(helicopter blades whirring) (radio chatter) (over radio): Roger, 10-4.

NARRATOR: After the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, Americans turned for hope and reassurance to a recently elected president many had thought was unprepared for the office.

The heir of a political dynasty, George Walker Bush had led a wayward life in his youth, until he found religion and a focus.

DAVID FRUM: George W. Bush has a famous name and 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 concentration was, 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.

MAN: George, we can't hear you!

I can hear you!

(crowd cheers and laughs) 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 knocked these 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.

♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: This program contains content which may not be suitable for all audiences.

Viewer discretion is advised.

(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 (no audio) off the road!

BUSH: The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.

We will meet that threat now.

May God bless our country and all who defend her.

(machine gun firing) NARRATOR: At first, the war unfolded far better than Bush expected.

(guns firing) U.S. soldiers advanced rapidly 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 down posters 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) (cheering and whistling) 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 around Saddam's statue and the tank pulling it over, and I said, "President, you should watch this."

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

(crowd cheering and yelling) FLEISCHER: The president was interested in seeing how the crowd wanted the statue down.

(cheering and yelling) FLEISCHER: 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 U.S.S.

Lincoln, moored just off the coast of San Diego, to salute returning troops.

ANDY CARD: This was, this was a fun experience for the president.

He was really looking forward to the Abraham Lincoln.

Why?

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

BUSH: Yes, I flew it!

(all laughing) 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 that sort of golden-hour light, so he landed in the late afternoon.

It looked great.

("Hail to the Chief" playing) (crowd cheering and applauding) Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.

In the battle of Iraq, the United States and her allies have prevailed.

(crowd cheering and applauding) 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.

(people talking in background) 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 troops and didn't think it was its job to be the police for Iraq.

It wasn't there to stop the looting.

(guns firing) (yelling) RUMSFELD: Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.

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

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

"Free people are free to make mistakes."

Um, as if we bore no responsibility, and as if this shouldn't have been expected.

It was an incredible thing to say, as if the success of this unbelievably ambitious and risky enterprise didn't depend on what was happening right then in the streets of Baghdad, as if it was already a done deal.

♪ ♪ 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 gotta try to do something for the Iraqi people and for Iraq."

Bush is undecided, and all of a sudden the president leans, leans, and makes the decision that we're staying.

NARRATOR: Bush made the decision, but left the details to others.

Most importantly, he didn't provide 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 discussion that I remember in the National Security Council about 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) BAKER: This was a country that had been torn by sectarian differences for many years, that have been kept under the boiling pot by a totalitarian dictatorship.

REPORTER: Today, hundreds protested against the arrest by U.S. soldiers of one of their religious leaders.

(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 like what 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 experience in the Middle East.

He's a can-do type person.

He shares the same values as most Americans share, and that is our deep desire to have a, an orderly country in Iraq that is free and at peace.

(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 guy there, and I'm going to leave the details to him."

REPORTER: The new U.S. civil administrator for Iraq are meeting here with Iraqi leaders.

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 then, with the appointment of Bremer, it all got delegated to Baghdad.

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

Well, in practice, he was supposed to report to Rumsfeld, but Rumsfeld never felt like he had control over him, so...

But at the end of the day, the responsibility for that has to rest in the White House.

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.

(chanting) They didn't solve any problem.

They only speaking and we didn't need speaking only, we need works.

(chanting) NARRATOR: A week later, Bremer issued his second order, which disbanded the 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 explosion I'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 I.E.Ds.

(I.E.D.

explodes) SOLDIER: I.E.D.!

Let's go!

Look for a target!

(guns firing rapidly) 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.

(guns firing, explosions echoing) SOLDIER: It's a (no audio) car bomb.

(soldiers and people yelling) FLEISCHER: The fedayeen and the now guerrilla-style attacks that increasingly started to take the lives of American servicemen and women in Iraq, it started to grow and grow and grow.

NARRATOR: Reports of casualties came in daily.

REPORTER: Yesterday, two ambushes left four American troops dead.

REPORTER: One U.S. Special Operations soldier killed, eight others wounded.

REPORTER: Four dead and 13 injured in three separate attacks.

SOLDIER: (no audio) smoking, hurry up!

Let's go!

SOLDIER 2: 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 now is a guerrilla war?

Um, I'll do my best.

(stammering) I guess the reason I don't use the phrase "guerrilla war" is because there, there isn't one, and it would be a misunderstanding and a miscommunication to you and to the people of the country and the world.

NARRATOR: But, for all the arguments over how to characterize the conflict, the uptick in attacks on American forces was undeniable.

REPORTER: The White House is aware that governing Iraq and containing unrest through the hot summer months may be costly in American lives, and critics will continue to pose the question of whether America won the war only to lose the peace.

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 run their own country.

The president early on did see evidence that this was going to be a struggle, but he continually looked on the bright side of how Iraq would blossom after the invasion.

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 faith in America's goodness.

And I think Bush saw himself and the country as agents of a great purpose, whose unimpeachable goodness would carry it through to the other side.

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 take their best shot, because U.S. forces will answer.

There are some who feel like that if they... attack us, that we may decide to leave prematurely.

They don't understand what they're talking about if that's the case-- let me finish.

There are some who feel like, that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there.

My answer is, "Bring 'em on."

We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation.

Of course we want... 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 he projects, right?

From his point of view, he's trying to embolden his own troops.

But it also projects a certain cockiness that strikes some as the wrong way to go.

He's actually asking for a fight that's not necessarily going to develop.

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 a five-day trip to the continent, he visited Gorée Island, where slaves had been weighed and measured before they departed through what was known as "The Door of No Return."

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. aid to fight the pandemic.

Africa has the will to fight AIDS, but it needs the resources, as well.

(audience applauding) 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 appetite in Congress for such a huge program of foreign aid, Bush forced the issue.

The money was supposed to care for ten million people living with H.I.V./AIDS, and provide antiretroviral drugs for two million people infected with H.I.V.

The program became known by its acronym, PEPFAR.

I don't think the president expected, certainly none of us expected, that one of the main initiatives of the Bush administration would turn out to be an assault on the AIDS pandemic in Africa, but I think the president saw it as a moral imperative.

MICHAEL GERSON: One of the essential commitments that he talked about again and again in the context of PEPFAR is the biblical phrase, "To whom much is given, much is required."

I think that explains a lot about the Bush presidency, this feeling that America is blessed and that we have a responsibility to others based on that blessing.

It's comparable to the Peace Corps and other efforts that defined America's role in the world.

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 Bush until we chase him out of Iraq.

No more Bush!

NARRATOR: By June, opposition to the war was building at home and around the world.

At the root of the protesters' anger was the belief that Bush had lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction.

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

9/11 was an excuse.

No imminent threat, no weapons of mass destruction.

Now the administration keeps changing its story, but they can't change the facts.

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, is substantial.

It is, happens not to be the area where weapons of mass destruction were dispersed.

We know where they are, they're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north, somewhat.

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 was getting an update from the field about an Iraqi military base in the western portion of Iraq, in the middle of a desert, that was excessively reinforced, had a lot of people at it, and it just didn't seem right.

Why would they have, in the middle of nowhere, all these forces?

And we thought, bing, we found it.

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

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

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 was humanly 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 was this Keystone Cops moment where everybody is pointing at each other, and it's, uh, nobody wants anything to do with it.

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

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

Bremer is trying to constitute a new government.

That's not his number-one priority.

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 Iraqi nuclear weapons program.

Now he was asked to pick up the search again.

KAY: The president was unhappy with the military's role in doing it, and they wanted someone who had not been involved in the initial assessments.

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

NARRATOR: In mid-June, as Kay prepared to travel to Baghdad, he went to the C.I.A.

headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to pore over the intelligence reports about Iraq's WMD.

This was the same evidence that Secretary of State Colin Powell had used to make the case for war in his speech to the United Nations just four months earlier.

It was literally a case of the hair on the back of your neck sort of goes up, you're, "Something's not right here," because it was hearsay, it was communication intercepts that were... "Nebulous" is the most generous way...

They were quite unclear as to what they meant.

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

So you worked on missiles?

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

It was usually Scooter Libby.

And sometimes, it was something as insane as a set of coordinates for where they thought the WMD was.

Raw intelligence is something that you do not give to amateurs or the uninformed, because it's easy to make mistakes.

We had enough to do without that sort of interference from Washington.

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 destruction in Iraq?

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

I mean, Iraq had a weapons program.

Intelligence throughout the decade showed they had a weapons program.

I am absolutely convinced, with time, we'll find out that they did have a weapons program.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Then, in early July 2003, the American public saw the first 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.

REPORTER: 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 Iraq had sought to buy uranium there.

In a widely read op-ed piece in "The New York Times," Wilson said the claim was false.

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 the American 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 have misled the public in making the case for war.

ANDREA MITCHELL: New questions tonight about whether the administration ignored 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 came in 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.

(laughing) Well, you can keep asking the question, and my answer is going to be the same: Saddam was a danger, and the world is better off 'cause we got rid of him.

It's hard for someone like George W. Bush, who views himself as a decider, who views himself as not swaying from side to side, seeing the world not in shades of gray-- which it usually is-- but seeing it in black-and-white terms.

It's hard for him to say, "I made a bad decision."

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.

(audience applauding) NARRATOR: As he had done since childhood, George Bush deflected unpleasantness with humor to defuse the tension around the search for WMD.

There's a White House Correspondents' Dinner where the president is expected to give a humorous talk, and he tries to make fun of it.

Those weapons of mass destruction gotta be somewhere.

(audience laughing) Nope, no weapons over there.

(audience laughing) BAKER: In the room that night, people laughed and thought it was funny, but the next day, a lot of people woke up and said, "There's nothing funny about this."

Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, and getting rid of him might or might not have been worth doing anyway, but that wasn't the reason people thought that they were going to war.

(audience applauding) DRAPER: I believe that George W. Bush is an honest man, in the sense that he doesn't go around lying to people, except insofar as he's not willing to face the truth.

That doesn't make him a liar, but it means sometimes that he's saying things that aren't true, and that's what happens when you're someone who is not fully in possession of the truth and not willing to engage in the rigors of finding out whether or not what you're about to say is the truth.

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 against U.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) NARRATOR: They were burned, and their charred bodies were dragged through the streets, then hanged from a bridge.

The president did not want it to be ignored.

This was not just another day in a battle.

He wanted us to have a response, and he wanted people in Iraq to see that there was a response, but he also wanted the world to see that this wasn't going to stand.

This collection of killers is trying to shake the will of the United States.

America will never be intimidated by a bunch of thugs and assassins.

(explosions booming in distance) NARRATOR: Usually content to delegate such decision-making to others, instead, Bush ordered the commencement of a large- scale attack on Fallujah over the objections of local Marine commanders.

REPORTER: The Marines have Humvee patrols going out across the city.

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

(siren blaring) ROBIN WRIGHT: Fallujah was emblematic of the fact the Bush administration didn't understand Iraq.

(talking in background) ROBIN WRIGHT: 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.

(chanting) NARRATOR: On the same day that Marines were pummeling the Sunni stronghold of Fallujah... (yelling) NARRATOR: American troops came under sustained attack from a Shia uprising in other parts of Iraq.

(guns firing) Armed militants, led by a fiery cleric, 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 to handle, but two, and you pretty much have the whole of Iraq against you.

So, suddenly, what had seemed like a very painful, but slowly upward path toward reconstruction and creating a sovereign Iraqi government looked like, um, just a war.

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 handling of 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 perished serving 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 to people being wounded or losing their lives, and he knew he had to join those families and take whatever it was those families wanted to say to him.

Sometimes it was loving, sometimes it was religious.

Sometimes it was compassionate.

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

♪ ♪ DANA PERINO: Most of the families were very happy to see the president, overjoyed, right?

The honor that was so great.

But there was one family... Their son was not going to make it.

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

And she railed at the president and yelled and yelled, and he didn't try to leave.

And the husband said, "Mr. President, thank you," you know, tried to calm his wife down, the president said, "It's okay, I, I can stay," and he said, "No, we thank you," and shook hands, continued on.

We saw about five more patients after that.

But I'll never forget that we get on the helicopter, Marine One, to head back, and he says, "That momma sure was mad at me," and he looked at me, and I said, "Yes, sir."

And he looked out the window, and I saw this one tear came down his cheek, and he said, "And I don't blame her a bit."

And we got back to the White House, and it was back to business.

NARRATOR: For all Bush's efforts to focus on other issues, the fight against Al Qaeda and the war in Iraq required his full attention.

In April 2004, "The Washington Post" obtained secret memos written after 9/11 which laid out a legal justification for using what Bush's administration called "enhanced interrogation techniques."

They were designed to extract information about imminent attacks from a small number of Al Qaeda leaders being held in undisclosed locations around the world.

They thought in those beginning days, and even maybe the beginning years, that there might be another attack any day now, and they needed to figure out who this network was and how to find them and how to kill them.

What they did with the captives is, they hid them in foreign countries.

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

They didn't necessarily want to treat them humanely, either, and that's where you get the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques."

NARRATOR: When news of the extreme techniques broke, Bush again dug in, defending his policy.

Mr. President, I wanted to return to the question of torture.

What we've learnt from these memos this week is that the Department of Justice lawyers and the Pentagon lawyers have essentially worked out a way that U.S. officials can torture detainees.

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

We have laws on the books.

You might look at those laws, and that might provide comfort for you.

They had defined torture as organ failure or death.

And so anything short of that, especially if it's monitored by a doctor so that the guy can't die, then that's not torture.

So I think Bush is convinced that, although we're treating people harshly, we're not torturing anyone.

And you've got to really, really think about that hard, because how on Earth could anybody think that we weren't torturing anyone?

NARRATOR: As Bush's war on terror grew, hundreds of low-level detainees were sent to Guantánamo Bay.

Many had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or the attacks of 9/11.

Still, soldiers began using enhanced interrogation techniques on these detainees, too.

All this was kept secret until the morning of April 28, 2004.

The Arab world woke up today to shocking photos that apparently show U.S. troops abusing detainees at a prison outside Baghdad.

(battering ram pounds door) NARRATOR: With the insurgency in Iraq gaining ground, American troops had been filling up the prison called Abu Ghraib with suspected bomb makers and guerrilla fighters.

For months, reports of abuse at Abu Ghraib had made their way up the chain of command all the way to Secretary Rumsfeld, who had done little until dozens of explosive photos were leaked to the press.

BAKER: Some of those prisoners were piled on top of each other naked.

The most horrific photograph shows one of the Iraqi detainees standing on a box, and he had been told if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted.

WOLF BLITZER: The pictures have led 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 an unjust 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 was a migration of the tactics used by a small number of C.I.A.

operatives against the suspects in the black sites.

It migrated over to this unit of low-level soldiers not trained in interrogations or even prisoner guarding.

They were bored, and cruel.

BUMILLER: Abu Ghraib was devastating for the administration.

It showed the kind of rot that was occurring in Iraq under American occupation, and it showed how far off we had come from American ideals.

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 the secretary of defense, Rumsfeld.

SHEILA JACKSON LEE: I ask the speaker of the House to command an open session here on the floor of the House for Secretary Rumsfeld to come and tell us why he was hiding reports for two months, why no one knew about the reports, and why these kinds of heinous and ridiculous acts are going on.

We want peace over war... ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: 12 days after the Abu Ghraib images went public, Bush met with his secretary of defense.

Rumsfeld handed Bush a letter of resignation, but the president refused it.

(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 your leadership.

You are courageously leading our nation in the war against terror.

You're doing a superb job.

You are a strong secretary of defense, and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude.

PRIEST: On Abu Ghraib, really, nobody is held responsible.

There are charges against the low-level soldiers that carried this out, but, from Rumsfeld on down, nothing happens; on the contrary, Bush exonerates him in public.

NARRATOR: No one was held accountable for the program of torture or enhanced interrogation at the black sites or the prison at Guantánamo Bay, either.

Bush and most of the president's closest advisers held to a deep-rooted conviction that the brutal interrogation techniques were necessary.

I can say that questioning the detainees in this program has given us information that has saved innocent lives by helping us stop new attacks.

The procedures were tough, and they were safe and lawful and necessary.

(audience applauding) 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 C.I.A.

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 sites kept us safer.

On the contrary, I think there's a lot of evidence that it made it much more dangerous for every American who went overseas, who fought overseas, because the stories that came out about the Abu Ghraib mistreatment and the Guantánamo mistreatment were the best recruiting tools that Al Qaeda ever got, no question about that.

They have picked up people on the battlefield, they've listened to people talking through surveillance, and they absolutely know that that mistreatment fueled a new generation of recruits, and they are still using all those images to do that.

♪ ♪ NARRATOR: With the Iraq War taking such a dark turn, Bush was tested in ways he had never anticipated.

He turned to history, devouring books on wartime presidents, most notably Abraham Lincoln.

♪ ♪ In public, he was careful to keep such introspection hidden, always looking ahead, and never second-guessing decisions he'd made, despite mounting pressure to acknowledge mistakes.

BARTLETT: I remember vividly a primetime press conference in the East Room.

JOHN DICKERSON: Thank you, Mr. President.

After 9/11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?

Hmm.

I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it.

Uh... 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.

You know, I just, uh...

I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet.

He thinks that what they are trying to say is it was a mistake to go to war.

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

So he stumbles over the answer, and it becomes kind of this indelible moment of his presidency.

(cheering) NARRATOR: As the summer of 2004 approached, Bush turned his attention away from Iraq and began planning for his re-election campaign.

(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 family thus far to have produced two presidents, they were two one-term presidents.

If George W. Bush won in '04, the Bushes would have achieved something no other political family had in American history: re-election.

NARRATOR: With America so deeply polarized over Iraq, Bush and his team knew that re-election would be a struggle.

KARL ROVE: Bush's approval rating is at 63 in the spring of 2003, and by election day, it was 51.

(crowd chanting, whistling) ROVE: Now, when we planned for the re-election, we did not think that the glory days are gonna last forever.

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

NARRATOR: Bush and Rove decided to energize their base by having the president come out forcefully against same-sex marriage.

I believe in the sanctity of marriage.

NARRATOR: 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's misled us on weapons, misled us on the reasons, misled us on a host of different things.

NARRATOR: Bush focused his campaign not on the war in Iraq, but on the continuing threat of terrorism.

After September the 11th, we could not fail to imagine that a brutal tyrant who hated America, had ties to terror, had used weapons of mass destruction, might use those weapons or share the capability of those weapons with terrorist enemy.

(crowd cheering and applauding) 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 define his opponent before he was able to establish himself on the national stage.

That task was taken on by Vice President Cheney.

Senator Kerry has also said that if he were in charge, he would fight a "more sensitive" war on terror.

(audience laughing) Those who threaten us and kill innocents around the world do not need to be treated more sensitively.

They need to be destroyed.

(audience applauding) What Bush does is, turns this war hero into a symbol of defeatism.

And it sells and it resonates in a country that is still looking for, for security.

(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 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 denounced the ad as a vicious smear on a veteran, the Bush campaign denied knowing anything about it.

You didn't know anything about the Swift Boat ads before they went on the air, did you?

No, I didn't.

Karl Rove know anything about it?

Don't think so.

Um...

In other words, are you asking whether we coordinated this in our campaign?

No, whether they gave you a heads up they were going to do it.

Not to my knowledge.

You look for your opponent's strength, and then you try to make it a liability.

You couldn't put Rove or Bush's fingerprints on it, and yet, at the same time, it just has the complete aura of having originated that way.

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

NARRATOR: The attack on Kerry's war record helped neutralize one of Bush's most glaring vulnerabilities: his preferential treatment in avoiding the draft as a National Guard pilot.

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, we really appreciate it.

NARRATOR: The early exit polls had Kerry comfortably ahead, but that changed as the evening wore 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 to congratulate 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 my second term.

Now I've got to get to work."

(crowd cheering) 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 what could happen.

There's an old saying: do not pray for tasks equal to your powers, pray for powers equal to your tasks.

In four historic years, America has been given great tasks and faced them with strength and courage.

Our people have restored the vigor of this economy and shown resolve and patience in a new kind of war.

Our military has brought justice to the enemy and honor to America.

(crowd cheering and applauding) SUSKIND: He comes out of it, he wins, and he wins it using a playbook which is not all that dissimilar from what gets him elected president-- confidence.

"I'm your man.

"I am certain, unflappable, and sharp in my focus"-- you know, there he is, W. And he kind of moves out into his own sunlight at that point.

♪ ♪ Thank you all, please be seated.

Yesterday, I pledged to reach out to the whole nation, and today I'm proving that I'm willing to reach out to everybody by including the White House press corps.

(others laughing) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: George W. Bush had always craved approval-- from his parents, from his classmates, from voters.

With his re-election, he believed he had finally earned it.

No longer was he the "illegitimate president" whose claim to power rested on a disputed Supreme Court decision.

Now he believed he had the chance to wipe the slate clean in Iraq and bring home the troops in victory rather than humiliating defeat.

You asked, "Do I feel free?"

Let me put it to you this way.

I earned capital in the campaign, political capital.

And now I intend to spend it.

It is my style.

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 two contentious 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 re-election wasn't anything close to a landslide.

But to this administration, after what they'd been through in November and December of 2000, it felt like a landslide.

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

(laughs): Thank you all.

DRAPER: This administration was riding high.

They felt like the ship will get righted in Iraq, and in the meantime, we got a lot of good work to do.

Just met with my Cabinet.

I'm proud of every person here.

They've done a great job for the country.

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 changes he chose not to make.

He kept on Dick Cheney as vice president and Donald Rumsfeld, the architect of the Iraq War, as secretary of defense.

Good morning!

Good morning.

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.

(crowd cheering) SUSKIND: He's in uncharted territory for any Bush, ever.

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: I, George Walker Bush...

I, George Walker Bush...

He's vindicated, he's affirmed, he's in a place his father never tread, into the second term of a U.S. presidency.

I will faithfully execute...

The office of president of the United States.

The office of president of the United States...

So help me God.

So help me God.

Congratulations.

SUSKIND: Kind of frees him up.

And at this point, he starts to slip out of some of the brittle, bullying petulance that inhabited a good part of his life as the son of the president who'll never measure up.

Vice President Cheney, Mr. Chief Justice...

The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

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 in the power of individuals to make right decisions for themselves and their families.

That's core George W. Bush.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements in every nation with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

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, he needed 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 invasion of Iraq to 9/11, as argued most vigorously by his vice 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, we must go after it.

Bush believes that there is evil out there, but he does also aspire to bigger, better things.

Now, I mean, some people thought that was naive, and some people thought it was even messianic, but I think it was born of this idea that the war on terror couldn't just be about killing bad guys.

It had to be about something bigger and more uplifting.

We had to make the world a better place.

Good morning.

NARRATOR: The work would begin, Bush believed, with the first elections held in Iraq since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

BUSH: In just four days from now, the people of Iraq will vote in free national elections.

Terrorists in that country have declared war against democracy itself, and thereby declared war against the Iraqi people themselves.

Yet the elections will go forward.

Millions of Iraqi voters will show their bravery, their love of country, and their desire to live in freedom.

The voting part was really important to him.

He believed in the universal freedom agenda.

This was the first opportunity to be able to vote, and it was a hopeful time, actually.

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

At many polling stations, the mood was jubilant, with crowds dancing and children playing soccer in streets guarded by thousands of Iraqi and American forces.

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 to be 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 it as the sign that all the naysayers had been wrong, that this was the future.

We were now on the right road.

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

(guns firing) 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 to the birth of the United States.

He said the voice of freedom had been unleashed in Iraq, ignoring the fact that there had been a hundred attacks on polling stations, that less than two percent of people in Anbar Province, the place where the insurgency really had its roots, turned out to vote.

It was totally misunderstanding what had happened in Iraq.

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.

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

NARRATOR: Bush had always dreamed of doing big things.

Now he had his chance.

He started with Social Security, relying on Karl Rove to help him craft and pitch his bold plan to privatize the program to the American people.

He embarked on a whistle-stop campaign that hit 60 cities in 60 days.

BUSH: There's a lot of issues we could talk about, but I'm here to talk about Social Security.

(crowd cheering) BUSH: 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.

(crowd cheering) 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 the Hill to introduce them.

NARRATOR: That summer, Bush retreated to his Crawford ranch for five weeks to rest and strategize about how to regain the political initiative.

But again, his presidency was soon overtaken by a crisis.

MICHAEL 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 28th, Hurricane Katrina had become one of the largest and most powerful storms ever recorded, with sustained winds of 175 miles an hour.

Brown briefed the president on plans for a coordinated federal and state response.

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 storm grew, residents of New Orleans began fleeing the city.

But tens of thousands of people were unable to leave, and were forced to take shelter wherever they could.

(wind whipping) (thunder clapping, wind howling) At 6:10 a.m. on August 29, Katrina made landfall in Louisiana.

Waves of water surged into low-lying areas.

(radio static buzzing) 911 OPERATOR: Police operator 1-6.

WOMAN: Yes, 911, I need help.

911 OPERATOR: Where are you, ma'am?

WOMAN: 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.

WOMAN 3: I'm gonna die.

The water's 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) NARRATOR: Floodwaters 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 carry on with his schedule, flying to San Diego for an event at a Navy base.

We had a big debate about whether he should go and speak to the troops in San Diego.

We felt like we're still at war, and there's one thing that the president couldn't be criticized doing is speaking with the troops.

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: 80 percent of New Orleans flooded.

The levees have broken, and they're having a difficult time trying to fix the situation.

The damage is staggering... REPORTER: The real concern is anybody who decided to ride the storm out inside their house, they may have actually drowned.

♪ ♪ (people calling) NARRATOR: New Orleans was now a major disaster zone, with over 50,000 people still stranded in emergency shelters.

The president decided to fly back to the White House.

On Air Force One, his aides debated whether to let journalists see him surveying the damage from his seat.

There's some staff that let the press up to the front of the cabin, they took that picture of him just looking out the window.

And it was one of the few times where his unbelievable political instincts let him down.

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 over and not stopping.

Well, I guarantee, if he had stopped, he would have been crucified even worse.

REPORTER: President Bush once again showed a lack of instant, immediate leadership.

And it just gets back to how powerful images are in a presidency, in life, but those iconic images that...

The ones that cut against us-- the "mission accomplished," the... obviously, the looking out of the aircraft-- those, those are searing.

(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.

(chanting): Help!

This morning, I found one lady in a wheelchair dead in the ladies' bathroom, and another lady laying on the floor by the ladies' bathroom, dead.

And then there's this guy right here that's dead, that's been sitting out here for a while.

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, as history records.

NARRATOR: And the story of presidential indifference was soon compounded by accounts of 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.

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 are coming here.

They're not here!

It's too doggone late.

Now get off your asses and let's do something and let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country.

SUSKIND: Katrina ends up being immediate domestic version of Iraq.

Bad planning, warnings that Bush doesn't heed, people in various positions who don't do their job the way any president would want them to, and all of it comes a cropper with Katrina.

It's not across the world in Baghdad now, it's right in New Orleans.

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 governor aren't up to the task, that they're failing," and my point was, yes, that's why they want the president to take over.

♪ ♪ 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 were displaced, forced to live in temporary accommodation for months on end.

On September 2, Bush finally visited the Gulf Coast to survey the damage in person.

But he was still unable to overcome a perception of being out of touch.

The good news is, and it's hard for some to see it now, that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, and that's, and that's what I've come down to assure people.

Again, I want to thank you all for... And Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.

The FEMA director is working 24... (audience applauding) 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 ourselves otherwise, but it put our own allies and party in a tough spot.

Even at the height of the Iraq insurgency, that period and the days and weeks after Katrina were as challenging as anything in the entire presidency.

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's 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 I.E.D.

struck his vehicle.

He was the 2,000th American soldier to die in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

(chanting): Not one more!

NARRATOR: Americans had grown increasingly weary of the continued occupation.

MAN: Bush lied, and thousand and thousand innocent children died in Iraq.

CINDY SHEEHAN: George Bush said that the families can rest assured that their children died for a noble cause.

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

NARRATOR: To shore up public support, Bush announced a withdrawal of U.S. troops from frontline operations.

BUSH: We will increasingly move out of Iraqi cities, reduce the number of bases from which we operate, and conduct fewer patrols and convoys.

As the Iraqi forces gain experience and the political process advances, we will be able to decrease our troop levels in Iraq without losing our capability to defeat the terrorists.

(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 bombed the 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 go like this.

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

The problem was, at the very time that the violence was increasing, we were moving out of neighborhoods back onto big bases, so it got even worse.

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 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 into the Oval that say, "Get out."

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

That would be withdrawal and defeat, and the country couldn't stand it.

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 their losses 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-branch analysis 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 the fire, 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 secure the Iraqi people, and that the Iraqi security forces could no longer do it without us going back into the neighborhoods.

And that was the biggest of the big ideas about the surge.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff was unanimously opposed to the surge.

They had almost no faith that the U.S. was going to be able to address the political issues that had unleashed opposition to the United States, that had fueled an insurgency.

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 country and the respect this country has "around the world is if we retreat before the job is done."

NARRATOR: With his new plan taking shape, Bush decided to change the leadership at the Pentagon, something he had stubbornly resisted.

After Republicans suffered huge losses in the 2006 midterms, he finally asked his defense secretary to resign.

After a series of thoughtful conversations, Secretary Rumsfeld and I agreed that the timing is right for new leadership at the Pentagon.

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 holiday season as 2006 drew to a close.

BARTLETT: The surge of troops in Iraq was one of the most gut-wrenching policy decisions I saw the president make.

Everybody and everything suggested that pulling out was going to be the most important thing, and we did just the opposite.

And this is the surreal aspects of a presidency.

He's making these massive life-and-death decisions, and every night for three hours, he's hosting holiday parties, which he has to look happy and take pictures with people from all around the country, and he is literally grinding on his teeth in these pictures as he's weighing the different decision points around Iraq.

NARRATOR: To sell the surge to the American public, Bush had been forced to take a rare step: admit his mistakes.

George W. Bush did not like to change his mind, he didn't like to be told he was wrong, and, and if there was a personality trait that was his biggest shortcoming, that was it.

The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people, and it is unacceptable to me.

Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely.

They have done everything we have asked them to do.

Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.

WOMAN: Thank you, guys... NARRATOR: To lead the surge, Bush turned to the architect of the model counter-insurgency strategy, General David Petraeus.

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

You know, this is catastrophic."

General, it's good to have you here.

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

PETRAEUS: He started each week in Washington, 7:30 in the morning, Monday morning, Eastern Standard Time, in the Situation Room for an hour with his entire national security team.

And it was completely unprecedented.

Around half the troops he's requested have arrived on the scene.

These troops are all aimed at helping this Iraqi government find the breathing space necessary to, to do what the people want them to do.

That's a hell of a transformation to going from being the guy who didn't want to do the details to being the guy who is infinitely doing the details.

I... how it happened, a recognition, I guess, that his whole reputation could go down the tubes based on one thing, Iraq, and it wasn't looking good.

(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 approach this 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) PACKER: But it was very hard for Iraqis to say, "Just go home," because they knew that, as feckless and incompetent as we had been, we still were the only force that stood between these warring factions.

(audience cheering) PACKER: 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 ground did stabilize.

He now hoped for a quiet end to his presidency.

Who else is coming?

WOMAN: The vice president and 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.

(audience cheering and applauding) 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 could get rich by flipping your house.

There was this whole plethora of new products that people had never really thought about before.

You didn't have to have any income or any assets, and you could still get a mortgage.

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.

REPORTER: With interest rates climbing back, many homeowners are having a hard time paying their mortgages.

REPORTER: Home prices are down for the first time in more than a decade.

REPORTER: Facing a growing number of Americans who are finding themselves one crisis 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 its worst 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 esoteric and therefore somehow contained, had actually somehow spread like water through the entire financial system-- into every crevice where water could possibly run, there they were, and just waiting to, to turn into a tsunami.

REPORTER: Citigroup is simply too big to fail.

WILLIAMS: Today the Fed's had to print more money.

MATT LAUER: Government apparently was concerned that A.I.G.

is too big to fail.

REPORTER: The Dow losing more than five-and-a-half 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, in the financial crisis, it was really scary.

In this difficult time, I know many Americans are wondering about the security of their finances.

Every American should know that the federal government continues to enforce laws and regulations protecting your money.

NARRATOR: Bush's treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, realized that his piecemeal efforts to stabilize the financial system were not enough.

Confidence in Wall Street banks had shattered, and as lending dried up, businesses across the country faced the very real prospect of bankruptcy.

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 Asset Relief 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, let, they have to pay the bills.

Let the banks fail.

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

Any kind of bailout was deeply antithetical to everything that Republicans generally-- and President Bush, in particular-- believed in.

He believed in the market.

And he did not come to the presidency to bail out people who made bad bets on mortgage-backed securities.

NARRATOR: On September 18, 2008, Paulson met with Bush.

He brought with him the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, and together, they made their case for a massive government bailout of Wall Street.

PAULSON: Much of it's a blur, but I remember the president, the vice president, Josh, and a whole lot of other people in the Roosevelt Room.

He asked if this was the worst he'd seen the markets, and Ben said you'd have to go back to the 1930s to see a situation like that.

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

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

And Ben looked him in the eye and said, "There's nothing more we can do."

♪ ♪ 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 going to be another Great Depression, you can be damn sure I'm going to be Roosevelt and not Hoover."

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

FRUM: He had learned the first impulse is not the right one, and he learned something with the limits of ideology.

President Bush responded to the financial crisis in a very non-ideological way.

Thanks for having me.

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 about the 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 to oppose government intervention.

I believe companies that make bad decisions should be allowed to go out of business.

Under normal circumstances, I would have followed this course.

But these are not normal circumstances.

The financial crisis hit at absolutely the worst time.

It was weeks ahead of a national election.

So he was being attacked by Republicans as well as Democrats and by both presidential candidates.

So he was taking it from all sides.

Plus, he had an economy on the brink, but he didn't let any of that get him down.

Americans think that someone who's very articulate publicly is bright, and someone that isn't as articulate publicly isn't as bright.

I have watched President Bush in private, and in private, he commands the room and he focused on what needed to be done.

There's no doubt he handles the financial meltdown better than Iraq.

And he acts decisively in support of Paulson and the others to settle and anchor this thing before the ship starts listing.

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.

LAWRENCE 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 much of America's wealth was lost, not to mention just the loss of life and the loss of faith that Americans have that their country is doing the right thing.

(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 mistakes, and, 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 call those mistakes or not, but they were... things didn't go according to plan.

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

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 ardent supporters will say was the response of a hero thrown into the fire, which his critics will say to get engaged in a war that we're still involved with all these years later.

And whatever you think of George W. Bush, how well you think he did or how poorly you think he did, he went through eight years of a presidency that was just exactly what he wanted, a consequential presidency.

ROBINSON: I have this vivid image of Bush in the rubble of the World Trade Center with the bullhorn.

And that's a moment when, I think, every American was proud of George W. Bush.

He had a measure of support that no president could ever dream of.

And in a sense, he squandered it.

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't pay attention to the details when he needs to.

You have the consummate competitor who needs to have the adrenaline rush of the possibility of defeat before he'll act.

You have a person who believes he's a leader, and doesn't know what's happening beneath him.

The fact that this man could be all of these things at once help us understand why the Bush presidency is going to be a bit of a riddle for historians.

He's going to be judged as a guy who seemed very simple and, in fact, was a very complicated man.

♪ ♪ 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 around the West Wing for a couple of minutes just to look around, and he greeted some of the workers, much to their surprise.

And then we went back to the Oval Office, and I thanked the president for the privilege of serving, as I had for eight years, and he said it was a... "It was a privilege for all of us."

And after we spoke those last words, he put his coat on, and he walked out the door to the Rose Garden from the Oval Office, and I watched him leave, and I noticed he didn't look back.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ANNOUNCER: "American Experience: George W. Bush" is available on DVD.

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