TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010890/01081010.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.5 KB | 78 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 50

THE PRESIDENCY

Freedom's Multi-Ring Circus


By Hugh Sidey


    Colonel John Bourgeois and the U.S. Marine Band are up to
speed on the national anthems for Poland and Rumania, but they
have some polishing to do on Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia and, who knows, maybe Albania. The way things
are going, figures director Bourgeois, the leaders of those
nations will sooner or later show up at the White House for a
state function, and the President's own band will have to
tootle them down the red carpet.

    All over Washington, savvy men like Bourgeois are changing
old rituals and recasting attitudes for the future rushing in
on them. It is a future, says Foreign Affairs editor William
Hyland, that will present a more unusual challenge to the
President than any "since Harry Truman in 1945."

    When George Bush took office about a year ago, he could look
around at a tidy club of democratic, market-oriented friends
staring across a wall at a bunch of backyard bullies. The wall
fell down, the bullies were chased off, and now everybody wants
into George's club.

    "We've got a freedom circus going on over here," declares
Treasury's Deputy Secretary John Robson, an Administration
coordinator for East European aid. "But it is a lot more than
three rings." The arrival and departure of delegations on
economic planning, marketing, trade and technical expertise are
expected to rise geometrically in the next year or so. Treasury
and the stodgy old Department of Commerce could be as important
in this new world as the Pentagon was in the last one.

    Spies, arms merchants, nuclear strategists are "out" in this
capital, which wickedly records such events. Economists, trade
wizards, industrial planners, tariff analysts and venture
capitalists are in demand. So are people with deep knowledge
of the culture and history of the nations now changing their
political and economic systems. "In some ways this is like the
Europe of 1914, and we need people with a sense of history,"
declares Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser,
insists that anyone with a knowledge of Rumania and Poland
could have foretold that change would come to one nation
violently, the other more in peace.

    From the Oval Office Bush will see not the scarred
proletariat leaders of the old era, not the stout peasants who
survived Nazi tanks, but lawyers, scientists, writers and an
assortment of creative malcontents. Few will be easy to please,
and none will be impressed by the Sixth Fleet. Around the White
House winded staffers are predicting that Bush will want to
meet them all, and if they don't find their way to Pennsylvania
Avenue, he will drop in on them.

    Even Henry Kissinger talks with reverence and, perhaps, envy
when he views this swirling epoch. "This will be a truly
historic presidency," Kissinger says. Just back from Hamburg,
where he met with scholars and thinkers from both East and West
Europe, Kissinger was fascinated with the difference. "The West
Europeans were pragmatic," he relates; "the East Europeans were
elemental, emotional, very moving in their idealism. We just
can't mumble to them." What better tutor in this changing world
than Thomas Jefferson, who long ago counseled, "We are not to
expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather
bed."