`I will not yield. I will not rest.'
George W. Bush finds his presidential footing on a most unfamiliar terrain
George W. Bush has found his mission and his moment. Never more can critics label him merely an affable Texan backslapping his way through a benign era or an untested, fortunate son of a former president. All that was swept away on the morning of September 11, when the grim fates again had conspired and the dark forces of history had issued another colossal challenge. The man who never professed to have much of a worldview suddenly had donned both the mantle of a wartime commander in chief and--in an extraordinary transformation--the cloak of a proselytizer against global terrorism.
He embraced these missions with uncharacteristic eloquence and self-reflection in his half-hour address to Congress last week. At one point, his eyes filling with tears, he described how the mother of martyred New York rescue worker George Howard had presented him with her son's police badge. "I will not forget this wound to our country, or those who inflicted it," the president declared. "I will not yield. I will not rest. I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people."
In the process, he abandoned a lifelong habit of setting limited, realistic goals and lowering expectations. "Our war on terror . . . will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated," he said. If serious about that vague and open-ended objective, he risks the perception of failure if Osama bin Laden is not captured or killed, and the possibility of immersing the nation in a Vietnam-style morass, only on a much farther-flung scale. For one thing, he has not left himself what his father called an "exit strategy"--a clear way to end the war. "We can drop a million bombs, but all the terrorists have to do is blow up a stick of dynamite in one of our cities and we're back to square one," says a former senior adviser to former President George Herbert Walker Bush. "All it takes is one more guy willing to commit suicide. You can't eradicate an idea or an ideology with bombs."
There is no small irony in the emergence of the new George W. Bush. The unilateralist finds himself organizing an international coalition against what he calls the heirs of fascism, Nazism, and other ideologies that ended in "history's unmarked grave of discarded lies." The conciliator who called for a civil tone in Washington now trafficks in bellicose words. In a fundamental way, he is adopting the philosophy for which his father was always known. The first President Bush, a World War II hero shot down over the Pacific, once said he saw his life in terms of "missions defined and missions accomplished." Now the son, who spent the Vietnam War flying National Guard jets and partying across Texas, is trying to emulate his dad. No one knows whether it will be a good fit.
Crisis management. Longtime advisers say Bush resembles his father in another way: as a crisis manager. "He approaches it with the same kind of focus, discipline, and methodical approach the former president did," says a family friend. "He is building a case against the bad guys and preparing to go get them. But he knows not to do anything until he and the country are ready." As he villainizes Osama bin Laden, just as his father did Saddam Hussein, and as he organizes the world against evildoers, the son is also under the tutelage of several of the same advisers who served his dad. Foremost among them: Vice President Dick Cheney, a former defense secretary, and Secretary of State Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But today's challenges are in many ways more daunting than those of the 1990s, and Bush's advisers are split about the next step. Powell, along with the former president and much of the intelligence community, wants to proceed cautiously. They fear that extending the counterattack too far will cause dire repercussions in the Muslim world. But Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz are among those pushing for the harshest and most broad-based response possible, according to administration officials. Bush, so far, has chosen the wider options, although he has allowed Powell to organize the international coalition.
Even more important, his father's war--designed to force Iraq out of Kuwait--was waged for a clear purpose, against an easily defined enemy, and with a massive conventional force that far outmatched Saddam's hapless military. Americans could even watch the battles on television--including the laser-guided bombs and missiles that destroyed their targets in what resembled a lethal video game on the nightly news. George W. Bush's war will be murkier in almost every way--and, as he concedes, he will find it immeasurably harder to demonstrate success.
A British influence. Behind the scenes, Bush's advisers describe a man with a new sense of purpose. His latest hero is not drawn from the traditional list of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or Franklin Roosevelt. Instead, Bush has become more enthralled than ever with Winston Churchill. Bush finds parallels between his own circumstances and those of the British prime minister who led his country against the Nazi blitz a half century ago and, with America's help, to ultimate triumph over the Third Reich. Almost since America's terrorist crisis began on September 11, Bush has told friends how he hopes to emulate Churchill's "resolve, his humor . . . his ability to lift a people during a very challenging time," says White House Chief of Staff Andy Card.
On the morning of his prime-time speech, he escorted a group of religious leaders on a tour of the Oval Office and pointed out a bust of Churchill he has prominently displayed near his desk. He also showed his guests a portrait of Lincoln and an inspirational painting of Western horsemen charging up a steep hill called A Charge to Keep. He said the three artworks inspire him. But aides say it is Churchill who has special relevance because Bush sees the prime minister's situation--rallying his country against what amounted to terror attacks against civilians--as similar to his own.
There is a larger point. Bush's identification with Churchill suggests that he also sees the current crisis as a life-or-death struggle. Aides say he is more methodical and disciplined than ever. He gets to the Oval Office at daybreak, carefully reads his briefing books, and asks plenty of pointed questions, which was not his habit when his presidency started in January. Using the Oval Office as a command center and with Rice at his side, he spends several hours each day doggedly calling foreign leaders to organize the international coalition.
Even his personal regimen suggests a new seriousness, as if he has started training for the biggest test of his life. He is maintaining a low-fat diet and jogs on a treadmill in the East Wing every afternoon. Sometimes he runs on the track that snakes around the South Lawn in midafternoon with Secret Service agents following at a discreet distance, which some aides see as a gesture of defiance to would-be terrorists. He uses these exercise periods to clear his head and ponder major policy choices. Last week, after one run, he returned to announce he wanted aides to schedule Thursday's prime-time address to Congress.
And clearly, he is now working weekends. His meeting with senior advisers at Camp David on September 15 was particularly sobering and intense. Aides describe it as a "war council," complete with charts and maps of Afghanistan and the surrounding region. Bush mostly abandoned his usual informality, calling Powell "Mr. Secretary" instead of Colin, and referring to Donald Rumsfeld of Defense as "Mr. Secretary" instead of "Rummy." He declared that fighting terrorism would become the central goal of his presidency. Five days later, the rookie commander in chief made that clear to the world.
This story appears in the October 1, 2001 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.