A President Finds His Voice

By MARGARET CARLSON

A man ain't supposed to cry. A hundred movies, books and the bylaws of the Republican Party say so. But the President didn't begin to fill the role of Commander in Chief until he let his eyes well up. Answering a reporter's question Thursday morning in the Oval Office, he teared up and said, "I am a loving guy, and I am also someone, however, who has got a job to do...This country will not relent until we have saved ourselves and others from the terrible tragedy that came upon America."

This transcendent moment erased two days in which Bush blinked his way through TelePrompTered remarks like a schoolboy reciting his lessons. In one of those staged events that are designed to look candid but fail utterly, he paced behind his desk during a photo-op phone call with Mayor Rudy Giuliani, accepting the mayor's invitation to tour his city's wreckage. Bush looked like a nervous teenager making weekend plans, especially in contrast to Giuliani, who was magnificent during New York City's darkest hour. (He had worn a New York fire department cap, and he deserved to wear it.) But this very bad Bush moment was immediately followed by the first very good Bush moment, in which he showed the humanity and resolve--choke up, swallow and keep going, just like everyone else--the public needed to see.

It's a lot to ask of any man to go from the moral equivalent of war to a real one in nine months. In this land of plenty, we tend to treat everyday problems like major crises. Until Tuesday, the measure of Bush rested on whether he or the Democrats would be the first to open up a lockbox that doesn't even exist. The bar for his success was keeping the looming recession shallow and short.

Now the stakes are as high as they can get. No wonder Bush looked the way he did Tuesday. He disappeared for precious hours in a bunker in Nebraska, which cost more precious hours the next day, as his aides tried to quiet criticism from his allies on the Hill that he should have returned immediately to the White House. (Senator Chuck Hagel reminded his colleagues that "this isn't a John Wayne movie," and he was right.) But this was the wrong time for spinning.

When Bush listened to his p.r. team and worried about his image, he was at his worst. When he listened to his conscience, turned his back on evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who had suggested that the bombings might be God's wrath on gays, lesbians, feminists and civil libertarians, he was becoming the kind of leader we need. And when he mourned victims and comforted survivors and rallied the nation from the rubble, he began to discover his best.

Bush choppered into lower Manhattan Friday to stand at the center of the terrorist winter, surrounded by men and women working day and night to help the living and recover the dead. He had come to thank the people the whole world wanted to thank--the cops and fire fighters, the pipe fitters and welders who had left their jobs uptown to pull up the ruins downtown, the paramedics working 36-hour shifts. As much as anyone or anything, it was the images of these people doing their grim, ceaseless work that kept the country together. Bush was at home among them.

When the cameras went off, he met with 200 family members of missing and dead police officers and fire fighters. There was no plan to the meeting, and that was perfect. These hurting people just came up to him, pressing their stories, their pictures and themselves on him. Bush let the tears flow freely, but he's got "a tough cry," someone there said. A staff member later said, reluctantly, "It was Clintonesque," the one thing Bush vowed he would never be. Oh, the silly things we used to worry about before Tuesday. Clinton was ridiculed once upon a time as Mourner in Chief, but in truth he didn't own the office until the tears ran down his cheeks as he comforted the survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Now Bush has to get us all to put on hard hats, give up comfort and certainty and indulgence for something larger than ourselves. It's not going to be as hard to start this war as to continue one that doesn't yield victory without ground troops in a country that's a guerrilla's dream and a general's nightmare.

During the campaign, we were assured that even if Bush was not seasoned, he was surrounded by those who were. But every history book tells us how war renders a President an island unto himself. As Senator Harry Reid observed after leaving a White House meeting in which Bush was surrounded but singularly responsible, "For the 535 of us in Congress, there's always one of us standing around to lean on. He's there alone."

Bush's father had the same people around him during Desert Storm, but he bore the solitary burden of a President at war. On Friday at the Washington National Cathedral, after the President delivered his homily, Bush senior reached over to squeeze his son's hand, his eyes not looking at him but raised toward the heavens. Like few others, he knows that the President is on his own.