President Bush laughs at a press conference, but his final months in office offered little mirth -- for the president or the nation. He enjoyed broad popular support immediately after 9/11, but his eight-year White House sojourn ended absymally with the lowest approval ratings in history; ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; international outrage over what the International Red Cross ultimately called "torture" employed by U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere; and an economic crisis as dire as any the nation has confronted since the Great Depression.