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                                                                                January 7, 1991

Men of the Year

The Two George Bushes



IN THE GULF: BOLD VISION

By moving decisively to blunt Iraq's aggression, Bush begins to
shape a brave new world order

By DAN GOODGAME

    During the heady days after his Inauguration, George Bush
delighted in leading guests on private tours of the White House.
He often paused in the hideaway office beside his bedroom before
a favorite painting of Abraham Lincoln conferring with his
generals during the Civil War. "He was tested by fire," Bush
would muse, "and showed his greatness." And to one friend, Bush
wondered aloud how he might be tested, whether he too might be
one of the handful of Presidents destined to change the course
of history.

    On Aug. 1 he found out.

    It was about 8 p.m. in Washington and Bush had gone upstairs
for the evening, when an aide brought an urgent message from the
White House Situation Room. Iraq had invaded Kuwait. At first,
most diplomatic and intelligence analysts believed Saddam
Hussein would confine his thrust to long-disputed border areas.
But as Bush followed the latest reports -- from the CIA and CNN
-- Iraqi tanks churned into the Kuwaiti capital, forcing the
royal family to flee. It was a full-blown takeover.

    Next morning the world was waiting to hear what Bush had to
say about that blatant act of aggression. At 8, just before an
emergency session of the National Security Council, he invited
reporters in for a brief exchange. "We're not discussing
intervention," Bush insisted. "I'm not contemplating such
action." He stammered a bit, as he often does when he is tired
-- or when he does not believe what he is saying. This time it
was both.

    As Bush would later recall, he had made an "almost
instantaneous" judgment that the U.S. must intervene. In fact,
even before sunup on Aug. 2, he had begun to move against Iraq.
When Bush awoke shortly after 5, his National Security Adviser,
Brent Scowcroft, was at the President's bedroom door. He
immediately got Bush's signature on a pair of executive orders
freezing the assets of Iraq and Kuwait in the U.S. and
prohibiting trade. The two men then resumed the discussions they
had begun the night before, talking through their options:
Let's get the allies to follow us on the asset freeze. Buck up
the other Arabs to condemn Iraq. Keep Israel quiet. Get the
Soviets on board. Work the U.N. Go for economic sanctions.

    Both men were determined to do more -- much more. But Bush
-- obsessed with secrecy as always -- would mask his
inclinations, at least initially, even at his first NSC meeting
on the crisis.

    At that session, once the reporters had been herded out and
fresh coffee had been poured, the atmosphere was relaxed and
matter-of-fact. One by one, Bush's top generals and diplomats,
spymasters and energy experts reeled off their analyses. The
prevailing attitude among the group, recalled one White House
official, was "Hey, too bad about Kuwait, but it's just a gas
station, and who cares whether the sign says Sinclair or Exxon?"
Anyway, what can we do? Doesn't Iraq have the Middle East's
largest army, and aren't we a long way from the scene?

    There was little sense that big U.S. interests were at stake
-- until the President spoke. He asked a simple question that
decisively shifted the debate: "What happens if we do nothing?"


    A Dog That Would Bite

    That question could have been Bush's graven motto, at least
before 1990, and it still could be in all but foreign affairs.
During the first 18 months of his presidency, communism
collapsed, the cold war ended, freedom spread across the Soviet
empire, and Nelson Mandela's release after 27 years in South
African prisons raised the prospect that apartheid might soon
come tumbling down. Except when Bush invaded Panama to remove
an irritating dictator, he had mostly sat and applauded politely
as these momentous events unfolded. His rationale was sound
enough: when things are going your way, don't get in the way.

    Bush's instincts were entirely different in the gulf crisis.
This time, letting events take their course would not suffice.
This was the moment for which he had spent a lifetime preparing,
the epochal event that would bear out his campaign slogan,
"Ready to be a great President from Day 1." And Bush's instincts
were only confirmed as the consequences of allowing Iraq to
swallow Kuwait became clear.

    If Iraq's aggression succeeded, an emboldened Saddam might
send his troops into Saudi Arabia or intimidate the lightly
defended petrokingdom, as well as its neighbors, into obeying
his dictates. Fifty-six percent of the world's oil supplies
would come under the sway of a ruthless dictator who is trying
to amass a force of long-range missiles that could hit every
state in the region, including Israel, with chemical, biological
and -- in a few years -- nuclear weapons. Every petty tyrant who
wanted to redraw the map of the world by force, who hated a
neighbor or coveted that neighbor's goods, would have learned
a lesson: in the post-cold war world, aggression pays.

    Bush knew that only one power, the U.S., could thwart
Saddam. The U.N. might pass a sheaf of resolutions, just as it
has over the decades in trying to resolve the Arab-Israeli
conflict, and with no more effect. As the Arabs and Israelis
both like to say, dogs bark but the caravan passes.

    Bush also knew, however, that Saddam had good reason for
anticipating an ineffectual response. Only eight days before
Saddam's army rumbled into Kuwait, U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie
had told him, on instructions from the State Department, that
Iraq's "border differences" with the tiny sheikdom were of no
concern to the U.S. An outright takeover was another matter --
but no U.S. official made that point to Saddam until after the
fact. The American dog, Saddam assumed, would bark but never
bite.

    Bush, however, would prove him wrong. Against the initial
judgment of many advisers, Bush was convinced that Saddam must
be stopped now, before he became even more dangerous. Bush had
been leafing through Martin Gilbert's The Second World War, and
he cited Winston Churchill's view that World War II need not
have been fought if Hitler had been thwarted in his 1936 push
into the Rhineland, when he was weak enough to be deterred at
relatively low cost.

    Bush resolved that he, not Saddam, would shape the new world
order emerging in the aftermath of the cold war. In this new
order, the U.S. and the Soviet Union would work together through
the U.N. to finally achieve the collective security promised by
the organization's founders in 1945. Bush thus found the
"vision," at least in foreign policy, that he has long lacked.

    Bush recognized that the U.S., as the last remaining
superpower, must continue to lead, but with a different style.
It must accommodate the rise of the economic giants Germany and
Japan, and of various regional powers, while coaxing the Soviet
Union, despite its retrenchment, to play a constructive role.
America, Bush reasoned, must lead through painstaking and often
frustrating coalition building -- precisely the sort of personal
diplomacy and horse trading at which he has excelled in the gulf
crisis.

    At first, Bush turned to the U.N. mainly to provide
diplomatic cover for the Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia, as well
as other Arab states reluctant to ally themselves with the "U.S.
imperialists." But as the U.N. showed surprising backbone --
first condemning Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, then imposing a
stifling trade embargo and authorizing the use of military force
to back it up -- Bush grew ever more respectful of the
organization.

    As he implemented his developing vision, Bush, unlike Ronald
Reagan, was no lone cowboy singlehandedly dispensing rough
justice but a sheriff rounding up a posse of law-abiding
nations. If his style is multilateral, however, it is anything
but open. In the gulf crisis, as elsewhere, he zealously guarded
his real intentions and game plan. All along he has retained
tight control of virtually every detail of U.S. action,
revealing as little as possible about his plans to the American
people and to Congress.

    That approach, however, could ultimately undermine Bush's
policy in the gulf. The President's penchant for secrecy, his
cunning stratagems, his willingness to commit the world's most
powerful nation to a course that he alone determines, helped him
assemble the alliance. But those very qualities engender doubts
in the mind of many Americans, who have learned from Watergate
and Vietnam not to invest too much faith in any one man.


    Focus on the Saudis

    In Paul Theroux's novella Doctor Slaughter, a young scholar
at a dinner party observes that China's population has recently
reached 1 billion. "Wrong," tut-tuts another guest, an
international banker. "There are two people in China. And I know
both of them."

    George Bush could make the same claim. After the invasion,
the intimate knowledge of world leaders and world politics that
he had acquired during his years as ambassador to the U.N.,
envoy to Beijing and CIA director helped him forge an
unprecedented international alliance. Throughout, Bush has
displayed an exquisite sensitivity to diplomatic nuance and the
need for subtle compromise -- and sometimes outright bribes --
required to bring together such mutually suspicious bedfellows
as Syria, Israel, Iran and the Soviet Union. His performance
went beyond competence to sheer mastery.

    The initial focus of Bush's diplomatic offensive was Saudi
Arabia. Though the kingdom feared it might be next to fall to
Saddam's rapacious army, King Fahd had grave reservations about
seeking U.S. protection. The King, Bush knew, was leery of
accepting non-Muslim troops, whose presence might provoke unrest
among deeply xenophobic elements of the Saudi clergy and people.
He also could not afford to have the conflict portrayed as Iraq
and the Arab masses vs. the wealthy monarchs of Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia and their "Western imperialist defenders."

    From the earliest hours of the crisis, Bush worked to
overcome those qualms. After his initial NSC meeting, he tried
to phone King Fahd but failed to reach him. Bush then flew to
Aspen, Colo., for a long-scheduled rendezvous with Britain's
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who urged him to counter Iraq
strongly. As the two leaders talked, Fahd returned Bush's call.
The President told him, we think you are in danger. We are
willing to offer air support and more. Fahd, in this and later
conversations, expressed three concerns. If the U.S. sent
troops to protect his kingdom, would the force remain until
there was no longer a threat from Iraq? Once the threat was
removed, would the U.S. withdraw its troops immediately?
Finally, would the U.S. sell Saudi Arabia the advanced warplanes
and other weapons it would need to defend itself? Bush's reply:
yes, yes and yes.

    In the capital on Aug. 3, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and
Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put the
hard sell on Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the brash, 41-year-old
Saudi ambassador to Washington. Bandar, a U.S.-trained fighter
pilot, was shown satellite photos of Iraqi armored divisions
massing along the Saudi border as though poised for an assault
on the oil fields near Dhahran, 175 miles away. Bandar called
his uncle the King, and assured Bush that U.S. forces would be
welcome in Saudi Arabia.

    Within weeks, it was the Saudis who were putting a hard sell
on the U.S. They were so alarmed by the growing Iraqi threat
just over their border that Bandar and Prince Saud al Faisal,
Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister, urged the U.S. to kill Saddam,
using any necessary means. The astonished Bush politely
declined, then observed to aides afterward, "It sure is easy for
other people to say what the U.S. ought to be doing to Iraq."

    Bush recognized from the first that the Saudis would not
accept U.S. troops unless other Arab states, the U.N. and the
Soviet Union also supported action against Iraq, and he and his
aides were working overtime to arrange that. They helped pass
a U.N. resolution condemning Iraq within hours of the invasion.
Secretary of State James Baker, who was traveling in the Soviet
Union, stood with his counterpart in Moscow and issued a joint
declaration demanding Iraq's withdrawal. Algeria, Egypt and
Morocco publicly condemned Iraq for the invasion. And the Arab
League, in an unprecedented show of resolve, followed suit.

    Bush called a second NSC meeting for Friday, Aug. 3, and
made clear that he had decided to dispatch forces to deter any
attack on Saudi Arabia. Two days later, however, Bush expanded
his goals to include the liberation of Kuwait, declaring, "This
will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait."

    Over the next 30 days, Bush would place 62 phone calls to
government leaders and heads of state. He pressed Japan, Germany
and wealthy Arab states to provide emergency assistance for
Turkey, Egypt and Jordan, nations hit hard by the embargo on
trading with Iraq. He called on Saudi Arabia and Venezuela to
pump more oil to make up for the 4 million bbl. daily shortfall
resulting from the blockade on Iraqi and Kuwaiti shipments.

    But this whirlwind of diplomacy represented only half of
Bush's strategy. The other half was to present Saddam with a
stark choice: quit Kuwait or be driven out by military force.
To that end, Bush set in motion the largest U.S. military
deployment since Vietnam. It began five days after Saddam's
invasion with the dispatch of 210,000 troops to Saudi Arabia,
enough to deter an Iraqi onslaught.

    Once Bush had vowed to liberate Kuwait, General Powell urged
him to deploy a force so massive that if war became necessary,
it could be fought all out and won quickly, unlike Vietnam. By
November, Bush had authorized a doubling of the force to
430,000, giving him the capacity to go on the offensive if
Saddam refused to meet the Jan. 15 deadline set by the U.N. for
Iraq to quit Kuwait.

    Bush also learned a valuable lesson from Jimmy Carter's
obsession with the U.S. hostages seized by Iranian students in
1979. Determined not to repeat that mistake, Bush deliberately
downplayed Saddam's holding of 3,000 Americans, some of whom
were placed at key military installations as "human shields"
against American attack. Bush repeatedly insisted that he would
not be deterred from military action by the hostages' fate. In
early December his stern stance produced results. Saddam
released his captives, apparently convinced that his "foreign
guests" would not forestall a U.S. offensive and that releasing
them might reap a propaganda benefit.


    Muddling the Message

    Despite his virtuosity in welding the international
alliance, Bush has stumbled in explaining his strategy to his
countrymen. He has consistently and clearly spelled out four
goals: complete Iraqi withdrawal, restoration of Kuwait's
government, protection of American citizens abroad and creation
of regional stability. But in explaining his strategy and
tactics for attaining those goals, Bush has been halting,
ineffective and less than candid. He has particularly left
doubts about why the wealthiest allies are contributing so
little to this crusade, about his sudden rush to use force if
Iraq does not comply with the U.N.'s demands by Jan. 15, and
about what sort of peaceful settlement, if any, the U.S. would
accept with Iraq.

    At times, Bush has likened Saddam to Hitler and claimed Iraq
is on the brink of obtaining nuclear weapons. (The consensus of
Bush's intelligence experts is that an Iraqi nuclear weapon is
about five years away.) Such belligerent talk suggests that
Bush, despite his public statements, would not be satisfied with
an Iraqi retreat but would seek to destroy Saddam's ability to
threaten his neighbors by obliterating his arsenal.

    The goals of American strategy were probably debated most
thoroughly last Aug. 23 in an unlikely setting: aboard Fidelity,
Bush's speedboat, bobbing off Kennebunkport. While Bush and
National Security Adviser Scowcroft trolled for bluefish, they
reviewed the U.S. experience four decades earlier in Korea,
another "police action" fought with U.N. authorization.
Scowcroft reminded Bush that soon after General Douglas
MacArthur's bold victory at Inchon in September 1950, the U.S.
succeeded in restoring the situation that existed before the
outbreak of war by pushing Kim Il Sung's invading army back to
the 38th Parallel, the boundary dividing North and South Korea.
The U.S., however, tried to unify Korea by driving all the way
to the border with China. The result: Beijing intervened and
drove American forces back almost as far as the old border. The
conflict lasted nearly three more years, cost tens of thousands
of additional U.S. and civilian casualties and poisoned
U.S.-Chinese relations for 20 years. All to end up back at the
status quo ante.

    In the gulf crisis, Scowcroft warned, a war fought not only
to liberate Kuwait but also to cripple Iraq could splinter the
coalition that Bush had so masterfully assembled. It could
trigger violent resentment by the Arab masses against the U.S.
and the Arab regimes allied with it. And it could create a power
vacuum that Syria and Iran might rush to fill.

    Iraq's massive conventional and chemical arsenals and its
fast-track nuclear-weapons program, Scowcroft argued, had to be
contained. But that could best be done through a continuing
embargo on weapons and weapons technology and by a security
arrangement among the U.N., the U.S. and the Arab states. "The
world was not willing to make war on Iraq for these reasons
before the invasion of Kuwait," said Scowcroft, "and it is not
clear why the U.S. and its allies should continue a war against
Iraq after the liberation of Kuwait."

    Shortly after this discussion, Bush and his top advisers
decided to make clear to Saddam that he could withdraw from
Kuwait and still save both his skin and his face. He could tell
his people that the invasion had got the attention of Kuwait and
forced it to negotiate Iraq's demands for access to ports and
control of the Rumaila oil field, which runs under both Iraq and
Kuwait. Once a decent interval had passed after Iraq's
withdrawal, the U.S. would not object if Kuwait made concessions
to Iraq. Also, the U.S. would press for progress on the
Palestinian issue, and Saddam could claim whatever credit he
liked.

    This message was delivered both privately -- through the
diplomatic channels of the U.S. and its Arab allies -- and
publicly, most notably in Bush's Oct. 1 speech before the U.N.
General Assembly.


    Down to the Wire

    With the Jan. 15 U.N. deadline only two weeks away, both
Saddam and Bush face fateful decisions. So far, Saddam has shown
no real interest in a peaceful withdrawal. He has reinforced the
100,000 Iraqi soldiers and 350 tanks deployed in Kuwait and
southern Iraq in the days just after the invasion with 410,000
more troops and 4,100 tanks. Bush's attempt to "go the last
mile" for a peaceful settlement by inviting Iraq's Foreign
Minister Tariq Aziz to the White House and dispatching Baker to
Baghdad for a face-to-face talk with Saddam has degenerated into
a dispute over when these meetings could take place.

    Pressures are mounting on Bush to bring the crisis to a
speedy conclusion. Not least of these are the economic hardships
the crisis has exacted on Iraq's neighbors. And high oil prices
are dragging down the economies of every country save the few
that supply oil.

    The calendar exerts a grim logic. In March, gulf
temperatures begin to rise as high as 100 degrees F, threatening
both soldiers and weapons. On March 17 the world's Muslims begin
observing Ramadan; in mid-June the annual pilgrimage to Mecca
begins. The Saudi government, already uneasy about the army of
infidels on its soil, is unlikely to approve the launching of
an offensive at either time.

    Even domestic politics has become a factor. Democrats on
Capitol Hill have grown increasingly critical of what they view
as an ill-considered rush to war. Many are angered by the
President's stubborn refusal to consult with them in advance of
his most momentous decisions. Bush's doubling of the U.S. force
stunned lawmakers, military and diplomatic experts and a large
slice of the public. Georgia's Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate
Armed Services Committee, held public hearings at which a parade
of former high-ranking intelligence, defense and foreign policy
experts from both parties counseled a more patient course.

    But the Administration has many reasons for not waiting to
see if sanctions can wear down Saddam's resolve. One is the
difficulty of holding the alliance together for the year or more
it might take for the blockade to pinch harder. That will become
even more difficult if, as Bush fears, Saddam announces a
partial withdrawal from Kuwait that would leave him in
possession of Bubiyan and Warba islands and the Rumaila oil
field. With so little at stake, some allies -- and some
Americans -- might no longer believe a war was worth fighting.

    In addition, a showdown postponed for a year or more would
complicate Bush's 1992 campaign for re-election. Says an adviser
to Bush: "We could have the economy in the toilet and the body
bags coming home. If you're George Bush, you don't like that
scenario."

    Thus far, the greatest threat to the President's gulf policy
has been posed not by Saddam but by one of Bush's long-standing
weaknesses. He has found no voice to match his vision in the
gulf.

    While lavishing personal attention upon the foreign leaders
in the anti-Iraq coalition, Bush has turned almost as an
afterthought to the equally crucial task of convincing his
countrymen that his course is just, his timing and strategy
sound. He has brushed aside Congress's insistence that the
Constitution empowers it alone to declare war. In private, Bush
disdainfully insists he can ignore Congress as long as there is
no consensus for or against his gulf policy.


    History Lessons

    In recent weeks Bush has spoken often of the "lessons of
Vietnam." He means the military lessons: that if the U.S. goes
to war, it must go to win, with overwhelming force instead of
gradual escalation. A quick knockout would deprive critics of
time to organize opposition, and the cheers of victory would
drown out their protests. But the President has not digested an
equally salient message from Vietnam: that the U.S. should not
go to war without solid support from Congress and the people.

    According to Scowcroft, the gulf crisis poses a crucial
question: "Can the U.S. use force -- even go to war -- for
carefully defined national interests, or do we have to have a
moral crusade or a galvanizing event like Pearl Harbor?" Polls
indicate that a majority of Americans support the use of force
if Iraq will not leave Kuwait peacefully. But a large minority
retain serious doubts. If war is necessary, there is little
doubt that the U.S. and its allies will prevail. But it could
prove a Pyrrhic victory if the cost in American lives is so high
that it provokes a new wave of isolationism.

    Bush's answer to the question he posed at the outset of the
crisis -- "What happens if we do nothing?" -- was not to sit
back and watch how events played out, as he had done so often
before. It was to move, quickly and with great skill, to
confront an act of aggression that might have set a disastrous
precedent for the fragmented world that is emerging. His next
moves could determine what future Presidents say when they gaze
at his portrait on the White House wall.


AT HOME: A CASE OF DOING NOTHING

Bush's feckless approach to America's ills is no accident, but
a conscious strategy for defending the status quo

By MICHAEL DUFFY

    George Bush has always been more a man of action than
introspection. When faced with a complicated problem, he often
plunges headlong into physical activity -- gunning his
speedboat, pitching horseshoes, flailing away on the golf
course. It is Bush's way, says an aide, to "drive those demons
of indecision out of his mind."

    So it was fitting that the hollow center of the President's
domestic policy collapsed last Oct. 10 while he was jogging in
Florida. Five days earlier, an unlikely coalition of right-wing
Republicans and liberal Democrats had revolted in the House of
Representatives, scuttling the deficit-cutting budget plan
crafted during four months of tortuous negotiations between the
Administration and congressional leaders. Only a stopgap
continuing resolution kept the government afloat while frenzied
efforts to devise a new deal bogged down. The sticking point:
Would Bush agree to a Democrat-backed rise in income tax rates
for the affluent in exchange for his cherished cut in taxes on
capital gains?

    For 24 hours, Bush had sown confusion by flipping and
flopping on the issue like a beached bluefish. First he signaled
that he would accept the swap. Then, under pressure from
Republicans who argued that Bush's change of heart would only
trigger further Democratic demands, his top aides announced that
the deal was no longer acceptable. Now, as he jogged a few laps
in St. Petersburg, the time had come for the Commander in Chief
to explain himself. Asked by reporters to clarify his stand,
Bush opted instead for a snide play on the campaign slogan that
had helped get him the job in the first place. "Read my hips,"
Bush said with a smirk, and jogged on.

    Read my hips. Was this any way to lead the most powerful
nation on earth?

    No, but neither was what the President did during the next
24 hours. Bush reversed himself twice more on the tax issue,
completing a quadruple somersault that twisted members of his
own party into knots, sent Democrats into orbit and helped cut
more than 20 points from his approval ratings in the space of
six weeks. That was the most precipitous dive in popularity,
absent a major scandal, for any 20th century President.


    A Formula for Ruling Forever

    At that moment, many Americans concluded that in George Bush
they had elected two Presidents: a highly capable captain of
foreign policy and a dawdling, disengaged caretaker of domestic
affairs. That impression was understandable but by no means
complete. The shilly-shallying performance on domestic issues
that has marked Bush's first two years in office is not the
result of ineptitude. It is the consequence of a shrewd
calculation made soon after Bush, one of the most ambitious and
pragmatic men ever to reach the White House, assumed the
presidency.

    Shortly after his Inauguration, Bush and his top advisers
figured that if the economic and domestic conditions that
existed then could be frozen in time, Republicans could hold the
White House indefinitely. That led to an obvious conclusion: do
as little as possible. "We inherited a situation that was
basically A-O.K.," says a senior official. "People were happy
with the status quo. No domestic revolution was about to take
place. With a few changes here and there, the G.O.P. could rule
forever."

    It is no coincidence, then, that Bush's highest domestic
priority has been to preserve the situation he inherited from
Ronald Reagan. Hemmed in, as are Democrats, by budgetary
constraints, he has initiated only a handful of new domestic
programs. He can claim some genuine progress -- passage of the
first clean-air legislation since 1977, a new law protecting the
rights of the handicapped, and a five-year budget deal that may
finally force Washington to start living within its means. But
most of these were long overdue or inevitable or were launched
out of necessity more than conviction. Bush has devoted far more
energy to thwarting Democratic initiatives or amending them in
such a way that the Administration could share in the credit. As
an official explains, "The key around here has always been
stopping the Democrats. If we couldn't stop them, we tried the
next best thing: turning the Democratic drive for reforms into
G.O.P. alternatives. We wanted to try to turn an apparent
political liability into something we could claim credit for."

    In Bush's mind, the real business of Presidents is the
conduct of foreign policy. He regards the management of domestic
affairs merely as an extension of politics, the unpleasant, even
silly, things one must do to win an office or keep it. When he
delves into homegrown problems, Bush cares less about the issues
themselves than their political implications. In foreign affairs
the opposite is true: Bush resists pressure to view world events
through a political prism, believing that the nation's long-term
interests are often better served by sitting quietly instead of
rushing to the ramparts.

    So though Bush bravely trumpets the promises of a new world
order abroad and takes bold steps to bring it about, his top
aides blithely admit they have no agenda at home for the next
two years. While Bush retains a tight grip on foreign policy
decisions, he has virtually abdicated responsibility for
domestic affairs to his pugnacious chief of staff, John Sununu,
whose attitude toward Congress is marked by contempt. Asked
recently what Bush has left to do at home, Sununu replied with
a smile, "Not that much."

    Even the President concedes that he finds handling foreign
policy more "fun" than domestic issues. As he put it the day
before his swivel-hips remark, "People really basically want to
support the President on foreign affairs, and partisanship does,
in a sense, stop at the water's edge. Whereas on domestic
policy, here I am with Democratic majorities in the Senate and
Democratic majorities in the House, trying to persuade them to
do what I think is best. It's complicated."

    It is not only complicated but dangerous as well. The U.S.
faces a mountain of nagging domestic needs and an abyss of debt.
On most of these problems, Bush has been inactive, if not
silent. At best, he has tinkered at the margins of America's
domestic ills. Rather than battle a national decline that some
fear has already begun, Bush is trying only to manage it. Read
my hips.

    Officials in the Bush Administration offer various
rationales for their boss's disdain for domestic affairs:
historic developments abroad; divided government at home;
truculent Democrats on Capitol Hill; a $3 trillion national
debt; unending deficits; constitutional powers that, by allowing
the President to brush off Congress, make operating in the
foreign policy arena easier and more rewarding.

    Good reasons all. But the real explanations may be found in
Bush's past. One is his almost pathological fear of the G.O.P.'s
right wing, a phobia that dates from his start in politics. The
other is a lack of conviction that renders him directionless at
home. From his earliest days in politics, he has risen by
loyally associating himself with powerful patrons, recasting his
views to suit those of the man at the top. As a candidate, he
has at one time or another positioned himself as a Goldwater
conservative, a moderate mainstream Republican, an effective
critic and then staunch supporter of Reaganomics -- whatever it
took to advance. And all along he has demonstrated a willingness
to compromise or jettison his positions to ensure conservative
support.

    Two weeks ago, Bush stepped back from a 42-year commitment
to support for black colleges when he allowed a mid-level
Education Department lawyer to challenge the legality of public
support for minority scholarships. Many of Bush's aides
despaired at their boss's unnecessary capitulation to
conservative notions. Says one: "This is one of those few areas
where we actually have some convictions, and now it looks like
we don't have the courage to stand by them."

    Bush is under pressure from the right again, this time to
adopt its new "reform" agenda, a campaign for tax cuts and term
limits on members of Congress and against affirmative action.
While the wisdom of this approach is under intense debate at the
White House, there are indications that Bush may try to mollify
the right for two more years, even if that means returning to
the racially divisive themes that helped elect him in 1988.


    A Yalie Goes To Texas

    Old habits die hard. In 1948, when Bush, then 24, moved his
family into the heart of the oil-rich Permian Basin, Texas was
a two-party state: liberal Democrats and conservative "Tory"
Democrats. Republicans just weren't in the picture. "If you were
a Texas Republican in the 1950s," recalls Don Rhodes, an old
Bush friend who now works as a personal aide to the President,
"you didn't let anybody know it." When Bush organized his first
Republican precinct primary, in Midland in the early '50s, only
three people showed up during 12 hours of voting -- the future
President, his wife Barbara and a lone Democrat who, Bush later
wrote, "stumbled into the wrong polling place."

    For a budding Republican politician, this was a discouraging
situation. And if being in so tiny a minority wasn't
embarrassing enough, the minority itself was. The nascent Texas
G.O.P. was made up of farmers and ranchers and a group of newer
city dwellers whose numbers and affluence were growing along
with the Lone Star State's gas and oil interests. And then there
were "the crazies," a small but noisy claque of John Birch
Society regulars who never controlled the party but kept it off
balance for years with their ultra-right stands and defeatist
tactics. Though they were gradually eclipsed during the 1960s,
the crazies didn't go quietly. In 1960 one group roughed up
Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson in a celebrated incident at Dallas'
Adolphus Hotel. In 1968 another group criticized a Republican
candidate for appearing with his arm around a black football
player.

    Accommodating this faction was bound to be tricky,
particularly for the son of an aristocratic Republican Senator
from Connecticut to whom moderate Republicanism was a kind of
birthright. Despite his 14 years in Texas, there was no
mistaking Bush's Eastern Establishment roots. His views on
foreign policy matched those of the locals well enough --
everyone, even Texas Democrats, was staunchly anticommunist. But
on domestic affairs, Andover-Yale was not Midland-Odessa.
Bush's moderate Republican views on states' rights, civil rights
and most social issues clashed with those of the Birchites. As
an old friend notes, "Bush was not sitting there asking himself,
`How do we impeach Earl Warren?'"

    In 1964, a terrible year for Republicans, Bush lunged for
a seat in the U.S. Senate, challenging liberal Democrat Ralph
Yarborough. For Bush just to lose respectably required a shift
to the right. He called himself a "100%" Goldwater man and
lashed out at the 1964 Civil Rights Act, labor unions and the
1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. He lost but garnered more votes
than any Republican in Texas history. That won him the notice
of Richard Nixon, who campaigned for him in 1966.

    Bush later confessed to an Episcopal minister, John Stevens,
that he was ashamed of his pandering to the right in 1964. "I
took some of the far-right positions I thought I needed to get
elected," Stevens recollects Bush saying. "And I regret it. And
hope I never do it again."


    A Schizophrenic Straitjacket

    Of course he did do it again, although not immediately. In
1966 Bush ran for Congress from Houston as a moderate, attacking
"extremists" in his own party. "I want conservatism to be
sensitive and dynamic," he said, "not scared and reactionary."
That led some Republican groups to tag Bush as a liberal and
endorse his conservative Democratic opponent, Frank Briscoe. But
Bush prevailed, in part because Texas' Seventh District was then
one of the state's few Republican strongholds.

    Bush nonetheless kept an eye on the right. In 1970, when he
gave up his safe seat to run for the Senate against Democrat
Lloyd Bentsen, he endured boos and catcalls at nearly every
campaign stop because he had supported a fair-housing law in
1968. Bush had indeed said aye to the bill, but only after
voting for a procedural amendment that could have killed it.
Paul Eggers, who campaigned with Bush that year as the G.O.P.
gubernatorial candidate, remembers his teammate's favorite
stump-speech line: "If you don't want to vote for me because of
open housing, then don't vote for me."

    Most didn't. Bentsen won, and Bush spent the next six years
working for Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford in a variety of
positions in which his future did not depend on the whims of
voters. By 1980 Bush was running for the presidency, at first
criticizing his rival Ronald Reagan on economic and foreign
policy and then adopting most of Reagan's views once the
Californian put him on the G.O.P. ticket. Bush deep-sixed his
lament of "voodoo economics" and his support for the Equal
Rights Amendment. "Please do not try to keep reminding me of
differences I had" with Reagan, Bush pleaded with reporters.

    As Vice President, Bush continued to swallow his many
objections to Reagan's policies. By 1986, when he began his own
race for the White House, Bush had shuffled to the right at the
suggestion of his campaign advisers. "He took a lot of heat for
it," says one who backed the strategy, "and he didn't like it.
But it had the effect of putting enough deposits in those
accounts so that we didn't have to worry about them anymore."
And in 1988 Bush based his campaign on "no new taxes" and the
furlough of convicted murderer Willie Horton, wrapping the whole
unsavory package in the American flag. The campaign was so
inflammatory that Bush's old hero Barry Goldwater came out of
retirement and told him to knock off the foolishness and "start
talking about the issues." When he took office, Bush sought to
appease conservatives further by selecting a top domestic
adviser who could act as a kind of ambassador, fluent in the
language, totems and rituals of his party's suspicious right
wing. So he chose John Sununu.

    The constant care and feeding of the right, says a senior
aide, "has given Bush not only an uncertainty about domestic
affairs but an alienation from them as well." Body language --
often Bush's most candid form of communication -- betrays his
discomfort with his predicament. Capable of approaching
eloquence when he speaks of a "Europe whole and free," Bush
delivers domestic speeches that are perfunctory and marred by
disingenuous gestures. When he held aloft a bag of crack cocaine
obtained after an intricate sting in Lafayette Square across
from the White House last year, he broke into an awkward smile,
as if to say, "Can you believe I'm doing this?" Says a former
adviser: "He's basically embarrassed to be a politician. It's
tacky. He has to do these horribly embarrassing things, and he
finds it distasteful, except as a competitive exercise."

    Catering to the right has also turned the President into
something of a political contortionist. Even as he sought to
convince Americans that he was a kinder, gentler incarnation of
his predecessor, he was straining to appease conservatives by
opposing most gun-control efforts and proposing a constitutional
amendment against flag burning. By trying to walk simultaneously
in opposite directions, he put his presidency in a schizophrenic
straitjacket.

    From the outset of his Administration, Bush calculated that
he could keep his poll numbers up merely by reminding voters
that he was aware of America's domestic problems. The White
House based this strategy on pollster Robert Teeter's surveys
and focus groups, which showed that while Americans were
concerned about drugs, education and the environment, they were
also deeply suspicious of any federal attempts to solve the
problems. Thus Bush promised to be the "education President" and
announced some badly needed educational goals last year. But for
nearly two years he retained in his Cabinet an Education
Secretary, Lauro Cavazos, who, by his own staff's admission, was
ineffective. He postponed politically painful choices on energy,
housing and transportation policy but has flown to the West
Coast twice in 14 months to plant a single tree in the name of
environmentalism. Midway through his term, some of his own aides
seem weary of the shell game. "You see a lot of blue-ribbon
panels and commissions around here," says a staff member. "It's
so much easier to do something innocuous than something real."

    Even where Bush has made improvements in the American
condition, he has worked hard to keep them secret. Though Bush
privately regards the budget pact as his greatest domestic
achievement to date, he declared in public two months ago that
the deal made him "gag." Though Sununu rightly claims that the
clean-air legislation "will change America," the chief of staff
tried to cancel a public bill-signing ceremony for the landmark
measure. When old friends press Bush on this refusal to trumpet
his accomplishments, he responds by saying he will ultimately
be judged "by deeds, not words." But they suspect that Bush is
leery of calling attention to anything that might upset
conservatives.

    Despite the President's constant wooing, the hard right
never seems satisfied. In the aftermath of the budget debacle,
a variety of conservative luminaries began clamoring about a
possible challenge to Bush in 1992. Though they stand no chance
of ousting Bush alone, the right-wingers could help Democrats
by sitting on their hands in 1992, narrowing G.O.P. margins in
key states. In an attempt to co-opt this volatile faction, Bush
will spend the next two years being "against" things
conservatives loathe: quotas, taxes, mandated government
benefits, anything that can be termed liberal or Democratic. The
idea isn't to get anything accomplished; it is to burnish Bush's
conservative credentials as he prepares for re-election. Says
an official: "There are some things you want to have a fight
on."

    Quite a few things are worth fighting over, in fact, but all
too often Bush has found himself in the wrong corner. On issues
like extending opportunities to minorities and cutting the
deficit, for example, the President has permitted his indecision
and fear of the right to overrule his better instincts. It is
a pattern that, in the short term, may get him re-elected in
1992. It is not one that will, as Bush promised in his
nomination speech of 1988, "build a better America."