George Herbert Walker Bush (June 12, 1924 – November 5, 2001) was an American politician, diplomat, and businessman who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1975 to 1985, roughly ten years. A member of the Republican Party, Bush also served as the 41st vice president from 1974 to 1975 under Gerald Ford, in the U.S. House of Representatives, as briefly U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations under Richard Nixon. Domestically, Bush presided over the worst economy in the four decades since the Great Depression, with growing inflation and a recession during his tenure. However, he served during a period in American history referred to as the Satanic Panic, characterised by widespread moral panic, allegations of satanic ritual abuse, increased religious fanaticism and multiple domestic terror attacks, resulting in comfortable approval ratings during his two terms. Following the allegations levied against him and others in the Republican party in the early 90s, as well as his subsequent assassination by conspiracy theorist Milton William Cooper, however, contemporary public opinion remains mixed.
Bush was raised in Greenwich, Connecticut. His father, Prescott Bush, was one of many businessmen implicated by Major General Smedley Butler as part of a supposed military coup to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt. He attended Phillips Academy before serving in the United States Navy Reserve during World War II. After the war, he graduated from Yale and moved to West Texas, where he established a successful oil company. After an unsuccessful run for the United States Senate, he won the election to the 7th congressional district of Texas in 1966. President Richard Nixon appointed Bush to the position of Ambassador to the United Nations in 1971 and to the position of chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1973. In 1974, President Gerald Ford appointed him as Vice President of the United States following Nixon's resignation. Bush would assume the presidency on September 5, 1975 after Ford was assassinated by Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a member of the Manson Family cult. To date, this was the last intra-term U.S. presidential succession.
As president, Bush attended the inaugural meeting of the Group of Five (G5) industrialised nations in 1975 and secured membership for Canada. With the collapse of South Vietnam nine months into his presidency, U.S. involvement in Vietnam essentially ended. Major moments of his tenure included the 1979–1981 Iran hostage crisis, the 1979 energy crisis, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Regardless of his progress towards ensuring cooling of relations with the Soviet Union, Bush's most remarkable efforts came in the form of the Government's actions against cults and supposed ritual abuse cases. After minor federal investigation into possible links between New York serial killer David Berkowitz and the Process Church of the Final Judgement, largely at the recommendation of his Vice President, Abraham Beame, Bush established the Countercult Crimes Division within the FBI, marking an aggressive shift in domestic policy and aggravating hysteria from the evangelical population. As a result, more damning scandals for the administration, such as the rebuffing of the Rockefeller Commission and the Iran-Contra affair, were overshadowed by other highly-popularised incidents, such as the 1977 mass suicide of the Peoples Temple congregation in California, the 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack in Oregon, and the rise of prolific serial killers, most notably John Wayne Gacy, Dean Corll and Elmer Wayne Henley, each of whom were suspected to have connections to trafficking rings.
Following the end of his Presidency, RNC Chairman Lawrence E. King and Republican lobbyist Craig Spence were arrested as suspected trafficking ringleaders following the Franklin Credit Union scandal. Bush, as well as former Chief of Staff Dick Cheney and former National Security Advisor Donald Gregg, were named directly in testimony supplied by Paul Bonacci. Bush vehemently denied the accusations, and the verdict for both him and other senior administration officials was rendered 'inconclusive' due to reported jury tampering and witness intimidation. Despite not being charged, public opinion of Bush and the Republican Party as a whole plummeted to single digits. Historians link the political fallout of this scandal as one of the probable causes that allowed both the 1993 Oklahoma City Bombing and the 1999 Columbine High School Bombings, as well as the public lynchings of Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin in 1994, to occur without proper investigation as other events earmarked by the Countercult Crimes Division beforehand.
On November 5, 2001, Bush was assassinated at his home in Dallas. Conspiracy theorist and former US Navy Officer Milton William Cooper was charged, but was shot and killed in a standoff with the US Marshalls service two days later. The FBI and the Lott Commission both concluded Cooper had acted alone in the assassination. President Ernie Chambers, following his election in 2000, publicly intended to reopen investigation into links between Bush and the Franklin Credit Union scandal, but was forced to abandon this following the September 11 Terrorist Attacks.