A Busy Thursday

By Hugh Sidey

The world is misbehaving again, and George Bush's puppy presidency, like Jerry Ford's English-muffin phase, has passed from American screens. Once again, as so often before, troops moved through the night; a defiant dictatorship strode the dark streets of a tiny, helpless nation; NATO complained and quibbled; the Soviets unexpectedly moved a bishop in the great chess game of power. The convicted ghost of Ollie North haunted Pennsylvania Avenue, and House Speaker Jim Wright -- a linchpin in this Government, like him or not -- teetered. The weary old terrestrial sphere was either too hot or too cold and capricious in doling out its moisture. God may be in his heaven, but for the nonce he is not a Republican and not at the end of Bush's overheated phone line.

From dawn to dusk these days, Bush has taken the dewy path along the Rose Garden and wondered about his fate. Not in despondency -- that is not his nature -- but in a detached, curious and wary way. Once he looked up after long hours of deliberation and said, "The decisions are getting tougher." So true. No good answers present themselves. He chooses now from the best of the bad, which is the usual way in government. Last Thursday his crisis pace reached its peak, as shown in these remarkable pictures.

Between the global troubles, the President spent time with Richard Darman, director of the Office of Management and Budget. "I've been talking about 1991," he said with a rueful smile, "and I don't like a thing I've heard so far." For the moment Mikhail Gorbachev, the wily Slav, and General Manuel Noriega, the Latin scoundrel, hold the spotlight, but Bush knows that in the long run, the monstrous, suffocating federal budget may be his biggest threat.

As the world has closed in on him, Bush has gone to his faithful telephone. Just 15 minutes before he was scheduled to make his statement to the nation on sending troops to Panama, Bush paused in his hurried preparations and put in a call to Costa Rica's President Oscar Arias Sanchez, the Nobel Peace laureate, even though he had spoken with him just a few hours earlier. "I'd just feel better if I know what's on his mind," the President said.

As the minutes ticked down to airtime, he suddenly looked up and asked, "Is there anything else I should know about?" One of his assistants said that earlier in the day Gorbachev had made a new proposal on arms reduction but that the U.S. had not fully digested it. "What is it?" Bush snapped. "Find out." Aides scurried for information from National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Bush tucked the new development away in his mind without comment, a kind of armor against questions that might arise in his upcoming press conference.

Almost every morning now it is somewhat the same. The first light is just touching the old elm planted by John Quincy Adams when a somber-suited CIA briefer with his bagful of woes pulls up beside Bush's desk. The cables from the secret operatives have grown distinctly more worrisome. By 7:30, when the angry traffic has built up on streets beyond the iron fence, Bush has heard from Scowcroft and chief of staff John Sununu. The President's own gleanings from his ceaseless phone calls and television viewing are cranked into the day's crisis agenda. Last week he glanced at the men around him, his principal national security staff, and said, "I saw on TV last night those pictures of Billy Ford ((Panama's opposition vice-presidential candidate, beaten by Noriega's goons)). They had tremendous impact, seeing him standing up to those beatings." Few things are as sacred to Bush as the free election process. Seeing it violated so savagely hit him particularly hard.

In the world of presidential crises, last week was about a 3 on a scale of 10 -- no great threat to civilization. Yet there is a law in the exercise of power: whatever the true dimensions of a crisis, it tends to fill the time and space of the moment. Bush needs to understand that and keep things in perspective. He may.

Walking through the gathering dusk, he marveled at the world that had plagued him for the preceding twelve hours. Then he suddenly brightened. "Well," he said, "I think I'll call up George Plimpton and ask him down to play some horseshoes."