By the time he met the press, Bush knew what he wanted to say–had to say. Two American soldiers had been killed in a helicopter crash–the war’s first battle-related U.S. casualties. He had consulted with his military advisers, and presided by videoconference over yet another meeting of his National Security Council, but didn’t bother to vet his thoughts with spin doctors. Don’t worry, he told one of them, I know what I want to say. For the first time, the word “sacrifice” was central. Americans, Bush said, “understand there will be sacrifice.” The passengers on Flight 93 had sacrificed their lives to prevent an attack, he noted, and there will be other “moments of sacrifice.” The soldiers, he said, “will not have died in vain.”
There was a time, and it wasn’t long ago, when George W. Bush thought of himself as the delegator in chief, a clean-desk man who left details to others until forced to focus. But now he is the commander in chief in a global struggle of monumental complexity. It is a war in which the “front lines” are everywhere, in which details can be deadly, in which his personal mastery is indispensable–and his own words matter most.
Bush is trying to figure out how to run the war on the run. History is forcing him to become what he didn’t want to be, to re-examine old assumptions. In public, he is speaking more, and with more confidence, even (at times) seeking out a press corps he’s always distrusted. In fiscal policy, he’s now a deficit spender, advocate of bigger government, a micromanager of the macro economy. In politics, he’s become a fellow traveler with Democrats, at odds with his GOP conservative base, sending aides to consult with Hollywood about how to sell American values abroad. In diplomacy, Bush is distancing himself from Israel while embracing nation-building and the United Nations, and even pledging a new era of prosperity for the world’s poor. Now, having dispatched troops to Afghanistan, Bush has to hope he does not become something else he never wanted to be: a president from Texas in a military quagmire.
Last week’s lesson: you can’t delegate the presidency, especially in war, and especially when the specifics of battle–from the amount of dust in Afghanistan to the size of spores on office desks in Washington–are so crucial. When the nation’s capital was hit by an anthrax attack, it drifted close to panic in the absence of strong leadership from him. Having spent the first month of the war focusing on military and diplomatic matters, Bush remained behind the curve on bioterrorism at home. When he left for Shanghai, he left the Hill to its own devices–with unnerving results.
The D.C. anthrax scare began like those elsewhere: with an opened envelope. In this case it was one addressed to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, bearing the same postmark (Trenton, N.J.) and childlike handwriting as one received the week before by NBC anchor Tom Brokaw. The aide who opened the letter last Monday summoned police and health officials. By the next night tests found that 31 people had tested positive for anthrax exposure–though no one had contracted the disease. (The number was later reduced to 28.) Wednesday morning, Hill leaders briefed Bush–who told them the next move was their call.
Confusion ensued. Spooked by rumors of similar letters in his own office, Speaker Denny Hastert–backed by the Democratic leader, Dick Gephardt–ordered the House and its offices closed. (Indeed, anthrax contamination was found last Saturday in a House mailroom.) But senators, meeting in private, decided to stay open for business as proof that Congress couldn’t be intimidated. The move infuriated the House and sent mixed signals to the country. (By a 53-34 percent margin, voters in the new NEWSWEEK Poll thought the Senate had made the right decision.)
The administration’s crisis managers finally stepped in, but didn’t do much to clarify things. Bush’s new director of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, held his first press conference only after Capitol Hill was in disarray. “He was invisible–‘Tom who?’ " groused Rep. Jane Harman, a Democrat from California. When Ridge finally did appear, backed by a phalanx of administration officials, he couldn’t, at first, answer the crucial question: was the anthrax “weapons grade,” as Hill leaders had been told? In fact, it wasn’t, but Ridge wasn’t able to say so clearly until the following day. In any case, only the president could reassure the country; some of his allies suggested that Bush himself should give a nationally televised speech on the topic. “He’s the one with the sky-high numbers,” said one GOP strategist.
That was only one of the many tasks the president has ahead of him. Another is to push through Congress–when it reopens for business this week–a series of urgent measures on law enforcement, airline security and the economy. The first, to give the FBI and other federal officials more investigative powers, seems likely to be enacted this week. The others could pit Bush against his conservative base.
House Republicans continue to oppose Democratic efforts to put all airport-security workers on the federal payroll. Bush doesn’t like the idea either, but is less concerned with philosophy than with preventing a collapse of the already reeling travel industry. Top White House aides say they’ll resort to executive order rather than wait much longer for Congress to act.
The fate of an “economic recovery” package is more problematic. Bush is resigned to seeing the federal budget fall into deficit. Budget Director Mitch Daniels confirmed to NEWSWEEK projections of at least a $10 billion deficit for next year. But White House officials are just as concerned about GOP efforts to load new tax breaks for business into the bill. And it’s not clear whom Bush is listening to. Indeed, in Shanghai, he spent time with Clinton Treasury secretary Bob Rubin, who favors spending and tax breaks for low- and moderate-income consumers.
It was Rubin who (at the president’s request) introduced Bush’s speech to Pacific Rim leaders last weekend. The president recalled his only previous trip to Shanghai. It was 26 years ago, when his father headed the new American mission in Beijing. He was a tourist at the time, a freshly minted M.B.A. heading to Texas to get into the oil business. The changes since then in China, and in his own life, had been beyond imagining. Now that troops were on the ground there would be more. The Chinese ideograms for the words “crisis” and “opportunity” are the same. Someday we’ll know whether that is true for the president, and the country he leads.
