White House Watch: Bush revisited

WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 (UPI) -- On this night one year ago, George W. Bush was really a different man. He had won the presidency, all right, but narrowly; his supporters were still anxious that the Democrats could devise some legal challenge that might force months of fighting to establish the legitimacy of his term.

Even though he was son and grandson of the American elite, he had eschewed the trappings of a political family and came to the presidency with almost no experience in the salient issues facing the United States in the new century. His father, at the same moment before taking office, had been vice president, head of the Central Intelligence Agency, ambassador to the People's Republic of China, chairman of the Republican National Committee, Congressman and a World War II hero.

The elder Bush had given his son the basics: he had sent him to Andover, one of the most prestigious boys schools in America, and to Yale College. But it had not taken. Bush turned away from that Eastern advantage, and even after getting a Harvard Business School degree, had put all his belongings into his car and driven back to Midland, Texas, where he had spent his elementary school years.

Midland is a Texas oil town, plain and flat and straightforward.

In Midland, he met and married a local girl, Laura Welch, a schoolteacher and librarian; ran a losing race for Congress; tried with only moderate success to be an oil lease man; made lifelong friends, and ended up using his father's connections to build a baseball franchise. He used the $15 million he made on the franchise to give him the basis to run for governor of Texas. For all that has been said about being a Texas governor, it doesn't prepare you to be the president of the most powerful nation on earth.

So on this night a year ago, George and Laura Bush must have felt somewhat intimidated at the prospect before them. He had already had endless briefings from his advisors -- the hard-to-pronounce names of foreign leaders, the intricacies of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs.

And on New Year's of 2001, George W. Bush could not have foreseen the year ahead. What has happened to him in these last months brings to mind two other presidents of the 20th Century in quite different ways.

One, of course, is John F. Kennedy, who like Bush was confronted by perhaps the greatest threat to the nation at that time since World War II: the Cuban missile crisis. Like Kennedy, Bush has had to make lighting-like decisions based upon the recommendations of generals and FBI directors and attorney generals that he hardly had time to know or to trust. Like Kennedy, Bush has found men and women he can rely on.

The other president that this year brings to mind is Harry Truman. In some ways, Harry Truman was the antithesis of George W. Bush. He was quintessential average, no college, no Ph.D, no family trust; a failed haberdashery storeowner when he turned to politics.

Truman was elected president in the heyday of the average man. In this time before robotics and computers, the power of the nation was in the hands of the average men and women. Fifteen million of them had gone to war when war was labor-intensive, and millions of the others had built the most powerful industrial empire the world had ever seen.

Certainly Harry Truman would not have liked Bush's energy bill, built to reward his cronies in the oil business, nor would he have liked a tax package so overwhelmingly favorable to big business. But having come out of the Prendergast machine of Kansas City, Missouri, Truman knew a little of cronyism and practical politics.

But if not alike in their politics and families, they are strangely alike in their experiences and attitudes. When Harry Truman took office after Franklin Delano Roosevelt's death in April 1945, he was as outside the inner circle of foreign policy as Bush was a year ago. Roosevelt had done little to groom the Missouri senator for the presidency, and he had not even been briefed on the atomic bomb, a weapon that changed the world.

Coming as he did in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt, not a lot was expected of Harry Truman, but in the end, with the Marshal- plan and the Truman Doctrine and the policy of containment, a lot was delivered.

Bush's early briefings hardly touched on terrorism and, like the atomic bomb, the terrorist attack has changed the context of American life.

Likewise, not a lot was expected of George W. Bush, but in the months since Sept. 11, quite a lot has been delivered. He has set out a world doctrine against terror and gone to war to eradicate it. He is studying international aid for Central Asia and other Muslim nations, which may come to sound like the Marshall Plan, and he has rallied the American people to new determination.

Perhaps most strikingly similar to Harry S. Truman is Bush's attitude about life in the White House. Harry Truman never lost a sense of Independence, Mo., and he and his wife Bess returned whenever possible. He liked to take long walks, play the piano and glow with pride in his daughter Margaret's musical talent.

George and Laura Bush go back Texas whenever possible. Not to Midland, but to their Prairie Gospel Ranch near Crawford, in a part of Central Texas as much "heartland" (as Mrs. Bush calls it) as was Midland.

President Bush, like Truman, has simple habits. He jogs instead of taking long walks, clears brush on his ranch, glories in his daughters, and last week went fishing. The cold, he said, had driven the fish to the bottom of the pond. It suggested that the joy for this fisherman is not in the catching, but the fishing.

Tonight, the president said, he plans to get to bed early.