The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Uruguay's President Julio Maria Sanguinetti, chatting with George Bush, spotted him first. Sanguinetti muttered a low warning to the U.S. President that Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, who had just entered the room at Costa Rica's Hotel Cariari, was headed toward them. Bush squared himself, picking up the Sandinista comandante in his peripheral vision. He was poised for this power game that is played with body language and photo opportunities. Adversarial heads of state strive to gain a psychological edge over one another and to make points with the vast electronic audiences that watch these dramas. In this odd world where image is the message and sometimes the meaning, the outcome can be critical. Bush vs. Ortega is not a World Series, but it is a ( measure of Bush's response to a defiant bush leaguer. "Not a relaxed setting," Bush told TIME last week, recalling the encounter at the Costa Rican summit on democracy. "But I was not going back to refusing to shake somebody's hand." He was harking back to 1954, when Dwight Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles ignored the outstretched hand of Chou En-lai in Geneva, humiliating the Chinese Premier and further complicating the dismal relations between the two nations.

"Ortega strode in," Bush related. "I was not sure whether it was a defensive stride or a take-command stride. He made his way around a table toward us. He is a bigger and broader man than the common perception. I noticed his uniform, the very bright khaki cloth and the bright red bandana. I don't say it to denigrate the Boy Scouts, but he looked like a senior Boy Scout leader."

The President kept his resentment under control. He was suspicious of Ortega's posturing but not then aware that the dictator planned to end the truce with the contras. "It was literally a photo opportunity," Bush said. Sure enough, Ortega's photographer rushed his shots to news organizations; the White House refused to release its own pictures. "We greeted. We shook hands. He had a firm handshake. He looked me in the eye. He did not lock on or anything like that. He was not defiant. We'd met before."

Ortega's orchestration of their meeting and his stunning announcement about ending the Nicaraguan cease-fire brought a flare of public anger from Bush the following day. "It was instantly, gratuitously offensive, and I felt I had to draw the line," said Bush last week. "Ortega abused the hospitality of the other nations. He showed himself as a small person."

Intrigued as well as irritated, Bush kept up his character study throughout the two-day summit in San Jose. The night that El Salvador's Alfredo Cristiani criticized Ortega publicly, Bush looked down the table to his right at the tilted chin, the solemn profile of the Nicaraguan President. "He just stared off into the distant horizon," Bush recalled. "There was in the room a sense of total outrage at what Ortega had done."

Back at the White House, Bush examined the pictures his photographers had made of Ortega. In shot after shot, Bush noted, was that same fixed stare beyond the people around him, a lonely man both at home and abroad. "Now, we keep pushing him," Bush said. "We don't let him off the hook of holding free elections. He is trapped as the current of democracy goes against him."