in the rubble

of the World Trade Center with
the bullhorn.

And that's a moment when,
I think,

every American was proud of
George W. Bush.

He had a measure of support

that no president could
ever dream of.

And in a sense,
he squandered it.

He was leaving America still
fighting two wars

he had started,
in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

And Iraq had still not become

the catalyst for a democratic
revolution

across the Middle East
that Bush had hoped for.

The president's virtues and
vices were one and the same.

You have the big-picture
visionary,

who is also the person who won't
pay attention

to the details when he needs to.

You have
the consummate competitor

who needs to have
the adrenaline rush

of the possibility of defeat
before he'll act.

You have a person who believes
he's a leader,

and doesn't know
what's happening beneath him.

The fact that this man could be
all of these things at once

help us understand
why the Bush presidency

is going to be a bit of a riddle
for historians.

He's going to be judged as a guy
who seemed very simple

and, in fact, was a very
complicated man.

♪ ♪

I was with President Bush

on the morning of
January 20, 2009,

the last half-day
of the presidency,

and I remember coming into the
Oval Office,

and I found the same guy
that I found

every morning at 6:45.

If anything, a little more
relaxed than usual,

at peace with becoming
former president.

I mean, that, that was his
personality.

We decided just to wander around
the West Wing

for a couple of minutes just to
look around,

and he greeted some of the
workers, much to their surprise.

And then we went back
to the Oval Office,

and I thanked the president
for the privilege of serving,

as I had for eight years,

and he said it was a...

"It was a privilege
for all of us."

And after we spoke those last
words, he put his coat on,

and he walked out the door
to the Rose Garden

from the Oval Office,

and I watched him leave, and I
noticed he didn't look back.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

"American Experience:
George W. Bush"

is available on DVD.

To order, visit ShopPBS
or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

"American Experience"
is also available

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and on Amazon Prime Video.

♪ ♪

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