The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

Colonel John Bourgeois and the U.S. Marine Band are up to speed on the national anthems for Poland and Rumania, but they have some polishing to do on Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and, who knows, maybe Albania. The way things are going, figures director Bourgeois, the leaders of those nations will sooner or later show up at the White House for a state function, and the President's own band will have to tootle them down the red carpet.

All over Washington, savvy men like Bourgeois are changing old rituals and recasting attitudes for the future rushing in on them. It is a future, says Foreign Affairs editor William Hyland, that will present a more unusual challenge to the President than any "since Harry Truman in 1945."

When George Bush took office about a year ago, he could look around at a tidy club of democratic, market-oriented friends staring across a wall at a bunch of backyard bullies. The wall fell down, the bullies were chased off, and now everybody wants into George's club.

"We've got a freedom circus going on over here," declares Treasury's Deputy Secretary John Robson, an Administration coordinator for East European aid. "But it is a lot more than three rings." The arrival and departure of delegations on economic planning, marketing, trade and technical expertise are expected to rise geometrically in the next year or so. Treasury and the stodgy old Department of Commerce could be as important in this new world as the Pentagon was in the last one.

Spies, arms merchants, nuclear strategists are "out" in this capital, which wickedly records such events. Economists, trade wizards, industrial planners, tariff analysts and venture capitalists are in demand. So are people with deep knowledge of the culture and history of the nations now changing their political and economic systems. "In some ways this is like the Europe of 1914, and we need people with a sense of history," declares Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, insists that anyone with a knowledge of Rumania and Poland could have foretold that change would come to one nation violently, the other more in peace.

From the Oval Office Bush will see not the scarred proletariat leaders of the old era, not the stout peasants who survived Nazi tanks, but lawyers, scientists, writers and an assortment of creative malcontents. Few will be easy to please, and none will be impressed by the Sixth Fleet. Around the White House winded staffers are predicting that Bush will want to meet them all, and if they don't find their way to Pennsylvania Avenue, he will drop in on them.

Even Henry Kissinger talks with reverence and, perhaps, envy when he views this swirling epoch. "This will be a truly historic presidency," Kissinger says. Just back from Hamburg, where he met with scholars and thinkers from both East and West Europe, Kissinger was fascinated with the difference. "The West Europeans were pragmatic," he relates; "the East Europeans were elemental, emotional, very moving in their idealism. We just can't mumble to them." What better tutor in this changing world than Thomas Jefferson, who long ago counseled, "We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather bed."