Bush was the son of Prescott Sheldon Bush, an investment banker and U.S. senator from Connecticut, and Dorothy Walker Bush, scion of a prominent St. Louis, Missouri, family. (Her father established the amateur golf competition known as the Walker Cup.) The young Bush grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and attended private schools there and in Andover, Massachusetts. Upon graduation from Phillips Academy, Andover, he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve. He served from 1942 to 1944 as a torpedo bomber pilot on aircraft carriers in the Pacific during World War II, flying some 58 combat missions; he was shot down by the Japanese in 1944. For his service he won the Distinguished Flying Cross. In January 1945 he married Barbara Pierce (Barbara Bush (Bush, Barbara)).

Following the family tradition, Bush attended Yale University, graduating in 1948. His membership in the Skull and Bones secret society there later became an issue that his critics used as evidence of elitism. Rejecting a position in his father's firm, he moved with his young family to Texas and became a salesman of oil-field supplies. He cofounded the Bush-Overbey Oil Development Company (1951), the Zapata Petroleum Corporation (1953), and the Zapata Off-Shore Company (1954). In 1959 he became active in the Republican Party in Houston, and after losing a campaign for the U.S. Senate to Democrat Ralph Yarborough in 1964, Bush was elected in 1966 to a safely Republican seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He gave up the seat in 1970 to run again for the Senate. He was defeated again, this time by Democrat Lloyd Bentsen, Jr. Shortly after his defeat, Bush was appointed by President Richard M. Nixon (Nixon, Richard M.) to serve as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (UN; 1971–72). In 1973, as the Watergate Scandal was erupting, Bush became chairman of the Republican National Committee. In this post, he stood by President Nixon until August 1974, when he joined a growing chorus of voices calling on the president to resign. Later that year, President Gerald R. Ford (Ford, Gerald R.), who had nominated Nelson Rockefeller (Rockefeller, Nelson Aldrich) as his vice president, named a disappointed Bush chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing—which was then the senior U.S. representative in China, because relations between the two countries did not permit the exchange of ambassadors. He served in this capacity until he was asked to head the Central Intelligence Agency in 1976. As CIA director, Bush took steps to ensure that the agency's activities did not exceed congressional authorization. When Jimmy Carter (Carter, Jimmy) took office in 1977, Bush resigned and returned to Texas, where in 1979 he announced his candidacy for president.

As vice president, Bush traveled more than a million miles as the administration's representative. When asked about his involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair—in which the Reagan administration, in violation of congressional edict, used funds from the illegal sale of arms to Iran to fund Contra rebels fighting the Marxist government of Nicaragua—Bush claimed that he was “out of the loop,” though he did admit knowing about the arms sale to Iran. In 1987 he published an autobiography, Looking Forward (written with Victor Gold).

From the outset of his presidency, however, Bush demonstrated far more interest in foreign than domestic policy. In December 1989, he ordered a military invasion of Panama in order to topple that country's leader, General Manuel Antonio Noriega (Noriega, Manuel), who—though at one time of service to the U.S. government—had become notorious for his brutality and his involvement in the drug trade. The invasion, which lasted four days, resulted in hundreds of deaths, mostly of Panamanians, and the operation was denounced by both the Organization of American States (American States, Organization of) and the UN General Assembly.

In August 1990, Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait. Bush led a worldwide UN-approved embargo against Iraq to force its withdrawal and sent a U.S. military contingent to Saudi Arabia to counteract Iraqi pressure and intimidation. Perhaps his most significant diplomatic achievement was the skillful construction of a coalition of western European and Arab states against Iraq. Over the objections of those who favoured restraint, Bush increased the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf (Persian Gulf War) region to about 500,000 troops within a few months. When Iraq failed to withdraw from Kuwait, he authorized a U.S.-led air offensive that began on January 16–17, 1991. The ensuing Persian Gulf War culminated in an Allied ground offensive in late February that decimated Iraq's armies and restored Kuwait's independence. (See primary source document: Operation Desert Storm (George Bush: Operation Desert Storm).)

On the strength of his victory over Iraq and his competent leadership in foreign affairs, Bush's approval rating soared to about 90 percent. This popularity soon waned, however, as an economic recession that began in late 1990 persisted into 1992. Throughout this period, Bush showed much less initiative in domestic affairs, though he initially worked with Congress in efforts to reduce the federal government's continuing large budget deficits. A moderate conservative, he made no drastic departures from Reagan's policies—except in taxes. In 1990, in a move that earned him the enmity of his conservative supporters and the distrust of many voters who had backed him in 1988, he reneged on his “read my lips” pledge and raised taxes in an attempt to cope with the soaring budget deficit.

In his last weeks in office, Bush ordered a U.S. military-led mission to feed the starving citizens of war-torn Somalia, thereby placing U.S. marines in the crossfire of warring factions and inadvertently causing the deaths of 18 soldiers. Equally as controversial was his pardoning of six Reagan administration officials charged with illegal actions associated with the Iran-Contra Affair.