Original subtitles

[helicopter blades whirring]

[radio chatter]

[over radio]: Roger, 10-4.

NARRATOR:After the worst terrorist attack

in U.S. history, Americansturned 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.

DAVID FRUM:George W. Bush has a famous nameand a wealthy family

but, until he's 40,

nobody thinks he's going anywhere.

BUSH: Thank you, brother.

NARRATOR: After two terms as the governor of Texas,

he became president in 2000,

following a controversial election victory.

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: He intended to be a domestic president.

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

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

[crowd cheering]

NARRATOR: 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.

I can hear you!

[crowd cheers]

NARRATOR: The president called upon Americans

to unify around a common purpose...

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

NARRATOR: ...a global war on terror.

And the people who knockedthese buildings down

will hear all of us soon.

[crowd cheers]

EUGENE ROBINSON: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

[radio chatter]

MAN [over radio]: Three, two, one, launch.

[rockets roaring, exploding]

BUSH: 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.

[explosions echo]

NARRATOR: 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 fuck off the road!

BUSH: The people of the United States and our friends

and allies will not live at themercy 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.

[machine gun fire]

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

[machine gun fire]

U.S. soldiers advancedrapidly up the Euphrates Valley,

crushing pockets of resistance.

REPORTER: 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.

NARRATOR: American forces found

that Saddam's vast army had largely melted away.

REPORTER: In the town of Zawbaa,

Iraqi citizens are tearing downposters of Saddam Hussein

and American troops are being treated as liberators.

♪

NARRATOR: And within just three weeks...

MARINE: Yeah, let's go!

NARRATOR:The first detachment of Marines

reached the heart of the capital, Baghdad.

[chanting and cheering]

ARI FLEISCHER: 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 aroundSaddam'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.

[crowd cheering and yelling]

The president was interested in seeing

how the crowd wanted the statue down.

[cheering and yelling]

He took it in as a pretty important moment.

But he didn't say much.

NARRATOR: 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!

RADDATZ: You can have the sound down,

you don't have to listen to anything.

You see those images

and it's people celebrating.

♪

[fighter jet engine roaring]

NARRATOR:On May 1, a buoyant George Bush

flew out to the USS Lincoln,

moored just off the coast of San Diego,

to salute returning troops.

ANDY CARD: 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 aplane and land on the carrier,

so he was excited.

BUSH: Yes, I flew it!

[crowd laughter]

ELISABETH BUMILLER: The intention was to show off

the end of the war.

Good job.

BUMILLER: They were very careful

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

they wanted the light to be thatsort of golden-hour light,

so he landed in the late afternoon.

It looked great.

["Hail to the Chief" playing]

[cheers and applause]

Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.

In the battle of Iraq,

the United States and her allies have prevailed.

[cheers and applause]

NARRATOR: Though the president did not say so

in his scripted remarks,

a large banner behind him proclaimed the war over.

BUMILLER: Bush makes his speech

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

but what people remember is the setting.

NARRATOR: 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.

CARD: 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.

[distant sirens blaring]

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

homes and stores,

museums, hospitals,

and electric plants were looted.

ROBIN WRIGHT: 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 troopsand didn't think it was its job

to be the police for Iraq.

It wasn't there to stop the looting.

[gunshots]

RUMSFELD: Freedom's untidy

and free people are free to makemistakes and commit crimes

and do bad things.

They're also free to live theirlives 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.

♪

NARRATOR: 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've got to 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.

NARRATOR: Bush made the decision,

but left the details to others.

Most importantly, he didn'tprovide the extra troops needed

for an occupation.

CARD: 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 discussionthat I remember

in the National Security Councilabout the process

of organizing a government and identifying leaders.

[cameras clicking]

NARRATOR: 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.

[crowd chanting]

This was a country that had beentorn by sectarian differences

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

by a totalitarian dictatorship.

REPORTER: Today, hundreds protested

against the arrest by U.S. soldiers

of one of their religious leaders.

[crowd chanting]

BAKER: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

BAKER: Jerry Bremer had been a well-respected diplomat

and lieutenant of Henry Kissinger,

but had never done anything likewhat they were asking him to do

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

BUSH: Today, it's my honor to announce that

Jerry Bremer has agreed to become

the presidential envoy to Iraq.

NARRATOR: After just one meeting,

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

even though he had no experiencein 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 orderly country in Iraq

that is free and at peace.

[chuckling]

WILKERSON: 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."

♪

NARRATOR: Bremer arrived in Baghdad

with the full authority of Bush behind him.

The problem was Bush hadn't clearly articulated

what he wanted.

ROBERT DRAPER: 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 guythere,

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

REPORTER:The new U.S. civil administratorfor Iraq

are meeting here with Iraqi leaders.

JERRY BREMER: We agreed we need to do some work

in restoring law and order.

ROBERT GATES: There was no decision made

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

and thenwith the appointment of Bremer,

it all got delegated to Baghdad.

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

Well, in practice, he wassupposed 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.

NARRATOR: Bremer moved immediately

to assert his control.

DRAPER: Bremer makes very quickly

a couple of extremely fateful decisions.

NARRATOR: 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.

[crowd chanting]

They didn't solve any problem.

They only speaking and we didn't need

speaking only, we need works.

[protesters chanting]

NARRATOR: A week later,

Bremer issued his second order,

which disbandedthe entire Iraqi army, security,

and intelligence infrastructure.

PACKER: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

BAKER: 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.

NARRATOR: As Iraq continued to spin out of control

and Bremer struggled to restore order,

the occupation entered a new phase.

CHARLES GIBSON: Today, American forces endured

one of the most violent days

since President Bush said the major fighting was over.

NARRATOR: 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 explosionI've seen since the war started.

It was a huge explosion.

NARRATOR: 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 IEDs.

[IED explodes]

SOLDIER: IED!

Let's go!

Look for a target!

[rapid gunfire]

FLEISCHER: 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.

[gunshots, explosions, yelling]

SOLDIER: It's a fucking car bomb.

[soldiers yelling]

FLEISCHER: The fedayeen and the now guerilla-style attacks

that increasingly started to take the lives

of American servicemen and womenin Iraq,

it started to grow and grow and grow.

NARRATOR: Reports of casualties came in daily.

REPORTER: Yesterday, two ambushes

left four American troops dead.

CNN REPORTER: One U.S. Special Operation soldier killed,

eight others wounded.

ABC NEWS REPORTER: Four dead and 13 injured

in three separate attacks.

SOLDIERS: Fucking smoking, hurry up!

Let's go!

Hey, their vehicle's on fire!

NARRATOR: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 nowis a guerilla war?

Um, I'll do my best...

[stammering]

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

is because there isn't one,

and it would be a misunderstanding

and a miscommunication to you

and to the people of the countryand the world.

NARRATOR: But, for all the arguments

over how to characterize the conflict,

the uptick in attacks onAmerican forces was undeniable.

REPORTER: The White House is aware

that governing Iraq and containing unrest

through the hot summer monthsmay be costly in American lives,

and critics will continue to pose the question

of whether America won the war

only to lose the peace.

NARRATOR: 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 runtheir 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 afterthe invasion.

PACKER: 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 faithin 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.

NARRATOR: As the attacks intensified,

the non-stop questions about progress in the war

began to exasperate the president.

REPORTER: Today, President Bush said foreign fighters,

Ba'ath party members,

and Iraqi criminals should taketheir best shot

because U.S. forces will answer.

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

attack us that we may decide toleave 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 them on."

We've got the force necessary

to deal with the security situation.

Of course we want...

FLEISCHER: 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'?"

BAKER:It's the cowboy persona that heprojects, 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.

[plane engine roaring]

NARRATOR: 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 afive-day trip to the continent,

he visited Goree Island,

where slaves had been weighed and measured

before they departed through what was known as

"The Door of No Return."

BUSH: One of the largest migrations of history

was also one of the greatest crimes of history.

NARRATOR: The heart of the trip was Bush's announcement

of a bold commitment of U.S. aidto fight the pandemic.

Africa has the will to fight AIDS,

but it needs the resources as well.

[applause]

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.

NARRATOR:Though there was little appetitein 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 HIV/AIDS,and provide antiretroviral drugs

for two million people infected with HIV.

The program became known by itsacronym, 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 assaulton the AIDS pandemic in Africa,

but I think the president saw itas a moral imperative.

MICHAEL GERSON:One of the essential commitments

that he talked about again and again

in the context of PEPFAR is thebiblical 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.

ROBINSON: 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.

[chanting]: Bush must go, now!

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

No more Bush!

NARRATOR: By June, oppositionto 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.

NARRATOR: Inside the administration,

officials were confident that they would find

Saddam's biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: 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?

RUMSFELD: Not at all.

The area in the south and the west and the north

that coalition forces control is substantial.

It is... happens not to be the area

where weapons ofmass destruction were dispersed.

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

around Tikrit and Baghdad

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

NARRATOR: 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.

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

in the Oval Office where he wasgetting an update from the field

about an Iraqi military basein 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.

DAN BARTLETT: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 washumanly impossible

for us not to find anything.

NARRATOR: As the search dragged on,

Bush demanded to know exactly who was in charge.

No one gave him an answer.

There's 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.

NARRATOR: 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 Iraqinuclear weapons program.

Now he was asked to pick up the search again.

DAVID KAY: The president was unhappy

with the military's role in doing it,

and they wanted someone who hadnot been involved

in the initial assessments.

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

NARRATOR:In mid-June, as Kay prepared totravel to Baghdad,

he went to the CIA headquartersin Langley, Virginia,

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

This was the same evidence thatSecretary 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?

NARRATOR: Once in Iraq,

Kay found that Vice President Cheney

and his chief of staff, Scooter Libby,

were monitoring his every move.

KAY: I would be asleep

and I'd get someone pounding onmy 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 somethingthat 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.

NARRATOR: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.

REPORTER: Is U.S. credibility on the line

over weapons of mass destructionin 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.

♪

NARRATOR: Then in early July 2003,

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

NEWSCASTER: Today, a former U.S. ambassador said

the administration may have taken the country to war

under false pretenses.

NEWSCASTER: Did the Bush administration exaggerate

some of the intelligence on Saddam's weapons program

in order to justify war with Iraq?

♪

NARRATOR: A retired U.S. ambassador, Joseph Wilson,

had been sent by the administration to Niger

to investigate claims that Iraqhad sought to buy uranium there.

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

Wilson said the claim was false.

BAKER: 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 theAmerican people

in order to go to war?

NARRATOR: 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.

DAVID GREGORY: 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 havemisled the public

in making the case for war.

ANDREA MITCHELL: New questions tonight

about whether the administrationignored its own experts

to hype more alleged evidence against Saddam Hussein.

NARRATOR: The final nail in the coffin

of the hunt for Iraq's WMD camein January 2004

when David Kay told Bush

the intelligence reports had been wrong.

There were no WMD.

DIANE SAWYER: 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,

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 seeingit in black and white terms.

It's hard for him to say,

"I made a bad decision."

PACKER: 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.

[applause]

NARRATOR: As he'd 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 expectedto give a humorous talk

and he tries to make fun of it.

Those weapons of massdestruction gotta be somewhere.

[audience laughter]

Nope, no weapons over there.

[laughter]

BAKER: In the room that night people laughed

and thought it was funny,

but the next day a lot of peoplewoke 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.

DRAPER: I believe

that George W. Bush is an honest man,

in the sense that he doesn't goaround 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'ssaying things that aren't true,

and that's what happens

when you're someone who is notfully 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.

PACKER: 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.

NARRATOR: 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 againstU.S. forces.

REPORTER: 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.

NARRATOR: On March 31, 2004,

insurgents ambushed four Americans who worked

for a U.S. military contractor,Blackwater.

[chanting, yelling]

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 tosee 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.

[distant explosions]

NARRATOR: Usually content

to delegate such decision-makingto others,

instead Bush ordered

the commencement of a large- scale attack on Fallujah

over the objections of local Marine commanders.

REPORTER:The Marines have humvee patrols

going out across the city.

And all day and all night

they have come under fire.

NARRATOR: 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 onFallujah,

it's not his finest moment of the war,

that's for sure.

[siren blaring]

WRIGHT: 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.

[crowd chanting]

NARRATOR: On the same day that Marines

were pummeling theSunni stronghold of Fallujah...

[crowd yelling]

American troops came under sustained attack

from a Shia uprising in other parts of Iraq.

[gunshots]

Armed militants, led by a fierycleric, Moqtada Al-Sadr,

seized control of major towns in the south

and even parts of Baghdad.

PACKER: The uprising was massive,

and it was devastating for the Americans because

one sectarian enemy was a lot tohandle, 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.

REPORTER: This week has been one of the deadliest

for U.S. troops over the past year.

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

REPORTER:...killing two U.S. servicemen.In Baghdad...

♪

NARRATOR: As attacks on U.S. troops intensified,

questions about Bush's handlingof the war took a back seat

in the media to profiles of American casualties.

REPORTER: Beaver Dam is in mourning.

One of its native sons perishedserving his country in Iraq.

REPORTER: A man who died too young,

three days after his 25th birthday.

A devoted husband, loving son, and brother.

WOMAN: He loved music,

he loved entertaining people, he did magic tricks.

NARRATOR: 148 soldiers were killed in April 2004

in more than 50 separate attacks,

more than all the casualties suffered

in the original invasion.

REPORTER: By sunrise, two Americans

and two suspected attackers had been killed.

NARRATOR: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.

FLEISCHER: He sent these people to war.

It was his decision that led topeople 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.

♪

DANA PERINO: Most of the families were very happy

to see the president, overjoyed,right, the honor, so great,

but there was one family...

their son was not going to make it,

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

And she railed at the presidentand yelled and yelled,

and he didn't try to leave.

And the husband said,

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

and 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 patientsafter 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.

NARRATOR:For all Bush's efforts to focuson other issues,

the fight against Al Qaeda and the war in Iraq

required his full attention.

In April 2004,

the Washington Postobtainedsecret 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 asmall 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 UN

to monitor their conditions.

They didn't necessarily want totreat them humanely either

and that's where you get

the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques."

NARRATOR: When newsof 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 learned 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, reallythink about that hard

because how on earth could anybody think

that we weren't torturing anyone?

NARRATOR: As Bush's war on terror grew,

hundreds of low-level detaineeswere sent to Guantanamo 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 photosthat apparently show U.S. troops

abusing detainees at a prison outside Baghdad.

[loud bang]

NARRATOR: With the insurgency in Iraq gaining ground,

American troops had been fillingup the prison called Abu Ghraib

with suspected bomb makers

and guerilla 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 dozensof explosive photos

were leaked to the press.

BAKER: Some of those prisoners were

piled on top of each other naked.

The most horrific photographshows one of the Iraqi detainees

standing on a box and he had been told

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

BLITZER: The pictures have lead to charges against

six United States soldiers, and the images

may have damaged the American mission in Iraq.

REPORTER: "It's wrong, wrong,

100 percent, and a crime," says Khalil.

"You came to liberate us from anunjust dictator,

who killed and tortured us."

[protesters chanting]

NARRATOR: 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.

PRIEST:What we found was that there wasa migration

of the tactics used by a small number of CIA 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.

BUMILLER: Abu Ghraib was devastating

for the administration, it showed the kind of rot

that was occurring in Iraq underAmerican occupation,

and it showed how far off we hadcome from American ideals.

NARRATOR: 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.

NARRATOR: 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 theSecretary of Defense, Rumsfeld.

CONGRESSWOMAN JACKSON:I asked 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...

♪

NARRATOR:Twelve days after the Abu Ghraibimages went public,

Bush met with his Secretary of Defense.

Rumsfeld handed Bush a letter of resignation,

but the president refused it.

[cameras clicking]

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 yourleadership.

You are... courageously leadingour 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.

PRIEST:On Abu Ghraib, really nobody isheld 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.

NARRATOR: No one was held accountable

for the program of torture or enhanced interrogation

at the black sites or the prisonat Guantanamo Bay either.

Bush and most ofthe 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.

[applause]

NARRATOR: 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 CIA.

ROBINSON: 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.

WILKERSON: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.

PRIEST: I don't think there's any evidence

that torture or the black siteskept us safer.

On the contrary, I think there'sa 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 Guantanamo mistreatmentwere 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.

♪

NARRATOR: With the Iraq war taking such a dark turn,

Bush was tested in ways he had never anticipated.

He turned to history, devouringbooks on wartime presidents,

most notably Abraham Lincoln.

♪

In public he was careful to keepsuch introspection hidden,

always looking ahead,

and never second-guessing decisions he'd made,

despite mounting pressure to acknowledge mistakes.

BARTLETT: I remember vividly

a primetime press conference inthe 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 thiswritten question ahead of time,

so I could plan for it.

Uh...

BARTLETT: 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...

BARTLETT: But what he was tempering,

that he did not and would not do,

is to call this a war a mistake.

BUSH: You know, I just...

I'm sure something will pop intomy head here

in the midst of this press conference,

with all the pressure of tryingto 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 notsomething he will say.

So he stumbles over the answer and it becomes

kind of this indelible moment of his presidency.

[crowd cheering]

NARRATOR: As the summer of 2004 approached,

Bush turned his attention away from Iraq

and began planning for his re-election campaign.

CROWD [chanting]: Four more years!

NARRATOR: After all the difficulties with the war,

he relished traveling the country

and being among his supporters.

TIM NAFTALI: 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 familyto produce 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 inAmerican history:

reelection.

NARRATOR:With America so deeply polarizedover Iraq,

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

KARL ROVE:Bush's approval rating is at 63in the spring

of 2003 and by election day it was 51.

[crowd chanting, whistling]

Now we, when we planned for there-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.

NARRATOR: Bush and Rove decided to energize their base

by having the president come out forcefully

against same-sex marriage.

BUSH: 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.

NARRATOR: 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'smisled us

on weapons, misled us on the reasons,

misled us on a host of different things.

NARRATOR:Bush focused his campaign not onthe war in Iraq,

but on the continuing threat ofterrorism.

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 thoseweapons with a terrorist enemy.

[cheers and applause]

The Iraqi people are free

and America and the world are safer.

BAKER: 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.

NARRATOR:Bush also knew he had to definehis opponent

before he was able to establishhimself on the national stage.

That task was taken on by Vice President Cheney.

Senator Kerry has also said thatif he were in charge,

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

[laughter]

Those who threaten us and kill innocents around the world

do not need to be treated more sensitively.

They need to be destroyed.

[applause]

What Bush does is turns this war hero

into a symbol of defeatism.

And it sells and it resonates ina country that is still

looking for security.

[cheering]

NARRATOR: 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's dishonored his country, he most certainly did.

I served with John Kerry.

John Kerry cannot be trusted.

They chop up Kerry to bits.

ANNOUNCER:Can you trust anything he says?

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

kill or be killed.

NARRATOR: When critics denounce the ad

as a vicious smear on a veteran,

the Bush campaign denied knowinganything about it.

You didn't know anything about the Swift Boat ads

before they went on air, did you?

No, I didn't.

Karl Roveknow 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'sfingerprints on it,

and yet, at the same time,

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

And particularly since the wholething came out of Texas.

NARRATOR:The attack on Kerry's war recordhelped neutralize

one of Bush's most glaring vulnerabilities:

his preferential treatment in avoiding the draft

as a National Guard pilot.

BAKER: 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.

BUSH: Thanks a lot.

NARRATOR: 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...

NARRATOR: The early exit polls had Kerry comfortably ahead,

but that changed as the eveningwore on.

TOM BROKAW: 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.

NARRATOR: 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 tocongratulate him on his victory.

CARD: 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 mysecond term."

Now, I've got to get to work.

[cheers and applause]

BUMILLER: 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...

CROWD [chanting]: Four more years!

BUMILLER: And, yet, John Kerry was not a strong candidate,

and the nation was still reacting to 9/11.

There was still fear about whatcould 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, Americahas 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 justiceto the enemy

and honor to America.

[cheers and applause]

SUSKIND: He comes out of it, he wins,

and he wins it using a playbookwhich 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 intohis 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.

[laughter]

♪

NARRATOR:George W. Bush had always cravedapproval

from his parents, from his classmates, from voters.

With his reelection, he believedhe had finally earned it.

No longer was he the "illegitimate president"

whose claim to power rested on adisputed 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.

NARRATOR: 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 twocontentious issues:

social security and immigration.

BUSH: When you win,

there is a feeling that the people have spoken

and embraced your point of view.

DRAPER: The Bush reelection

wasn't anything close to a landslide,

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

in November and December of2000, it felt like a landslide.

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

[laughs] Thank you all.

DRAPER: This administration was riding high.

They felt like the ship will getrighted in Iraq,

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

BUSH: Just met with my cabinet.

I'm proud of every person here.

They've done a great job for the country.

NARRATOR: 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 changeshe 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.

NARRATOR: And on January 20, 2005,

George W. Bush took a journey from the White House

to the Capitol that his father had been denied.

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen,

the president of the United States,

George Walker Bush. [cheers]

SUSKIND:He's in uncharted territory forany 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 Presidentof the United States...

So help me God.

So help me God.

Congratulations.

SUSKIND: Kind of frees him up.

And at this point, he starts to slip out

of some of the brittle, bullyingpetulance

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 offreedom in all the world.

GERSON: 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."

STEPHEN HADLEY: The second inaugural was a reflection

of the president's confidence inthe 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.

PACKER: 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, heneeded to free the Middle East,

and that's what he set out to do.

NARRATOR:Bush laid out an ambitious plan

for advancing American values abroad, notably in Iraq.

The case for tying the invasionof Iraq to 9/11,

as argued most vigorously by hisvice president,

was consigned to history.

BAKER:If you look at Bush and Cheney,

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

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

Bush believes that there is evilout there,

but he does also aspire to bigger, better things.

Now, I mean, some people thoughtthat was naiïve.

Some people thought it was evenmessianic

but I think it was born of this idea

that the war on terror couldn'tjust 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.

NARRATOR: The work would begin, Bush believed,

with the first elections

held in Iraq since the overthrowof Saddam Hussein.

BUSH: In just four days from now,

the people of Iraq will vote in free national elections.

Terrorists in that country havedeclared 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 theirdesire 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.

NARRATOR: In all, eight million Iraqis cast a ballot.

At many polling stations, the mood was jubilant,

with crowds dancing and childrenplaying soccer

in streets guarded by thousandsof Iraqi and American forces.

RADDATZ: 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.

NARRATOR: That day at least,

something wonderful appeared tobe unfolding,

and Bush's grand vision for a democratic Iraq

seemed within grasp.

BUSH: 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 itas the sign

that all the nay-sayers had beenwrong,

that this was the future.

We were now on the right road.

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

[gunshots]

NARRATOR: 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 tothe 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.

NARRATOR: Hungry for good news,

Bush ignored the signs of brewing trouble in Iraq.

Instead he now turned his attention

back to his domestic agenda.

ROVE: He won by actually,

during the campaign, talking about a couple of issues,

immigration reform and social security modernization.

And so he thought, you know, look, I'm not going to coast.

NARRATOR:Bush had always dreamed of doingbig things.

Now he had his chance.

He started with social security,

relying on Karl Rove to help himcraft 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.

BUSH: 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.

[cheers]

GERSON: We campaigned week after week

all across the country on social security reform

trying to use this political capital

and no minds were changed.

NARRATOR: 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.

CARD: 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 thehill to introduce them.

NARRATOR: That summer, Bush retreated to his Crawford ranch

for five weeks to rest

and strategize about how toregain the political initiative.

But again, his presidency

was soon overtaken by a crisis.

MIKE BROWN: Everyone, let's go ahead and get started.

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

NARRATOR: 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.

NARRATOR: By August the 28, 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.

BUSH: 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.

NARRATOR:As fears of the impending stormgrew,

residents of New Orleans began fleeing the city.

But tens of thousands of people

were unable to leaveand were forced to take shelter

wherever they could.

[wind whipping]

[thunder, heavy wind and rain]

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

Katrina made landfall in Louisiana.

Waves of water surged into low-lying areas.

[radio static]

911 OPERATOR: Police operator.

WOMAN: Yes, 911, I need help.

911 OPERATOR: Where are you, ma'am?

WOMAN 1: I'm in the Ninth Ward.

WOMAN 2: I'm stuck in the attic, me, and my little sister,

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

[dial tone]

WOMAN 3: I'm gonna die,

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

and I'm gonna drown in the attic.

NARRATOR: 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.

[heavy winds whipping]

NARRATOR: 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.

[man shouting]

Flood waters killed a hundred people

and forced survivors to clamber to safety.

MAN: Hold the rope, let him pull to the boat!

[music playing at rally]

NARRATOR:Bush once again decided to carryon with his schedule,

flying to San Diego for an eventat 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 warand if there's one thing

that the president couldn't be criticized doing

is speaking with the troops.

NARRATOR: 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.

REPORTER: Eighty percent of New Orleans flooded.

The levees are broken andthey're having a difficult time

trying to fix the situation.

The damage is staggering...

REPORTER: The real concern is anybody who decided

to ride the storm out inside their house,

they may have actually drowned.

NARRATOR: New Orleans was now a major disaster zone

with over 50,000 people stillstranded 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 led the press

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

of him just looking out the window.

And it was one of the few timeswhere his

unbelievable political instinctslet him down.

REPORTER: President Bush had Air Force One

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

for about 35 minutes.

CARD:He was crucified for flying overand not stopping.

Well, I guarantee you if he had stopped

he would have been crucified even worse.

REPORTER:President Bush once again showed

a lack of instant, immediate leadership.

This 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 are searing.

CROWD [chanting]: We want help!

All these people you see here are dying.

NARRATOR: Five days after Katrina hit,

much needed federal assistance had yet to reach New Orleans.

[people chanting]: Help!

This morning I found one lady ina wheelchair dead

in the ladies' bathroom, andanother lady laying on the floor

by the ladies' bathroom, dead.

And then there's this guy righthere that's dead,

that's been sitting out here fora while.

ROBINSON: 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 history records.

NARRATOR: And a story of presidential indifference

was soon compounded by accountsof federal incompetence.

BRIAN WILLIAMS: "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.

MAYOR RAY NAGIN: 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 arecoming 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.

SUSKIND: Katrina ends up being

an 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 wantthem 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.

BARTLETT: 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 governoraren't up to the task,

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

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

♪

NARRATOR: 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 weredisplaced,

forced to live in temporaryaccommodation 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 hardfor some to see it now,

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

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...

[applause]

GERSON: 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.

BARTLETT: It was a damaging blow, politically,

to the president.

We would like to tell ourselvesotherwise,

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 anythingin the entire presidency.

BUMILLER:George Bush actually said that,at one point,

that Katrina was worse on his presidency

than the Iraq War had been,

because what it exposed was complete incompetence.

RAHM EMANUEL:First Sergeant Alan Nye Gifford.

Specialist David H. Ford IV,

Staff Sergeant Virgilio E. Neelum,

Sergeant First Class Lawrence E. Morrison.

NARRATOR: 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 IED struck his vehicle.

He was the 2,000th American soldier to die

in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

CROWD [chanting]: Not one more!

NARRATOR:Americans had grown increasinglyweary

of the continued occupation.

FERNANDO: Bush lied,

and thousands and thousands ofinnocent children died in Iraq.

CINDY SHEEHAN: George Bush said that the families

can rest assured that theirchildren died for a noble cause.

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

NARRATOR: To shore up public support,

Bush announced a withdrawal of U.S. troops

from frontline operations.

BUSH:We will increasingly move out ofIraqi cities,

reduce the number of bases fromwhich we operate,

and conduct fewer patrols and convoys.

As Iraqi forces gain experience

and the political process advances,

we will be able to decrease ourtroop levels in Iraq

without losing our capability to defeat the terrorists.

[crowd yelling]

NARRATOR: 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,

REPORTER: 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.

PACKER: Throughout 2003, '04, and '05,

Iraq got worse and worse and worse.

But the true turning point was February 2006,

when Al Qaeda insurgents bombedthe Golden Mosque

and that opened the gates of hell,

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

PETRAEUS: After that moment,

the violence statistics just golike this.

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

The problem was at the very timethat the violence was increasing

we were moving out of neighborhoods

back onto big bases, so it got even worse.

NARRATOR: 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.

REPORTER: Leading Republicans now acknowledge

that the situation in Iraq is bad.

JOHN WARNER: 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.

JAMES MANN: 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 the 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."

ROVE: There are people streaming in the Oval that say, "Get out."

But Bush knew that that would beVietnam all over again.

That would be withdrawal and defeat,

and the country couldn't stand it.

NARRATOR: 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 theirlosses in the midterm elections.

BUSH: 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.

NARRATOR: 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 branchanalysis of the Iraq war.

For months, Bush immersed himself

in the details of military and political strategy.

BAKER: 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.

SUSKIND: 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 thefire, and that's my job.

I am the president," and in he goes,

acting like a president.

NARRATOR: 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 securethe 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 addressthe political issues

that had unleashed opposition

to the United States, that had fueled an insurgency.

BOLTEN: 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 countryand the respect this country has

"around the world,

is if we retreat before the jobis done."

NARRATOR:With his new plan taking shape,

Bush decided to changethe leadership at the Pentagon,

something he had stubbornly resisted.

After Republicans suffered hugelosses 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.

NARRATOR: In Rumsfeld's place,

Bush appointed the security expert Robert Gates.

PETRAEUS: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.

NARRATOR: 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.

ANNOUNCER: The president of the United States

and Mrs. Laura Bush.

NARRATOR: Bush's new strategy for the Iraq War

was finalized over the holidayseason as 2006 drew to a close.

BARTLETT:The surge of troops in Iraq wasone of the most

gut-wrenching policy decisions I saw the president make.

Everybody and everything suggested that

pulling out was going to be themost important thing,

and we did just the opposite.

And this is the surreal aspectsof a presidency.

He's making these massive life and death decisions,

and every night for three hourshe'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 onhis teeth in these pictures

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

NARRATOR: To sell the surge to the American public,

Bush had been forced to take a rare step:

admit his mistakes.

George W. Bushdid 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...

NARRATOR: To lead the surge, Bush turned to the architect

of the model counter-insurgencystrategy:

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.

PETRAEUS [voiceover]: 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.

It was completely unprecedented.

Around half the troops he's requested

have arrived on the scene.

These troops are all aimed at helping the Iraqi government

find the breathing space necessary

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 couldgo down the tubes

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

[car horns honking]

NARRATOR: Gradually, the surge of additional troops

began to pay dividends.

In September 2007,

Bush claimed success.

BUSH: Conditions in Iraq are improving.

We are seizing the initiative from the enemy.

The troop surge is working.

RADDATZ: 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 approachthis in a different way.

GATES: 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.

PACKER: 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...

[man yells in Arabic]

but it was very hard for Iraqis

to say, "Just go home," becausethey knew that, as feckless

and incompetent as we had been,

we still were the only force

that stood between these warring factions.

[soldiers cheering]

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.

NARRATOR: Bush never got the democracy in Iraq

that he envisioned.

But the situation on the grounddid stabilize.

He now hoped for a quiet end to his presidency.

Who else is coming?

WOMAN:The vice presidentand Josh Bolten.

Good, okay.

NARRATOR: 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.

[applause]

NARRATOR: Bush had long extolled the virtues of owning a home.

BUSH: 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."

[crowd cheers]

NARRATOR: 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.

REPORTER: 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 couldget 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.

COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCER: Thanks to their flexible lending rules,

Paul got a quick approval.

It was just... it was insane.

NARRATOR: 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.

NEWS ANCHOR: With interest rates

climbing back, many homeowners are having a hard time

paying their mortgages.

NEWS REPORTER: Home prices are down

for the first time in more than a decade.

NEWS REPORTER: Facing a growing number of Americans

who are finding themselves onecrisis away from financial ruin.

NARRATOR:Although borrowers were hurting,

Wall Street banks seemed secure,

if only because of their enormous size.

But on September 15, 2008...

MEREDITH VIERA: With the crash of the titans,

Wall Street in panic mode this morning.

NARRATOR: The investment bank Lehman Brothers

suddenly collapsed,

triggering full-scale financial crisis.

WILLIAMS: Lehman is by far the largest bankruptcy

ever in this country.

Today Wall Street had one of itsworst days on record.

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

monumental down here.

NARRATOR: 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 esotericand 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.

REPORTER: Citigroup is simply too big to fail.

WILLIAMS: Today the feds had to print more money.

MATT LAUER: Government apparently was concerned

that AIG is too big to fail.

REPORTER: The Dow losing more than 5.5 percent today,

its second straight day of huge losses.

REPORTER: 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,

the financial crisis, it was really scary.

In this difficult time, I know many Americans

are wondering aboutthe security of their finances.

Every American should know

that the federal government continues to enforce laws

and regulations protecting your money.

NARRATOR: Bush's treasury secretary, Hank Paulson,

realized that his piecemeal efforts

to stabilize the financial system were not enough.

Confidence in Wall Street bankshad shattered

and as lending dried up,

businesses across the country faced

the very real prospect of bankruptcy.

HANK PAULSON: 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.

NARRATOR: 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 AssetRelief Program, or TARP.

PAULSON: 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, 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.

NARRATOR: On September 18, 2008,

Paulson met with Bush.

He brought with him the chairmanof the Federal Reserve,

Ben Bernanke, and together theymade their case

for a massive government bailoutof Wall Street.

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

the vice president, Josh,

and a whole lot of other peoplein 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 anythingmore 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."

♪

BAKER: 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 goingto be another Great Depression,

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

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

FRUM:He had learned the first impulseis not the right one,

and he learned something with the limits of ideology.

President Bush responded to thefinancial crisis

in a very non-ideological way.

Thanks for having me.

FRUM: 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 aboutthe Great Depression,

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

"How do we not have another Great Depression?"

NARRATOR: 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 tooppose government intervention.

I believe companies that make bad decisions

should be allowed to go out of business.

Under normal circumstances, Iwould 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 byRepublicans 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 thefinancial 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.

NAFTALI: 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.

NARRATOR: 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.

WRIGHT: 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 muchof 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.

[cameras clicking]

Thank you.

NARRATOR: As the clock counted down on his presidency,

Bush joined White House correspondents

for a final press conference.

REPORTER: Do you think, in retrospect,

that you have made any mistakesand, if so,

what is the single biggest?

You can make... only make decisions, you know,

on the information at hand.

BAKER: 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.

BAKER: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 callthose mistakes or not,

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

Let's put it that way.

God bless you.

WAYNE SLATER: It's a presidency

that will always be defined by 9/11,

always be defined by the response to it,

which his utmost most 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 didor how poorly you think he did,

he went through eight years of a presidency

that was just exactly what he wanted,

a consequential presidency.

ROBINSON:I have this vivid image of Bushin the rubble

of the World Trade Center with the bullhorn.

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.

NARRATOR: 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.

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

You have the big picture visionary,

who is also the person who won'tpay 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 beall of these things at once

help us understand why the Bush presidency

is going to be a bit of a riddlefor historians.

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

and, in fact, was a very complicated man.

♪

BOLTEN: 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 aroundthe West Wing

for a couple minutes just to look around

and he greeted some of theworkers, 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 privilegefor 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.