TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012092/0120101.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.7 KB | 81 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 16

THE PRESIDENCY

Motion Sickness


By Hugh Sidey


    The malady that caused George Bush to throw up on Kiichi
Miyazawa's suit was identified as gastroenteritis. Actually it
was an ailment that has afflicted the presidency for 30 years.
Call it excessive travelitis: jetting around the world too far,
too fast, too often.

    We are just lucky that before last week there had never
been such a public presidential barf. But in the culture of
obsessive motion that has seized the government for the past
three decades, Bush has gone farther (350,000 miles), faster (in
three years) and through more countries (36) and their exotic
germs than any other Chief Executive.

    "We ruined the presidency when we gave him that jet," the
late Peter Lisagor of the old Chicago Daily News once mused. "A
President gets on that plane, leaves his problems behind, looks
down on a beautiful globe and thinks he can run it. We ought to
take the jet away and make him fly USAir."

    Surely the time has come for all these top government
officials to curtail their frantic dashing about. Former
Secretary of State Dean Rusk has never stopped pointing out that
the diplomatic service is a 500-year-old invention designed to
make it unnecessary for Kings, Presidents, Prime Ministers and
Secretaries to be everywhere at once.

    Of course, some presidential travel is necessary.
Considerable good comes from personal contact between heads of
state. But travel for travel's sake, the current malady, is a
waste and a danger. We still wonder if Nikita Khrushchev's
sizing up of John Kennedy, whose back was throbbing from an
injury sustained while planting a tree in Canada, inspired the
Soviet leader to send missiles to Cuba in 1962.

    Presidents are only part of this unwitting conspiracy.
Politics is now a drama of motion. The media love the
exhilaration of nomadic statecraft. Anchors like Tom Brokaw and
Dan Rather climbed the ladder by breathless appearances at
exotic summits from Beijing to Moscow.

    The Air Force, which spends millions on its fleet of 43
planes for the VIPs, relishes the chance to curry favor with its
sources of money and influence, including Congressmen and
Senators, whose taste for junketeering is legendary. The White
House advance teams, the Secret Service -- which deploys
hundreds of agents on some presidential trips -- are made up of
young men and women who are thrilled by the adventure. Concocted
and hyped crowds roar approval. Add it all up, and a President
gets the feeling he rides with the gods. It is an illusion.

    Ronald Reagan flew to Moscow through seven time zones in
1988, when he was 77 years old, and at moments responded like
a sack of potatoes. Jimmy Carter frazzled himself and his
entourage by racing through seven countries in Europe, Asia and
Africa in nine days in 1978. Lyndon Johnson went on a whimsical
and wild four-day flight around the world in 1967. When he
found out he had overspent his travel kitty, he sent his
Bible-thumping aide Marvin Watson skulking around Washington
seeking secret funds from other departments.

    Bush does not have travel-budget woes yet, but his
67-year-old frame is plainly protesting. He began this
25,000-mile trip with a 20-hour hop to Australia that he
admitted gave him jet lag. His antidote for fatigue was, as
usual, a jammed schedule, plus jogging and tennis. Through some
20 diplomatic meals in four countries, no strange sauce or Asian
delicacy was barred from his long-suffering stomach. He could
not have been more beautifully prepared for a ravenous microbe
if he had planned it.