The rhetorical Bush, the ever-present Clinton, a report from Broadway, &c.

September 16, 2001 12:45 p.m.

n Friday’s installment of this column, I wrote that I didn’t want the president to be a spiritual leader at the moment, but rather wanted him to see to the physical protection of the nation. Period. That’s enough.

It so happened that, right before the attacks, I was writing about and talking with Phil Gramm, who’s retiring from the Senate after three terms. When he ran for president in 1996, he took a lot of heat from people like me when he said,“I’m not runnin’ for preacher.” This was his comment when some of his supporters, or would-be supporters, wanted him to speak more about the “social issues,” or the spiritual condition of the country.

Gramm never gave you much poetry. He was an irascible, hard-headed cuss. But, God, was he valuable.

One of the many interesting things he said in our interview together was that America would never have elected him absent a crisis — it would’ve taken a crisis to put him in the White House, and we didn’t have one in 1996. Naturally, I have thought about this remark in the last few days. Gramm, if he were now president, wouldn’t be preachin’, that’s for sure: He’d be working like hell — quietly, fumingly, undeterrably — on plotting and prosecuting this war.

George W. Bush said he wanted to come to New York “to hug and love and cry” (or something very close to this). When he spoke those words, I actually felt a revulsion. This was a man very much of the Oprah age. And the times — the moment — doesn’t call for a man of the Oprah age, but for a harder, tougher-minded man, someone like Churchill, or — what the hell? — Phil Gramm.

Bush gave some of us further pause in his National Cathedral remarks. He engaged in theological flights, such as, “God’s signs are not always the ones we look for. We learn in tragedy that His purposes are not always our own.” He also said, “Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.”

Rid the world of evil? Perhaps he meant to say “this evil,” alluding to Arab terrorism.

But I must say — and here is the main point of this commentary — that Bush cheered me and many others when he did come to New York and didn’t just hug and cry, in the Oprah-age manner, but stood tall and determined, with that bullhorn.

So, hats off to our Commander-in-Chief, for whose election I so fervently hoped, and with reason.

Bill Clinton was also here in New York. He just couldn’t stay away, when this city was the center of international attention. You remember the old saying, “the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral” ? That’s our Clinton.

I remember when Nixon re-emerged, after a couple of years of lying low. My mother, seeing him on the news, was so disgusted. “I can’t believe it!” she said. “There he is, kissing babies!” I had some of this feeling on seeing Clinton again. And, of course, he will never go away. Not ever. As a journalist friend of mine said, after Hillary was elected senator, “We will never be rid of them. Not ever.”

So true. And one reason is — besides their own egos and characters — that Americans seem to love them. Go figure.

When a reporter questioned Clinton about Osama bin Laden, he answered that, in the 1998 raid, the military had missed him “by a couple of hours, maybe less than one hour.” Was Clinton supposed to say that? Was he supposed to admit that the government, on his orders, had tried to “assassinate” a foreign “leader” ? And if bin Laden was such an obvious threat to the United States, why didn’t Clinton pursue him? Apart from that one, anemic, Monica-diverting raid?

Bill Kristol was one who was furious that people were referring to the attack on the USS Cole as a “terrorist act.” This assault on a U.S. military vessel was not a “terrorist act,” he insisted. It was an act of war.

That was true.

And weren’t the Yemenis terribly helpful thereafter?

Speaking of which, where is Mubarak, where is the emir (or whatever he’s called) of Kuwait, where is King Hussein’s son in Jordan, where is the royal family in Saudi Arabia? Where are the “moderate” Arabs when you need them? Shaking in fear from their more radical subjects in the streets, no doubt.

I was one of the hairy-chested few who maintained that King Hussein was an enemy for siding with Iraq during our war against it, for allowing Iraqi planes to wing through Jordanian airspace in their mission to attack our men and our allies. “But he had no choice,” people said. Ah, but people usually have more of a choice than they think in human affairs, and Hussein made his.

Then, of course, he’d fly his own jet into Minnesota for his medical treatments. What a bizarrely humane nation, America. “The little king,” as William Safire called him, had sided with a monster in a war against us, using his nation’s resources to facilitate our defeat. Any other nation — a less humane one? — would have shot the king’s jet down, “moderate” Arab or no, “no choice” or no, American wife or no.

One has to ask the question: Is America’s military up to the war we now face, or has it been allowed to dwindle to the point of incapacity? Or, more to the point, has it been allowed to dwindle to the extent that we face more casualties than we would otherwise? One of the reasons we suffered only a handful of casualties in the Gulf was that we were very, very well prepared (thank you, Ron).

When Bush and Cheney raised these questions in the 2000 campaign, Gore and Lieberman jumped on them as though they were traitors. Do you remember Lieberman in that (glorious) vice-presidential debate? Turning to the camera and adopting a grave tone, as though giving an Oval Office address, he said, approximately, “I’d like to assure the nation and the world that, despite the doubts our opponents are so unpatriotically sowing, the American military is second to none, capable of doing anything asked of it.” Cheney responded, coolly and logically, that it was not unpatriotic to question our military readiness, but rather a patriotic duty.

Holiday’s over. America has never wanted to be a martial nation, not from earliest days. Too bad. The world keeps forcing it out.

I can give you a little vignette from New York — from Broadway, specifically. My wife and I went to a show on Friday night. We were dreading what might transpire, for we had seen a lot of yellow-ribbon, candlelight-vigil stuff. Would there be some treacly speech? Something gooey and sentimental about “peace” and “an end to hatred” and the ickiness of military retaliation? Broadway types are surely among the left-most, most New Agey people in the nation.

Sure enough, before the curtain, a man walked out. We held our breath. He then proceeded to give an amazingly intelligent, measured, inspired, and patriotic speech about national resolve and the courage to go on. He ended, “America will triumph.”

America will triumph. On Broadway! I clapped so hard, I almost hurt my hands.

After the show, the cast lined up, and this same man asked the audience to join them in the singing of “God Bless America” (which is, by the way, in part a religious song: “Stand beside her, and guide her through the night with the light from above” ). I sang so hard, my throat hurt.

As a friend of mine commented — on hearing this — a lot can change after a national experience such as this. I saw really no difference Friday night between Broadway and the Elks Lodge in Boise.

On Tuesday, the day of the attack, a pianist friend called me. He was scheduled to give a recital the following night on a college campus. He was inclined to go through with it. Did I agree? Of course I did. Our enemies shouldn’t be allowed to stop more than they already have. They want to disrupt our lives. Why let them, to the extent we can help it? Why should these murderers be allowed to shut Beethoven’s mouth (this was an all-Beethoven recital)?

This is one reason I’m disgusted by the decision of the PGA Tour et al. to cancel their events. Myra Hess gave concerts at the Museum during the Blitz. The sound of bombs punctuated her Beethoven sonatas. She symbolized the nation. All loved her.

There is simply no need to sit around sulking and whimpering. In fact, there’s a great need not to.

I think of a beloved old spiritual: “Ain’t got time to die.” Ain’t got time to cringe, to wring hands, to quake. Somberness, yes. Fear, no.

In Florence, there is a sign in virtually every shop window: “Long live America.” Good.

The New York Times, of course, prints the egregious Amos Oz on its op-ed page. This Israeli leftist couldn’t wait until the beings in the World Trade Center had expired before alleging his country’s culpability. I could quote the entire thing — and it is couched and hedged with the usual talk about “no excuses,” even as the excuses come — but the worst statement is ” . . . with or without Islamic fundamentalism, with or without Arab terrorism, there is no justification whatsoever for the lasting occupation and suppression of the Palestinian people by Israel. We have no right to deny Palestinians their natural right of self-determination. Two huge oceans could not shelter America from terrorism; the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel has not made Israel secure — on the contrary . . .”

Where is memory, where is logic, where is simple decency? Why, in fact, does Israel occupy? Did Israelis wake up one morning — as Oz and all like him must assume — and say, “Gee, guys, here’s an idea: Howzabout we occupy Arab land, taking on all the burdens of an occupier and ensuring continual war and enmity against us?”

The Israelis acted as they did — why is this still necessary to say? — because their enemies were using those areas to launch attacks that were killing them. The Israelis acted as they did so as not to die. “No justification,” Amos? How about survival?

As far as the “self-determination” of Palestinians is concerned, what they are “determined” to do is wipe Israel off the map, rejecting any compromise, refusing flatly to co-exist. That is what “self-determination” means in the Palestinian context. I used to think and talk as Oz does, too. Then I turned, oh, 18.

Finally, Oz says that “the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza” has not made Israel “secure.” No, it hasn’t. But it has made Israel much more secure than it would be if the nation’s enemies were still using those bases. And it has made Israel more secure enough to allow Amos Oz to live unmolested as he writes his despicable op-ed pieces for the New York Times and thereby misleads the world.

Anthony Lewis, in his own, utterly predictable Times column, warned that if we attacked in Afghanistan, ” [t]he result would likely be to kill many impoverished Afghan civilians and few if any terrorists.” I love that “impoverished” — a typical Lewis (and a typical leftist) touch. Would it matter if they were rich? To the Anthony Lewises, probably.

Only last November, I was in Cairo, enjoying every moment, desperately sad to leave. I now see chanting, jubilant Cairenes in the street, shouting, “Bullseye!” How can I ever go back? A small minority, a “faction” even? I wonder.

We’re all for free trade here, but I believe the American commercial class will have to look deep within itself — deep within itself as it sells to China (for example), which in turn transfers to Iran, and so on. Yes, the commercial class — which we all support and applaud — will have to look deep within itself. So will we applauders and supporters.

I love this story out of West Bengal, India: “A schoolboy has been beaten up by his teacher for criticizing Osama bin Laden during a class discussion. Koushik Dey was admitted to the hospital after being repeatedly caned by an Urdu language teacher. The teacher later apologized but has been arrested by police after the boy’s father complained.”

Blessings on you, little Koushik.

There has been a lot of talk, the past few days, about the American Civil War, and the casualties that this nation has suffered on this soil.

It struck me, as I was thinking about it this morning, that only twice in my experience did teachers cry in the classroom. You don’t soon forget that: a teacher crying. Both instances had to do with the Civil War. In the eighth grade, my American-history teacher — an older woman near retirement — cried when discussing “brother against brother” and so on. I was deeply impressed by this, knowing that the Civil War must have held a special horror.

The next time, I was in college. This was a course on the prelude to the Civil War, titled “The Ordeal of the Union.” On the last day of class, the professor — reaching for a way to describe the war that had finally come — read Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” and when he came to the part about “ignorant armies clashing in the night,” he cried.

That was a jolting experience: a college professor’s crying. A man’s crying. He was a southerner, which I found significant.

I don’t have an explicit point to make; you can draw your own inferences. I just say, again: Something like that, one doesn’t soon forget.