John O. Brennan Career highlights What were his career highlights? Brennan began his CIA career as an analyst and spent 25 years with the agency. What is notable about his time at the CIA? He was a daily intelligence briefer for President Bill Clinton.
What did he do under President Bush?
What did John O. Brennan do under President Bush?
Brennan began his CIA career as an analyst and spent 25 years with the agency. He was a daily intelligence briefer for President Bill Clinton. In 1996, he was CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia when the Khobar Towers bombing killed 19 U.S. servicemen. In 1999, he was appointed chief of staff to George Tenet, then-Director of the CIA. Brennan became deputy executive director of the CIA in March 2001. He was director of the newly created Terrorist Threat Integration Center from 2003 to 2004, an office that sifted through and compiled information for President Bush's daily top secret intelligence briefings and employed the services of analysts from a dozen U.S. agencies and entities. One of the controversies in his career involves the distribution of intelligence to the Bush White House that helped lead to an "Orange Terror Alert", in late 2003. The intelligence, which purported to list terror targets, was highly controversial within the CIA and was later discredited. An Obama administration official does not dispute that Brennan distributed the intelligence during the Bush era but said Brennan passed it along because that was his job. His last post within the Intelligence Community was as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in 2004 and 2005, which incorporated information on terrorist activities across U.S. agencies.  Brennan then left government service for a few years, becoming Chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) and the CEO of The Analysis Corporation (TAC). He continued to lead TAC after its acquisition by Global Strategies Group in 2007 and its growth as the Global Intelligence Solutions division of Global's North American technology business GTEC, before returning to government service with the Obama administration as Homeland Security Advisor on January 20, 2009.  On January 7, 2013, Brennan was nominated by President Barack Obama to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency.  In September 2017, Brennan was named a Distinguished Non-Resident Scholar at The University of Texas at Austin, where he also acts as a Senior Advisor to the University's Intelligence Studies Project. CANNOTANSWER
He was director of the newly created Terrorist Threat Integration Center from 2003 to 2004,
"The Pet Goat" (often erroneously called "My Pet Goat") is a grade-school level reading exercise composed by American educationalist Siegfried "Zig" Engelmann.  It achieved notoriety for being read by US President George W. Bush with a class of second-graders on the morning of September 11, 2001.  After being discreetly informed of the September 11 attacks midway through the reading by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, Bush waited quietly for the reading to finish before dealing with the unfolding crisis.  The episode figures prominently in the retrospective assessment of Bush's response to the September 11 attacks.

Reading exercise
"The Pet Goat" was composed by Siegfried "Zig" Engelmann, who had written over a thousand similar instructional exercises since the 1970s.  It was anthologized in the classroom workbook Reading Mastery: Rainbow Edition, Level 2, Storybook 1.  "The Pet Goat" is designed to teach student about words ending in the letter E, using the Direct Instruction (DI) teaching method.  The exercise tells a story about a girl's pet goat, which her parents want to get rid of because it eats everything; the parents relent after it foils a robbery by butting the intruder, who is now "sore" (that word ending in e).

George W. Bush during the September 11 attacks

On September 11, 2001, US President George W. Bush went to Emma E. Booker Elementary School to meet students and staff and to bring attention to his plans for education reform.  Upon arriving at the Sarasota, Florida school, the president was informed of the first plane crash into One World Trade Center, though he was briefed that it was probably just a small propeller plane.  While President Bush sat in Kay Daniels' classroom, and her students read "The Pet Goat", White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card interrupted the president to whisper in his ear: "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack."

Afterwards, the children continued to read and President Bush sat while—as described by The Wall Street Journal—"trying to keep under tight control."  Despite the president's efforts, students knew something was wrong; they later said that the president's face became red and serious, and his expression was "flabbergasted, shocked, [and] horrified".

According to Bill Sammon's book Fighting Back, Bush's gaze flitted about the room—the children, the press, the floor, his staff—while his mind raced about everything he did not yet know.  After receiving cue-card advice from his press secretary, Ari Fleischer ("DON'T SAY ANYTHING YET"), the "notoriously punctual" president lingered in the classroom after the reading exercise was finished: he adamantly did not want to give an appearance of panic.  After chatting with the students and their teacher, Bush deflected a Trade Center-related question from a reporter, and began to learn about the magnitude of the attacks.

Public attention to "The Pet Goat" first came to the fore with Michael Moore's 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, though the film incorrectly gave the title as "My Pet Goat" and called it a book.  Within a few weeks, a blogger named Peter Smith tracked down the correct name and origin as a reading exercise by Engelmann.

Reactions
The New Yorker described a seven-minute video of President Bush holding Reading Mastery while "staring blankly into space" as the most memorable bit in Fahrenheit 9/11; the film presents the president as faltering in the face of the crisis.

The commander-in-chief's supporters argued that there was nothing for Bush to do but wait for more information while not alarming the pupils.  On his own behalf, Bush said that "his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis. The national press corps was standing behind the children in the classroom; he saw their phones and pagers start to ring. The president felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening."  Booker Elementary Principal Tose-Rigell supported the president's reactions at her school—"I don't think anyone could have handled it better.  What would it have served if [Bush] had jumped out of his chair and ran out of the room?"—as did Daniels' students, who later said that Bush's actions were the right ones.

A year after the attacks, Kay Daniels' classroom still had the chair in which the president sat; it was festooned with a purple ribbon.  By 2004, Engelmann (then a retired professor) was surprised at the attention "The Pet Goat" received: "It hasn't brought me any fame, […] It's fascinating that anyone would even be interested in something like this."

Editions

References

animal tales
children's short stories
fiction about goats
George W. Bush
September 11 attacks Jonathan James Bush (May 6, 1931 – May 5, 2021) was an American banker who was the fourth child and third son of U. S. Senator Prescott Bush and his wife Dorothy Bush. He was the brother of former Congressman, CIA Director, Vice President and President George H. W. Bush. He was also the uncle of former Texas Governor and President George W. Bush, and former Florida Secretary of Commerce and Governor Jeb Bush. He died in Florida, hours before his ninetieth birthday.

Early life
Bush was born in Greenwich, Connecticut, to Prescott Sheldon Bush, a politician, and Dorothy Walker Bush. He graduated from The Hotchkiss School and Yale University, where he was a member of Skull and Bones. The fourth child in the family, he was the brother of Prescott "Pressy" Bush, Jr. (1922–2010), the 41st President of the United States George H. W. Bush (1924–2018), Nancy Bush Ellis (1926–2021), and William "Bucky" Bush (1938–2018). He was the uncle of the 43rd President George W. Bush. Like his brother George H. W. Bush, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at Yale.

Bush and his wife Josephine are the parents of former NBC entertainment reporter Billy Bush and health care executive Jonathan S. Bush.

Career
As of December 31, 2018, Jonathan Bush had retired from Fairfield, Bush & Co., an Investment Advisory Firm in New Haven, Connecticut.

Jonathan Bush founded J. Bush & Co., which provided discreet banking services for the Washington, D.C., embassies of foreign governments for many years. In 1997, Riggs Bank bought J. Bush & Co. and made Bush CEO & President of Riggs Investment, a firm based in New Haven, Connecticut.

In the early 1980s, Jonathan Bush helped organize investors for George W. Bush's first oil venture, Arbusto Energy, later called Bush Explorations.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush was a major contributor and fundraiser to his nephew's election and was named a "Bush Pioneer" for raising more than $100,000 for the campaign.

Bush died on May 5, 2021, the day before his 90th birthday. At the time of his death, he was the last surviving child of Prescott Bush and Dorothy Walker Bush.

Controversy
On May 15, 2004, The Washington Post published an article that said, "A political Web site written by a Democratic operative drew attention yesterday to the fact that President Bush's uncle, Jonathan J. Bush, is a top executive at Riggs Bank, which this week agreed to pay a record $25 million in civil fines for violations of law intended to thwart money laundering."

The bank accounts under investigation may have been Saudi, though the article did not say so. It did, however, go on to say: "a source familiar with the multiple federal investigations of the bank's Saudi accounts and other embassy accounts say Jonathan Bush's investment advice unit has 'no relationship whatsoever' with any of the Riggs's Saudi accounts." Moreover, the newspaper quoted a spokesman for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as saying "any suggestion of political influence in the Riggs situation is 'preposterous.'"

In 1991, Bush was fined $30,000 in Massachusetts and several thousand dollars in Connecticut for violating registration laws governing securities sales. He was barred from securities brokerage with the general public in Massachusetts for one year.

References

1931 births
2021 deaths
American bankers
American political fundraisers
Bush family
Businesspeople from Maine
Businesspeople from Greenwich, Connecticut
Connecticut Republicans
Maine Republicans
Hotchkiss School alumni
Yale University alumni
People from North Haven, Maine George Bush most commonly refers to:
 George H. W. Bush (1924–2018), 41st president of the United States and father of the 43rd president
 George W. Bush (born 1946), 43rd president of the United States and son of the 41st president

George Bush may also refer to:
 George Bush (biblical scholar) (1796–1859), American pastor, abolitionist, academic and Zionist
 George Bush (footballer) (1883–1936), English footballer who played as a winger
 George Bush (racing driver) (1911–1967), American NASCAR driver
 George H. Bush (1857–1898), New York state legislator
 George P. Bush (born 1976), American attorney and politician; member of the Bush family
 George Bush (pioneer) (1779–1863), first African-American settler in what is now Washington State
 USS George H.W. Bush, an aircraft carrier named after the former president
 George H.W. Bush (film), a 2008 two-part biographical television film
 George W. Bush (film), a 2020 biographical film

See also
 
 
 
 Bush family
 Presidency of George Bush (disambiguation)
 George Brush (disambiguation)
 Bush (disambiguation)