TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/123190/1231101.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.7 KB | 78 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 14

THE PRESIDENCY

History Lessons


By Hugh Sidey


    George Bush sits in the soft light of the Oval Office,
tilted back in his chair, brow knitted, rimless glasses in his
restless hands, then on his nose, then off again. He suddenly
swivels, points a long forefinger at a stack of papers in the
center of his neat desk. It is Amnesty International's report
on Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait. He's just been asked about
compromising with Saddam Hussein.

    "I'm absolutely convinced you can't," he says. "If there's
a question about the moral purpose here, I really urge people
to read this report. It's going to have a devastating effect.
And there are comparisons between this and what happened when
[Hitler's] Death's Head Regiment went into Poland. I'm about 200
pages into a 950-page book. It's a history of World War II. And
the reason I made reference to the Death's Head Regiment is that
it was very clearly spelled out what happened. They came in
after the original troops and inflicted the same kind of
brutality on the people."

    The President is staring history in the face on this
Thursday morning. Given a successful resolution of the gulf
crisis, scholars will pronounce his policy a success. If he gets
into a stalemated desert war or simply puts off a bloody
confrontation by a few months or years, he may be judged
harshly.

    It is an odd moment in the presidency. The big grandfather
clock can be heard ticking between Bush's words. A Christmas
tree festooned with gingerbread men and candy canes stands
against the wall of the Oval Office, just across the hall from
the standards that proudly hold streamers from 352 military
battles. Is history on his side in this?

    He lowers his voice so much it is hard to hear him. He looks
again at the Amnesty International report. "No question," he
says. "You do not placate an aggressor. You do not reward
aggression. There's a lot of historical precedent to look at on
this one."

    Bush, unlike Professor Woodrow Wilson or even self-taught
Harry Truman, is no historian. But he has never been beyond the
shadow of conflict. As a young man, he remembers, he was "a
little bit" aware as the Nazi armies overran Europe. "But the
whole concept of the real atrocities and the things now that
history so vividly records weren't driven home every single day
to America," he says. "You've got to remember that in the end
of the '30s there was kind of an isolationist fervor in some
quarters. People saying, `Hey, that's not any of our business.'
There's a parallel there for what some feel about the Persian
Gulf today: let somebody else figure this out. And it's my view
that nobody can, except the United States."

    Pearl Harbor ignited Bush emotionally, though not yet
intellectually. He enlisted and went off to the Pacific as a
torpedo-bomber pilot. "It was good vs. evil," he says. "The evil
was epitomized by Adolf Hitler and Emperor Hirohito. There was
never any second-guessing, never any rationalization about what
we might have done differently." Bush was "quite aware" of the
cold war. He talked about it with his father Prescott Bush, who
was then a U.S. Senator from Connecticut. Bush met Dwight
Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the
diplomat who riled the world by suggesting he had "to go to the
brink" of war to keep peace. The President ponders a question
on whether his current policy is a Dulles echo, then says,
"Maybe so, maybe so. What I'm trying to do is convince Saddam
Hussein that I intend to do my part in implementing the United
Nations resolutions. The way to have peace is for him to
understand that. I don't think he does."