The Presidency

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."