The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

The scholars and connoisseurs of power have a task: to describe and label the new presidency that George Bush has wrought in the past few days. Princeton's political historian, Fred Greenstein, suggests that rarely, if ever, has there been a time in the past half-century when "so many elements of the world's mosaic" have been lined up in America's favor, made to order for a tradesman like George Bush. Says Greenstein, with an appreciative chuckle: "George Bush the networker, the hyperkinetic, the gadfly, the follower of specifics."

That will never boil down to a bumper sticker for the 1992 campaign. And if Murphy's Law (Whatever can go wrong, will) holds in the hot sands around the Persian Gulf, Bush may want to forget it. Yet there seems to be something at work around the globe for the moment that is in favor of the U.S. Greenstein wonders if some good chickens are coming home to roost for this country after our decades of dispensing money, instruction and hope. "Saudi flyers were trained by us," he notes. Others observe that many government officials in many countries, both friendly and doubting, went to Harvard and listened to the lectures of Henry Kissinger.

Bush has devised his own leadership constellation. It has a core of aides who meet, travel, eat and drink with him. There are Cabinet officers and diplomats who come in and out of the circle, flung to distant points for crucial negotiations.

Familiarity with the byways of this planet pervades all levels of this operation. Most of the great warships in the Middle East or on their way have been there before, officers and crew knowledgeable to some extent about the region.

$ Back home, Bush keeps moving: White House to Camp David to Pentagon to Kennebunkport to wherever. He pops up to shake a fist, then pumps out a smoke screen of fuzzy gray words. The blockade is an "interdiction," the detained Americans are not called hostages, and what is happening is not war but a defensive operation. Bush's press conference last Tuesday sounded like a court deposition. He talked about advice from his lawyers and his rights under the U.N. Charter.

While the world was watching Bush, the often maligned military was conducting an operation that sent more men and materiel farther and faster than at any other time in history. This huge cavalcade was not exactly secret, but nearly a week went by before the vast size of the operation dawned on an astonished world. It was typical Bush style: quick, secret decisions; mobile command post to avoid becoming hostage to any place or group; voluble talk that builds confidence, sets a mood but reveals few specifics.

"If George Bush succeeds, he will become the dominant world leader," says former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The superstars of recent months, like Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl, will be swept to the side of the board. "Only America could have put together the diplomacy, the military power and the economic measures to do this," says Kissinger. "So far, this is an action of enormous sophistication and skill."