It was a melancholy flight: the leader of the free world, in the air and on the run, in his own country. The president flew to an Air Force base in Louisiana to refuel and to give Bush a chance to speak briefly to the people. The Secret Service advised him to fly deeper into the interior–a bitter reprise of his summer “Home to the Heartland” tour–to a command post in Nebraska. “You don’t argue with the intel of the Secret Service,” said Rove.
Back in the besieged capital, members of Congress were grumbling privately about Bush’s absence. “He has to reassure the nation, and he has to do it from the Oval Office,” said one Republican senator. As it happened, Bush, urged on by his political advisers, had reached the same conclusion on his own. By 5 p.m. on Black Tuesday, he was on his way back to the capital, accompanied by a close formation of fighter jets. By 8:30 he was addressing the nation on TV, offering condolences, reassurance and the promise of revenge against those behind “these evil acts.”
George Walker Bush has never wanted to be a hero, only president. Now he has to be the former to succeed as the latter. Bush must rise to an occasion as daunting as any faced by any president before him, and do so with less experience than almost all who preceded him. He does not like to make a spectacle of himself, or to be challenged by lofty expectations, or to make grand statements or to reach for greatness. Now he must try to do all these things. “We need him to exceed all the expectations,” said Fred Greenstein, a scholar of the presidency at Princeton University. “We need him to raise the bar higher.”
Bush tried. To a nation that harbors doubts about the president’s ability, the day of horror ended on a note that was reassuring enough but not memorably inspiring. Great presidents, or even the merely serviceable ones, learn to master a medium and an emotion, from Lincoln’s Old Testament invocations of a sense of justice and FDR’s fireside chats to Reagan’s lyrical Irish eulogy after the Challenger disaster and Clinton’s empathy-on-demand sermon in Oklahoma City.
Bush has yet to find a note of eloquence in his own voice. He is, in fact, distrustful of it, and went for Texas plain talk, rhetoric as flat as the prairie and as blunt as a Clint Eastwood soliloquy. In an extra line he apparently penciled in after the speech was hurriedly drafted by aides, Bush vowed to make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them. What he said made sense. But he did not look larger than life at his Oval Office desk, or even particularly comfortable there, and he cited Psalms without the kind of emotional resonance voter-viewers have come to expect from an Empathizer in Chief.
His challenges would be tough for a Lincoln or an FDR: to make us feel that our lives are safe when they evidently are not; to snatch an economy out of recession even as the epicenter of capitalism lies in ruins; to find and liquidate wealthy and ruthless terrorists; to explain why we may have to forgo aspects of our taken-for-granted freedoms–to travel freely, for example–in exchange for protecting others, such as the right to be secure. And Bush has to do all this in a country that long ago became wary, even bitterly cynical, about the very possibility of idealistic political leadership in America.
The tasks he faces now were made harder by the way in which he entered office, and by how he has conducted himself there so far. He got 500,000 votes fewer than his foe and needed a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling to seal the deal. As president he has avoided the bully pulpit; now he has to build one and speak from it at the same time. Leaders in Congress who know him like him, but some still quietly disparaged his ability even as they marveled at what, until that day, was his enviable string of good luck. “Now he looks like a luxury we can’t afford,” said one Democrat and likely 2004 rival.
Nor has Bush built a consensus behind a foreign policy to justify the war he is about to make. To the contrary: the president, as some critics see it, has pursued a pull-up-the-drawbridges mentality that has only made matters worse. “Our foreign policy for the past year has been too unilateral,” said one prominent Democratic senator, who is publicly supportive but privately worried. “We’re seen as arrogant about the state of the world and are using our power and position in ways that invite significant targeting.”
But Bush has strengths to play to now. For one, he has a solid team around him, even if they didn’t act to forestall terrorism with a greater sense of urgency than their recent predecessors. As he kept on the move on Tuesday, he was in constant touch with Vice President Dick Cheney, national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others. None of them has a fingertip feel for the latest in terrorist thinking and theory. But they know how to move force around the world, and they will do so now. White House sources say that the president has been on the phone to the Most Important Adviser of All, his father. No one knows precisely what the Old Man has said, but insiders say it is likely to follow on his model from the gulf war: win the support, or at least the benign neglect, of moderate Arab states before you strike.
Bush can also count on voters, and most politicians in Washington, to rally around him, at least for a time. Congressmen are like other human beings: they want to feel safe, too, and know that a commander in chief has national security as his No. 1 duty. There was quite a bit of chaos on the Hill Tuesday morning, with no evacuation plan and no source of reliable information about what was going on. The Senate GOP leader, Trent Lott, was working in his office until aides, peering out their windows in the Capitol, saw columns of smoke rising from the Pentagon across the river. “We decided it was time to get the hell out,” said one aide, and Lott was hustled out to Andrews Air Force Base for the rest of the day.
The White House, an office as well as a home, was eerily calm at first, until, at about 11:30 a.m., Secret Service fanned out through the building to order every-one to evacuate. Rather than go home, about 50 staffers set up a command post in an empty law-firm office nearby, while Condi Rice stayed in the White House basement, in the Situation Room, to be in constant contact with the traveling president. Laura Bush was on the Hill when the news broke, and was quickly hustled to a secure location; Secret Service agents quickly found the Bush daughters, and did the same. Aboard Air Force One, Bush didn’t have a long conversation with Laura until late in the afternoon. He was finally on his way home, he told her, and everything would be OK.
Everyone wants a president to be strong in a crisis. Meeting later that day, in secret, at Capitol Police headquarters, Lott joined 70 senators, Republican and Democrat, in wishing for just that. But it quickly became apparent that no one–including Lott–had the faintest idea where the president was. Lott and Democratic leader Tom Daschle had spoken to Vice President Cheney but not to Bush himself. “People were angry and full of questions,” said a senator who was there. Senators were especially angry when White House communications aide Karen Hughes emerged in Washington to assure the nation that the president was safe. “We didn’t need her to tell us he was all right,” said another senator. “We needed him to tell us that we are all right. They missed the point.”
But Bush could count on the country to root for him. It is in our nature to rally as a country behind a president if times demand it, as these surely do. The members of Congress did their part. They gathered on the East Front of the Capitol in the early evening to listen to their leaders pledge their allegiance to the president. When the speeches were done, someone began singing the strains of “God Bless America.” Soon every member was singing along, party and ideology long forgotten. At the White House later they said it was the last thing Bush saw before going into the Oval Office to address the nation, and it made him feel more eager to meet the moment.
