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                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 32

PRESIDENT BUSH

Warrior for the Status Quo


In an excerpt from their new book, TIME's White House correspondents
depict George Bush as a deeply practical man who decided that
what he most wanted to do in his first term was win a second
term

By MICHAEL DUFFY and DAN GOODGAME

    From Marching in Place: The Status Quo Presidency of
George Bush by Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame, published by
Simon & Shuster. (c) 1992 by Michael Duffy and Dan Goodgame.


    Some obvious questions awaited George Bush on Wednesday,
Nov. 9, 1988, his first day as President-elect of the United
States of America.

    What were his plans? Would he move quickly to make good on
his vows to clean up the nation's skies, fully fund Head Start
and broaden opportunities for disabled Americans? How would he
persuade lawmakers to go along with such proposals after a
campaign of ugly attacks on Democrats and considerable Congress
bashing? How would Bush's kinder and gentler promises mesh with
his oaths to halt regulatory red tape, rein in the Federal
Government and reduce the deficit? How would Bush do all that
and still uphold his "no new taxes" pledge?

    Appearing before reporters that morning, Bush was asked to
describe his mandate. He replied, "Well, I don't know whether
I want to use the word mandate . . . I would simply say the
people have spoken, the verdict was clear, and therefore I will
take what I think the prime issues of the campaign were and
work constructively with Congress to attain the will of the
people."

    Bush was forecasting a great deal when he eschewed the
word mandate. His campaign had been a bewildering fugue of
mixed messages designed to hold together an unlikely coalition
of mainstream Republicans, activist conservatives, Reagan
Democrats and independent suburbanites. Bush won with a
coalition whose demands were so contradictory that it would
prove almost impossible to govern. But then a mandate had never
been Bush's objective. Getting elected was. He had assembled a
coalition not to govern, but simply to acquire the 270 electoral
votes he needed to win the presidency.

    It was only a matter of weeks after Bush's Inauguration
that his aimless style began to worry many of his aides. Bush,
they complained, was flitting around from St. Louis to South
Korea to South Carolina without communicating a clear sense of
his priorities to the country or even to his staff. Only six
weeks into his term, Bush felt obliged to call a press
conference to deny that his Administration suffered from
"drift."

    In fact, Bush did have a strategy, and John Sununu, his
chief of staff, revealed its essence during a fractious staff
session in his big corner office on the evening of March 6,
1989. That meeting, unusual amid the informal, walk-in-anytime
atmosphere of the Bush White House, was called at the urging of
a group of senior officials, who for weeks had been telling one
another, in whispered asides and computer-mail messages, that
the President was being badly served by his scattershot
planning.

    Several senior aides recommended that the White House
agree on a set of legislative priorities and political messages
and pursue them single-mindedly over the next several months:
coordinating Bush's travel, speeches, meetings and -- especially
-- TV news coverage, in a theme-of-the-week, line-of-the-day
routine. Hearing this, Sununu erupted, "No! No! Government
doesn't work that way!" What he meant was that George Bush
wouldn't work that way. Weekly themes, Su nunu insisted, were
"too confining, too cumbersome" to suit Bush's peripatetic
personality or the political constraints that he had inherited.
Bush, unlike Ronald Reagan, did not have a Republican-controlled
Senate, effective control of the House or a clear mandate from
the voters to accomplish any specific, big-ticket reforms.

    Sununu then provided his aides what they needed: not a set
of domestic priorities so much as a political strategy and a
way of understanding what Bush was up to. What was the single,
overriding goal of the Bush Administration? Su nunu's answer:
a "successful presidency" that would bring re-election in 1992.
Next question: How can the Bush Administration best ensure that
the voters judge it a success? The answer: by putting together
a solid record of accomplishment on which to campaign in 1992;
a checklist of bills passed that major constituencies would
applaud, of bills vetoed that other constituencies --
particularly conservatives -- had despised; and a tally of
presidential actions taken, crises handled, opportunities
seized. Sununu referred to this presidential platform in the
making as "talking points."

    Here, finally, was "the vision thing": the image Bush saw
when he imagined a better future for America was . . . himself
in the Oval Office through January 1997! Silly as it might
sound, this revelation proved useful as "an organizing
principle," in the recollection of one senior official present
at the meeting, and "gave us a quiet, internal coherence" that
had been missing until then. Bill Kristol, the chief of staff
to Vice President Dan Quayle, later explained that Sununu "had
us think of the record that we'd like the President to run on
in 1992 and work backward from there."

    This approach offered another advantage, which Sununu
described as "tactical flexibility" -- a nimbleness,
unencumbered by sticky specific goals or principles, that would
allow Bush to quickly seize political opportunities as they
arose. During the 1988 campaign, Bush committed himself to as
few specific policies as possible, believing that such
undertakings would confine him after the election. After Bush
took office, his reluctance to commit himself only grew stronger
and gained an additional rationale: laying out to the public a
clearly defined agenda would make it more difficult for Bush to
shift his attention to unexpected crises and opportunities, at
home and abroad, that offered bigger political payoffs. Budget
Director Richard Darman made this point to his colleagues at the
March 6 meeting, in words that nicely prefigured the entire
term: "Remember, much of how a President is going to be
evaluated is how he handles surprises, not necessarily how he
handles his own agenda."


    BUSH THE REGULAR JOE

    Americans sensed that they had elected a different sort of
President when George Bush let it slip that he showered with his
dog. This was something new: an emperor who admitted that he
(at least for a few minutes every morning) had no clothes. The
disclosure was not as startling as it might have been. Bush,
America knew, or would soon learn, owned a bowling ball. He
hated broccoli. He had trouble finishing his sentences. He had
a fancy estate at Kennebunkport, Maine, which had been in his
family for generations, but he ran errands to town and invited
just about everyone to lunch. He preferred country to classical
music. The anecdotes about Bush's "normal" habits tumbled forth
from White House staffers like so many talking points. The
message was obvious: the President is a regular Joe. "This is
the first normal guy to hold this office in 25 years," a senior
official said.

    Some of those habits were not quite as advertised. During
the 1988 campaign, Bush injected more of a Texas twang into his
voice. "Fair" became a two-syllable word. He no longer intended
an action; he was "fixin' to" do it. Bush did not excise all
fancy words from his vocabulary, but he did spell them out
syllable by syllable, as if reading them for the first time.
Even "ed-jew-cay-shun" got this aw, shucks treatment. He had his
picture taken throwing horseshoes rather than playing golf or
tennis. Campaign officials discouraged photos of the Bush spread
in Kennebunkport. The owner of an expensive speedboat and an
avid angler for the exotic bonefish of the Florida Keys, Bush
now emphasized his love of fishing for the humble largemouth
bass and attended the Bass Masters exhibition in Alabama. He
also let it be known that he liked to unwind with a beer
(domestic, of course) and a big bag of pork rinds.

    As soon as he was elected, Bush dropped most of his
working-class affectations. It turned out that his favorite
snack was not pork rinds but popcorn, and beer gave way to vodka
martinis (on the rocks with lots of olives) and white wine. Bush
once again strapped his watch to a striped-cloth band that had
been banished during the campaign as too preppy. He similarly
resumed wearing shirts with white collar and cuffs over striped
or pastel-colored bodies: "what Roger calls my `elitist shirts,'
" Bush joked in a reference to his savvy campaign adman and
image adviser, Roger Ailes.

    Bush's eight years at Reagan's side taught him a great
deal about how to be President and about how not to be
President. He learned that a well-liked Commander in Chief,
which Reagan was for most of his two terms, would be forgiven
many a political gaffe or unpopular policy initiative. Bush also
learned that a President who promised too much, who raised
expectations for sweeping change, would, like Reagan, in the end
be seen to fall short of the mark. So Bush set out to endear
himself to the American public while at the same time working
to lower its expectations both of him and of his presidency.

    To the task, Bush brought something special: an ironic,
self-mocking approach to the job. He went through the motions
of being President that tradition dictated, but often with his
tongue planted in his cheek. He once gathered his advisers in
the Oval Office, placed a crystal ball on his desk and widened
his eyes over the orb as a photographer snapped the picture with
a Polaroid. (An aide later forwarded the snap to a reporter,
saying, "The President wanted you to know how he really makes
decisions.")

    Film actress Melanie Griffith recalls standing on the road
outside her home in Aspen, Colorado, and watching the
President's motorcade go by one day in August 1990. In fact, it
wasn't just any day; it was Aug. 2, 1990 -- the day after Saddam
Hussein invaded Kuwait. But Bush, seeing Griffith, stopped his
car, activated the special speaker in the rear of his limousine
-- Bush calls this device "Mr. Microphone" -- and barked at
Griffith's one-year-old daughter, "What's the matter, Dakota?
Never seen a talking car before?" Bush invited Dana Carvey,
whose Saturday Night Live imitations of the President were
frighteningly convincing, to the White House. There, during a
15-minute Oval Office chat, Bush and Carvey stood in front of
the fireplace and talked simultaneously at each other, one being
Bush, the other doing Bush. When Carvey began chopping the air
with one hand and talking about "Daaaan Quaaaayle -- getting
stronger, learning ev-er-y daaay," Bush doubled over in
laughter.

    This downsizing of the presidency served a dual political
purpose: Americans came to like Bush and to expect less of him.
It was as if to say, "Like me? Trust me." And it was hard not
to like a man who, surrounded by grim-faced Secret Service
agents, howled with laughter when he played the
$20-bill-on-the-end-of-a-string trick on unsuspecting waiters
at the Chinese embassy; who would greet visitors to the Oval
Office by placing a windup mechanical bumblebee on the floor and
letting it buzz around; who walked around the White House with
a voice-activated stuffed monkey that socked itself on the head
whenever the Commander in Chief began to talk. As Bush's old
friend from Yale, Thomas ("Lud") Ashley, liked to say, "It's
easy to underestimate George Bush because he's so damned genteel
and nice."


    BUSH THE LOYALIST

    In looking for a chief of staff, Bush wanted a bad cop and
one who was loyal to him alone. Bush had watched his friend Jim
Baker, as Reagan's chief of staff, privately blame the
Commander in Chief for much of what went wrong and take the
credit for most of what went right. Bush was determined to find
a more selfless chief of staff, and thus picked John Sununu, the
deeply conservative New Hampshire Governor who had saved Bush's
flagging presidential bid by helping him win his state's
primary. Bush deployed Sununu as a double-sided human shield,
whom liberals would blame for taking a moderate Administration
hostage and to whom conservatives would turn when the President
abandoned their causes. Sununu ran interference when Bush needed
to shuffle to the right on such issues as judicial appointments
or abortion, absorbing the blame of Bush's latest pander to his
party's extremist wing. But because his ties to conservatives
were so strong, Sununu could mollify the powerful G.O.P. faction
when the President needed to veer back to the middle on taxes
and fiscal questions. "Sununu took all the arrows," explained
an aide, "and Bush got all the credit."

    While Sununu seldom exceeded his brief from Bush, his
style was gratuitously insulting. He made enemies that neither
he nor Bush needed. Nor did Sununu realize that by treating
people maliciously, he ceased to get the best out of them; once
burned by Sununu, most Republicans and White House aides just
stopped saying anything or making suggestions. It wasn't until
Sununu flew afoul of White House travel rules in May 1991 that
Bush realized how few friends his obnoxious chief of staff had.

    Bush began to nudge Sununu out just before Thanksgiving
1991. Moving with characteristic stealth, Bush dashed off an
identical note to seven or eight longtime political allies
asking for their "advice" about the upcoming campaign. He sealed
the notes in White House envelopes and passed them to his son
George. The younger Bush inserted the letters in larger plain
brown envelopes bearing his return address in Dallas. He
followed up with telephone calls, speaking individually with
each of the outside advisers. The response to the secret letters
was nearly unanimous: the recipients reported that they'd love
to work in the 1992 campaign but could not imagine doing so if
Sununu would retain authority over the campaign as chief of
staff. As one member of the high command put it later to
another, "I'm not working for that little son of a bitch."

    On the day before Thanksgiving, sounding more like a Dutch
uncle than an executioner, the younger Bush tried to break it
to Sununu gently in the chief of staff's office. "You know, I've
talked to a lot of people. They're down on you. It's going to
be tough for you to work with these people. I've got to tell my
father, and you've got to talk to him about it." George W.
delivered his heave-ho but left the session doubtful that he had
accomplished his mission. Indeed, Sununu concluded that he still
had some wiggle room left and went to see Bush, who told him to
come to Camp David that Sunday.

    When Sununu arrived he surprised Bush by fighting for his
job. "I can survive this thing," he told Bush. "I can work
through it." The Commander in Chief couldn't bring himself to
cut the umbilical cord. Having relied on Sununu to do his dirty
work, Bush discovered that there was no one around to ax the
hatchet man. So Bush again demurred, postponing his next move
for another day. "Let's think about it. Let's talk tomorrow."

    On the morning of Monday, Dec. 2, Sununu tentatively
offered to resign, thinking Bush would reject it. Bush's
response seemed vague: "Let me see what we ought to do," he
said, "how we can handle it." Sununu didn't get it at first, but
within an hour he realized that "maybe" meant yes. Bush's
ambivalent refusal to a half-serious offer of resignation was
in fact a request for the real thing. "He didn't clear it up,"
Sununu later explained to friends. "He didn't clear it up."

    In fact, he did, but in his own way. Both the Washington
Post and the New York Times led their front pages the next day
with stories about Sununu's pending departure -- unmistakable
leaks from the President's allies. Sununu immediately went to
see Bush and told him that they had both suffered enough. "I
don't want my family to go through another day of this," he
said.

    Within days the former Governor had explained to friends
that he was disappointed that Bush couldn't deliver the bad
news himself but relied instead upon his son to do his dirty
work. "What really bothers me," said a close Sununu ally from
New Hampshire, "is that the President couldn't tell John to his
face, that he sent his kid to do it. John deserved better than
that, and I know it bothered John too."

    Weeks later, after Sununu was gone, many of the same
officials who had received the secret letters from the President
tried to impress upon reporters that George W.'s role had been
vastly exaggerated. As one insisted, ``I know for a fact that
he hadn't been sent there by anyone." This was revisionism. Bush
was just covering his tracks after the kill, perhaps embarrassed
that he lacked the guts to fire his chief of staff himself.


    BUSH THE BIT PLAYER

    In his first 22 months in office George Bush made the
evening news a third as often as his predecessor. The tactic was
intentional: Bush believed that too much time on television
would only raise public expectations about what he could
accomplish. "It's not honest," press secretary Marlin Fitzwater
said. "The President of the U.S. cannot solve every problem from
warts to AIDS." David Demarest, Bush's communications director,
put it this way: "This President does not see himself at the
center of national attention." Bush had reason to worry that if
he became too commonplace in America's living rooms, the public
would tire of him prematurely. Pollster Robert Teeter had data
that suggested the public actually resents a President who is
on the news every night. Teeter regularly surveyed Americans for
their sentiments about Bush and discovered that, as he once put
it, "they don't like having to come home every night and turn
on the television to learn what he did today." A President, as
Bush put it, could get "overexposed." By keeping his head down,
Bush was subtly telling Americans not to look to Washington, and
particularly the White House, for answers.

    Bush instead sought to dial back his exposure, trimming
the role of the presidency in the lives of most Americans. In
this way, he was making a virtue of necessity: his inability to
affect a swaggering leadership style dovetailed with his
minimalist agenda. Plainspoken by nature, Bush was uncomfortable
with dramatic language and hyperbole. He often deleted the most
memorable passages from his speeches as he delivered them. He
skipped over emotional lines about patriotism and national
service, both before the Gulf War and after. (Radio reporters,
who relied more than most reporters on strong words from a
President for good stories, routinely let loose howls of
frustration when Bush omitted the best lines from prepared
texts.) The President didn't really believe that ideas could
change people's minds. That, he figured, required careful,
one-on-one negotiation -- the kind of personal hard pitch that
works best after a personal acknowledgment in a presidential
speech.

    When their White House mess privileges were revoked early
in 1989, Bush's speechwriters realized their work would be less
important to the 41st President than it had been to his
predecessor. His writers complained privately that the only
portions of speech draft that the boss seemed to care about were
the "acknowledgments" -- the several paragraphs of names and
perfunctory thank-yous that led nearly every Bush speech, in
which he recognized by name the friends, political allies and
routine famous people in every audience. If Bush saw someone he
knew who was not mentioned in the text -- and he nearly always
did -- he would break away in the middle of his comments to
recognize the luminary, and often sent a stiff note to the
errant researcher afterward. It was, several speechwriters
explained, the only thing Bush ever complained about.

    Several White House officials tried to take advantage of
Bush's interest in public opinion polls to present him
opportunities for rhetorical leadership. They sent the President
surveys that asked respondents not only what they thought, but
how much they knew and didn't know, and whether new information
and arguments might change their opinions. For example, a
July-August 1990 poll by Teeter's old firm, Market Opinion
Research, asked 1,000 registered voters whether the government
spends "too much, not enough, or just the right amount on
federal farm subsidies." Most of the respondents, thinking of
aid to small farmers in need of drought assistance and such,
answered "not enough" (43%) or "the right amount" (12%). Then
the respondents were told, "In 1988, 43% of federal farm
subsidies went to farm operators whose average net income was
$96,000 per year." With this new information, 55% of those
polled said that "the federal program should be changed [and]
we should only help small farms." This offered an opening for
Bush to shift public opinion and policy against the farm
subsidies for the wealthy that he said he opposed. But he failed
to follow through in any bold way.

    Nor did he think he needed to. Midway through his term,
Bush concluded that his Administration had already done enough
to win re-election. "Let me suggest the following," Sununu said
in November 1990 to the annual meeting of the Conservative
Leadership Conference. "There's not another single piece of
legislation that needs to be passed in the next two years for
this President. In fact, if Congress wants to come together,
adjourn and leave, it's all right with us. We don't need them."


    BUSH THE GENERAL

    Saddam Hussein was a hard man and reckoned he knew a patsy
when he saw one. The Iraqi leader had watched with contempt as
Bush tried for years, as Vice President and President, to
appease him with trade concessions, intelligence sharing and an
obsequious, boys-will-be-boys attitude toward Saddam's use of
chemical weapons and torture against his own people and his
threats against Israel and Kuwait. Saddam also saw how Bush had
tried to appease the rulers of China after the 1989 Tiananmen
massacre, and Mikhail Gorbachev after his March 1990 crackdown
on Lithuania.

    But after Iraq invaded Kuwait, Saddam learned better about
Bush, and so did Bush's countrymen. In the opening words of his
somber televised address on Aug. 8, 1990, announcing the initial
dispatch of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia, Bush could have been
describing himself as easily as America: "In the life of a
nation, we are called upon to define who we are and what we
believe."

    In the gulf crisis, George Bush found something to believe
in. He saw almost immediately that Iraq's invasion of Kuwait
threatened vital U.S. interests and must be reversed -- probably
by force. And perhaps for the first time in his long political
career, he never wavered. He defied the consensus of his aides
on several crucial questions, including the decision to
intervene in the first week of August and the move in early
January to seek explicit backing from Congress before starting
the air war. He encountered public resistance at half a dozen
turns in the crisis and overcame it, not with soaring rhetoric,
but with bold actions, each of which shifted public opinion
toward support of his policy.

    Crucial to Bush's success in winning support at home and
abroad was his well-practiced and ruthless use of deception. He
repeatedly misled Saudi Arabia, the other coalition allies, the
American public and Congress by exaggerating the nature of the
threat that Iraq posed to Saudi Arabia and by concealing a
number of intentions: the massive size and duration of the
military deployment he had in mind, his immediate determination
not only to defend Saudi Arabia but also to liberate Kuwait and
his private assessment from the early weeks of the crisis that
all-out war was likely.

    Through it all Bush radiated an eerie calm and sense of
command. Gone was the shrill, arm-waving creature who reversed
himself on taxes, civil rights and abortion. The qualities Bush
displayed throughout the gulf crisis -- stubborn resolve and
adherence to principle, resourcefulness and foresight -- were
particularly striking in contrast with his feckless performance
at home. In his speeches Bush evoked a "new world order" in
which the U.S., as the sole superpower, would cooperate with the
humbled Soviet Union and work through the U.N. to resolve
conflicts. This new order represented an appealing hope and
vision, but Bush focused his war aims squarely on the
restoration of the old order, which he and his aides strictly
defined as the status quo ante bellum -- the situation that
existed before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. In the gulf crisis
Bush performed with uncommon conviction and ingenuity, but he
served as he did at home: as a warrior for the status quo.

    The U.S. strategy toward Iraq was worked out far in
advance during a relaxed, four-hour session between Bush and
Brent Scowcroft, as they trolled for bluefish off Kennebunkport.
The two men assumed the U.S. would do whatever was necessary to
drive Iraq out of Kuwait, but was that enough? What further
objectives should they pursue? The overthrow of Saddam?
Destruction of Iraq's chemical-, biological- and nuclear-weapons
programs and its ballistic missiles? As a lesson in the dangers
of expanding one's war aims, Scowcroft recalled the U.S.
experience four decades earlier in defending South Korea from
invasion by the communist North. Rather than merely expel the
invaders, the U.S. tried to unify Korea by marching all the way
to the border with China. In response, China intervened. The
conflict lasted nearly three more years, cost tens of thousands
of additional casualties and poisoned U.S.-Chinese relations for
20 years. All to end up back at the status quo ante bellum.

    If it came to war, Scowcroft argued, the U.S. would have
ample opportunity to bomb deep inside Iraq, to destroy its
unconventional and ballistic weapons and to cripple its
conventional army as an offensive threat. But those objectives
must remain unstated. Nor must the overthrow of Saddam be a
public objective. When he retreated from Kuwait, or was driven
out, Bush and Scowcroft were assuming, his generals and Baath
Party leaders would tear Saddam apart like carrion and elevate
a new leader who would be eager to restore ties with the rest
of the world.

    As it turned out, the ground war lasted only one hundred
hours. But even weeks after victory over Iraq, Bush was nagged
by the problems of the Kurds. Baker had just returned from a
visit to the Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq and phoned Bush
to describe the horrors he had seen. What was more, the camera
crews with him had seen them too; night after night, the
networks were leading the news with pitiful Kurdish children
dead and dying. Then Bush received a phone call from President
Turgut Ozal of Turkey. The plight of the Kurds, Ozal insisted,
was "an embarrassment to you and a political threat to us, and
it will get worse, believe me." Then Ozal said firmly, Here is
what you must do. First, you must get the Kurds down out of the
mountains to the flatlands where they can be helped. Second, to
get them out of the mountains, you must protect them from the
Iraqi military.

    This went against Bush's oft-stated instinct to avoid
entanglement in Iraq's ferocious tribal conflicts. Yet as Bush
canvassed the European allies, he learned, as Baker had warned,
that they were prepared to move without the U.S., leaving him
to look cold and heartless and, more important, like a man
surrendering the leadership of the new world order. By Tuesday
evening, Bush had turned his policy 180 degrees. He would send
ground troops into northern Iraq to protect the Kurds. "So much
for our nice, clean victory," carped one White House opponent
of the new policy, "and for not getting bogged down in Middle
East politics."

    The Kurds would be only the first bit of unfinished
business in Iraq to gradually corrode what should have been an
untarnished triumph for Bush's leadership in diplomacy and war.
Yet those who chided Bush for not "finishing the job" by ousting
Saddam seldom thought through the costs and difficulties of such
a mission. "Saddam was not going to sit and wait on his veranda
for us," said Bob Gates, then Scowcroft's deputy. "We saw how
difficult it was to find Manuel Noriega in a much smaller
country with a smaller army." Saddam's ouster would have
required a full-blown takeover of Iraq, incurring additional
U.S. casualties. It would have committed the U.S. to putting a
new government in place and would certainly have splintered the
wartime coalition, leaving the U.S. to do it alone. "Can you
imagine how we would be pounded," Gates said, "if we were
`bogged down' in an `inconclusive civil war' in Iraq?"

    But even victory began to work against Bush. Pollsters
reported that although Americans were mightily impressed with
Bush's performance during the gulf crisis, they resented the
fact that he did not apply the same skills to reversing
America's economic decline. "If he ever exerted the same kind
of leadership on domestic issues that he did in the Persian
Gulf," said Representative Leon Panetta, the California Democrat
who chairs the House Budget Committee, "there's no question
President Bush could have a significant impact."


    BUSH THE CAUTIOUS COACH

    When Bush says he considers himself a conservative, he
sees his role as a conservator: one entrusted with an
inheritance and concerned less with expanding it than with
guarding it. His is an old-fashioned "order" conservatism, which
seeks to impose no new vision of society but rather to defend
the status quo and to avoid mistakes of commission -- in sharp
contrast with the risk-taking, china-breaking conservatism of
Reagan and Barry Goldwater.

    Bush often volunteers, in contrast with the rhetoric of
Reagan, that he does not "hate government." Bush is, however,
deeply skeptical and pessimistic toward attempts by government
to force the pace of human progress. He believes that prog ress
comes, when it comes, through glacial changes in attitudes. When
Bush ran for the U.S. Senate from Texas in 1964, for example,
he made opposition to civil rights legislation the centerpiece
of his campaign. "I believe that the solution to this grave
problem," he stated in a campaign brochure, "lies in the hearts
and goodwill of all people."

    The first duty of a President, Bush believed, was
"prudence," a quality he esteemed above all others. Bush further
defined this duty in terms of the teachings of Hippocrates, the
ancient Greek known as the father of medicine, who counseled
young physicians, In trying to heal, first take care to do no
harm. Though masked by the President's sunny disposition and
boundless energy, the phrase "Do no harm" became a pessimistic
leitmotiv for the Bush Administration. Where John Kennedy won
the presidency in 1960 on the slogan "We can do better," Bush's
byword, uttered often by him and to him in private strategy
sessions, was "We could do worse."

    "I don't want to make any early-term mistakes like Kennedy
and the Bay of Pigs," Bush told his advisers. Bush could always
see the pitfalls he wished to avoid more clearly than any
affirmative goals he might have in mind. Defending his
restrained response to the Soviet crackdown on Lithuania in
early 1990, Bush quoted one of his favorite philosophers, Yogi
Berra, saying, "I don't want to make the wrong mistake." When
he was pressed in late 1991 to fight the double-dip recession
with a middle-class tax cut and extended unemployment benefits,
Bush demurred, endorsing the laissez-faire view that recessions
can be beneficial in helping businesses to become "leaner" and
"more competitive." He added that "my goal is to see that
government doesn't get in the way." Bush also argued that
recessions are largely self-correcting, saying, "That is an
argument for not doing anything dumb . . . that's going to make
it worse."

    Bush often tries to portray his dearth of principles and
his irresolution as virtues. Asked by an Iowa student why he
reversed his stand on abortion rights and embraced Reagan's
staunch pro-life stance, Bush replied, "Have you ever changed
your mind? That's one thing about intellectual honesty."

    At other points, however, Bush has defended his abortion
switch by pointing out that the number of abortions had grown
enormously and convinced him that the practice should be
curtailed by law. This line of argument is common with Bush, and
telling. Few particular practices, whether abortion or S&L
shysters forking out billions in taxpayer-insured deposits to
their cronies in commercial real estate, are abhorrent to Bush
inherently, but only when taken to excess. Thus, after reading
Den of Thieves, the James Stewart tale of Wall Street market
rigging and self-dealing, Bush pronounced himself disturbed by
the "greed" involved but drew no larger conclusions about
deregulation of taxpayer-insured financial industries. Thus, the
moral question at the heart of the abortion debate -- the rights
of a fetus versus those of its mother -- are of less interest
to Bush than the number of fetuses involved.

    Pollster Teeter, like Bush, often quotes former Republican
National Committee chairman Ray Bliss, who advised that in
politics one should always wait a few days before taking an
important position or making a major decision, because "by then,
you might not have to decide at all." With the Democrats in
control of both houses of Congress and with Bush disinclined to
wage partisan jihad, compromise seemed the President's only hope
of accomplishment. Still, even Teeter warned Bush to guard
against the impression that he was some sort of national real
estate broker whose only goal was to close a deal, any deal.
Teeter and other close advisers urged Bush to "tell people what
you would do if you were a dictator, if you didn't have to deal
with Congress."

    Bush seldom followed that advice. Whenever he was asked
why he wasn't leading on some controversial issue -- say, the
need to reduce the burden of regressive Social Security taxes
on middle-income wage earners -- Bush would spread his arms,
shrug and reply, "Why don't Republicans and Democrats [in
Congress] rise up and do something about it?" Bush expected the
Democrats in Congress to take the lead in domestic policy and
told them so repeatedly in private sessions. While Reagan had
staffers dig out Harry Truman's old placard THE BUCK STOPS HERE
and place it on his desk, Bush as President sent the thing back
into storage.

    Bush left no doubt of his defensive, risk-averse
temperament in a 1989 interview about his baseball career at
Yale, where he served as team captain and first baseman, despite
having one of the worst batting averages on the squad. Asked
what kind of manager he would be, Bush replied, "Probably fairly
cautious. I'd play by the averages, probably get people on, be
cautious about too much stealing and bunt 'em over . . . I think
just steady is what I'd say."

    Bush lacks a clear rationale for a second term in part
because the imperative that drove his first four years --
re-election -- will be moot on Nov. 4, 1992. Absent the
political goal of winning a second term, Bush would have no star
to chart by. Already, the Bush White House is in danger of
intellectual exhaustion after not four but 12 years in office.
Many of the brightest Bush aides have no plans to stay around
for a second term because they know the fun that goes with the
heavy lifting of legislation is over. "You've got to get out of
here soon," said one top official as he pondered his options in
the spring of 1992, "because nothing is going to happen here in
a second term."

    A second Bush term would look a lot like the first: more
of the same, only less. Bush would rely on his instincts,
reacting to events as necessary. His goals wouldn't be bold, but
then his actions wouldn't be imprudent. Like the experienced
captain of a cruise ship, Bush would take care to coddle the
first-class passengers, and though he would be indifferent to
the vessel's course and destination, he could at least be
trusted not to sink it.