Bush's second term began on a bright note for the president. Republicans had managed to take control over the Senate for the first time in decades, albeit by a narrow margin and Bush hoped to have more control over Congress with this and the increased Republican caucus in the House. Bush would manage to pass a tax reduction bill through the Congress in 1982 but would almost completely undo the bill's effects following the United States' involvement in UNSFFI a year later.
The "Curse of Tippecanoe", a superstition that all presidents elected in twenty year periods since 1840 (and William Henry Harrison's death after only thirty days in office) was foiled in the most chilling assassination attempt to date. During a visit to Denver in September 1981, President Bush was greeting the crowd when a man opened fire, killing one Secret Service agent, Bush's adviser James Baker and wounding three others, including the president (who was hit in the left arm by a bullet that shattered his arm bone). Secret Service agents returned fire, killing the man, who was identified as Theodore Robert Bundy, a former campaign staffer for Daniel Evans' 1972 presidential campaign who had disappeared alongside another staffer at the tail end of the 1972 primaries.
During the FBI and Secret Service search of Bundy's rented apartment, the clothing and other artifacts of dozens of women were found, alongside human remains later identified as those of several missing women who had disappeared in the past eight or so years on the west coast. Bundy's journals that were recovered indicated that he had somehow been convinced Bush had ended his political career by ensuring Evans' defeat to secure his own bid to the White House four years later (despite the fact that Bush was not a candidate in the 1972 election) and the would-be assassin chillingly wrote of plans to capture the president "if able" and "exact [his] revenge", most likely with some of the many instruments that federal agents found human blood on and that were later confirmed to be murder weapons Bundy had kept. The journals later wrote Bundy had become convinced that capturing Bush was impossible and that he would instead "make a name for [himself]" by killing Bush.
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Like the first half of Bush's term, the most drastic events were in foreign policy. The situation in Iran had, in the views of both Washington and Moscow, been going on for too long and greatly destabilizing both the Middle East as well as the international oil market. In a rare Cold War display of agreement, Bush and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev (or, more accurately, the Politburo acting on behalf of the increasingly ill Brezhnev) agreed to let a French motion in the UN Security Council pass to set up an international stabilization force for Iran. The announcement of the United Nations Stabilization Force For Iran (UNSFFI) was greeted with surprise across the globe and became a major foreign policy landmark in American-Soviet relations (albeit one that was reached with the secret condition of increasing grain exports to the Soviet Union as well as the administration backing down on criticizing the Warsaw Pact's human rights record).
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein refused to relinquish control over the Khuzestan province (or at least parts that the Iraqi military effectively controlled) and once UNSFFI forces entered Iran, the international coalition spearheaded by United States troops, quickly forced Iraq back behind the border. The "mission to bring democracy and stability to Iran" went a long way to ending the "Vietnam syndrome" that the American public had voiced since the 1970s.
Once Bush's UNSFFI partner Brezhnev died in 1982, relations with the Soviets soured and Soviet contributions to UNSFFI ended almost entirely. A cooling of relations in the Andropov years (1982-1984) was balanced out by the realization among the State Department officials and the CIA from contacts/agents gained as a result of contact with Soviet soldiers in UNSFFI that the Soviet state was in worse shape than had previously been thought and that led the White House to erroneously believe that the USSR was in its dying throes and leaned off pressuring the communist state, fearing a power vacuum would ensue (a la Iran) if the Soviet state collapsed.
As such, democracy activists from the Warsaw Pact nations and domestic red-baiters were infuriated with the administration's seeming indifference to the plight of those living behind the Iron Curtain and the president suffered at the polls. Following the 1982 midterms, the Republicans lost control of the Senate and the Democrats again set the domestic agenda, overriding Bush's veto to oversee the expansion of Medicare eligibility to all Americans (which the president decried as fiscally imprudent) and watering down the president's proposed anti-drug laws.
Unlike his immediate predecessor, Bush was able to make one appointment to the Supreme Court, after Potter Stewart announced his retirement in 1981. He selected Illinois Court of Appeals Justice John Paul Stevens to the court, and although the president promised several socially conservative southern Republican senators that he would appoint an anti-abortion conservative with his second pick, he was never able to do so.