`I will not yield. I will not rest.'
George W. Bush finds his presidential footing on a most unfamiliar terrain
George W. Bush has found his mission and his moment. Never more can critics label him merely an affable Texan backslapping his way through a benign era or an untested, fortunate son of a former president. All that was swept away on the morning of September 11, when the grim fates again had conspired and the dark forces of history had issued another colossal challenge. The man who never professed to have much of a worldview suddenly had donned both the mantle of a wartime commander in chief and--in an extraordinary transformation--the cloak of a proselytizer against global terrorism.
He embraced these missions with uncharacteristic eloquence and self-reflection in his half-hour address to Congress last week. At one point, his eyes filling with tears, he described how the mother of martyred New York rescue worker George Howard had presented him with her son's police badge. "I will not forget this wound to our country, or those who inflicted it," the president declared. "I will not yield. I will not rest. I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people."
In the process, he abandoned a lifelong habit of setting limited, realistic goals and lowering expectations. "Our war on terror . . . will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated," he said. If serious about that vague and open-ended objective, he risks the perception of failure if Osama bin Laden is not captured or killed, and the possibility of immersing the nation in a Vietnam-style morass, only on a much farther-flung scale. For one thing, he has not left himself what his father called an "exit strategy"--a clear way to end the war. "We can drop a million bombs, but all the terrorists have to do is blow up a stick of dynamite in one of our cities and we're back to square one," says a former senior adviser to former President George Herbert Walker Bush. "All it takes is one more guy willing to commit suicide. You can't eradicate an idea or an ideology with bombs."
There is no small irony in the emergence of the new George W. Bush. The unilateralist finds himself organizing an international coalition against what he calls the heirs of fascism, Nazism, and other ideologies that ended in "history's unmarked grave of discarded lies." The conciliator who called for a civil tone in Washington now trafficks in bellicose words. In a fundamental way, he is adopting the philosophy for which his father was always known. The first President Bush, a World War II hero shot down over the Pacific, once said he saw his life in terms of "missions defined and missions accomplished." Now the son, who spent the Vietnam War flying National Guard jets and partying across Texas, is trying to emulate his dad. No one knows whether it will be a good fit.
Crisis management. Longtime advisers say Bush resembles his father in another way: as a crisis manager. "He approaches it with the same kind of focus, discipline, and methodical approach the former president did," says a family friend. "He is building a case against the bad guys and preparing to go get them. But he knows not to do anything until he and the country are ready." As he villainizes Osama bin Laden, just as his father did Saddam Hussein, and as he organizes the world against evildoers, the son is also under the tutelage of several of the same advisers who served his dad. Foremost among them: Vice President Dick Cheney, a former defense secretary, and Secretary of State Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
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