TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/091889/09188900.050

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 4KB | 64 lines

NATION, Page 32

The Presidency

The Struggle with Ourselves

By Hugh Sidey


    It was a strange way to start a war. When members of George
Bush's senior staff gathered in the Cabinet Room to watch the
President's drug speech, they took a peek beforehand at the
broadcast of David Frost's down-home interview with the First
Couple. There were George and Barbara Bush at their elegant
Kennebunkport mansion set against the uncrowded beauty of Maine's
shoreline.

    When the President had finished his Oval Office declaration,
there was enthusiastic applause from the Cabinet Room coterie and
champagne all around to toast the performance, coached by the
Machiavelli of modern political media, Roger Ailes. There was
little tension in the atmosphere: no black limousines cruising
through the dark, no all-night vigil in the Situation Room --
hallmarks of crisis through the years. The only drug officer around
was the man who brought the crack that Bush brandished on the air.

    The nation has been launched on something brand new and not
fully comprehended or sorted out by the President. The metaphor
"drug war" does not even work very well. War implies an adversary
that can be identified and attacked. It requires a traditional
assault with money and power of some sort. Democratic Senator
Joseph Biden, rebutting Bush, claimed we need a "D-day," not a
"Viet Nam," against drugs, a sign that he is still having trouble
with semantics. Viet Nam failed because of a D-day mentality. It
never should have been fought as it was. There is every indication
this time as well that traditional approaches simply will not work.
They certainly have not for the past 20 years, during which the war
on drugs has been declared and redeclared. This country is
grappling with its soul as well as with cocaine cartels.

    Pundits, entangled in the pervasive nature of the drug scourge,
were not having much better luck searching for historical
precedents. George Will compared the problem with civil rights,
where legislation led to a change in attitudes. But how do you
change appetites? Milton Friedman hastily pointed out that
prohibition against demon rum in the 1920s was an abject failure.
Back then, however, schools and quiet neighborhood streets were
rarely if ever menaced by booze-running kids and gangs with
automatic weapons and stacks of cash.

    The scope of the drug problem reminds some of the Great
Depression, when the U.S. faced a crisis of confidence as well as
the tangible burdens of idled shops, busted banks, homelessness and
hunger. But Franklin Roosevelt was given almost everything he
wanted by a Congress that had lost its way along with most other
Americans. The morning after Bush's speech it was quite plain that
Congress would try to dictate the size and direction of the drug
campaign. There was no carte blanche for the President, instead the
prospect of bitter argument within his own political system.

    By week's end the more thoughtful people around the White House
were talking not about a war but about a siege, even "a continual
call to the American people to resist drugs." Bush launched his
campaign the morning after his talk with a heartrending stop at
D.C. General Hospital's ward for babies abandoned by addicts. The
great weapon may be, as it has been in the past, the democratic
process itself -- the argument, the criticism, the stops and
starts, the big failures and little successes -- and from it all,
finally, the heightened awareness that changes hearts. Almost
nothing else will put such a foe in its place.