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October
4, 2002 9:00 a.m. By Saul Singer |
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hen
George W. Bush was elected, the first guess was he would be like his father,
who also happened to be the previous Republican president. But Bush the
father was a bureaucratic pragmatist who came to the presidency as if
to the end of a natural sequence — it was practically the only significant
job in government he had not held.
Bush the son surprised everyone by being much more like Ronald Reagan: a leader who had convictions strong enough to — at least sometimes — trump the pragmatic considerations that normally dominate politics.
Perhaps less noticed, however, is the convergence of the Bush presidency with that of a much earlier White House occupant from another party: Harry S. Truman.
When Truman was sworn in hours after the death of the revered Franklin Roosevelt, the nation went into shock. As Truman biographer David McCullough put it, the news struck "like massive earth tremors... To many it was not just that the greatest of men had fallen, but that the least of men — or at any rate the least likely of men — had assumed his place."
Truman had only become vice president the summer before, having been a barely known senator from Missouri. Though he had gained a measure of respect for his conduct in the Senate, the charge that he was the "Senator from Pendergast" — a reference to the boss of a Midwest political machine — still dogged him with the reputation of an intellectual lightweight.
Nor did this unserious reputation leave him as president. When he ran for reelection three years later, my grandmother recalls that all the "good liberals" at the U.S. Mission at the United Nations, where she worked, were voting for Henry Wallace.
Remarkably, even after leading the nation through such momentous events as the Potsdam Conference, dropping the bomb on Japan, and the launching of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, Truman was still dismissed by the intellectual elite of his own party as the "Senator from Pendergast."
Truman won that election almost as squeakily as Bush won his. But the similarities just begin there.
The first is each had the personal sense of security to surround himself with heavyweights, despite the risk of being outshone by them. Truman appointed Dean Acheson and George Marshall, both considered senior statesmen of their day. Bush found Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld — all of whom carried reputations somewhat weightier than his own.
Even more impressive, Truman and Bush showed they could go head-to-head with their mighty brain trusts and be right in the bargain. Truman did this most dramatically when he decided to recognize the state of Israel eleven minutes after it was declared, on May 14, 1948.
McCullough reports: "Some [US] delegates actually broke into laughter, thinking the announcement was somebody's idea of a joke... Marshall dispatched his head of UN affairs to New York to keep the whole delegation from resigning."
Marshall himself had opposed recognizing Israel so strongly that he told Truman to his face that he would vote against the president if he took that decision. In an eerie parallel with Bush's relationship with Powell, Marshall was appalled that "political" considerations could sway a foreign-policy decision, while his own implied resignation threat became a central part of the political equation.
Bush, for his part, has twice overruled Powell in the most dramatic way: with his "axis of evil" speech that made regime change a centerpiece of U.S. policy, and with his June 24 speech calling for a new Palestinian leadership. Bush may not have done something like firing General Douglas MacArthur (during the Korean War), but his takeover of the foreign-policy arena — which he was expected to avoid out of ignorance — is no less stunning.
But the greatest similarity lies not in bureaucratic gutsiness but in an approach to a moment in history. As alluded to in the title of Dean Acheson's memoirs, Present at the Creation, Truman was the architect of the postwar era. It was Truman who charted the switch from the wartime alliance with "Uncle Joe" to the long resistance to Soviet adventurism. Truman's first decision as president was not to try and postpone the founding conference of the U.N., which came just twelve days after Roosevelt's death.
Though the Cold War ended with the fall of the Soviet Union during his father's term, it is really Bush the son that is forging the "New World Order" proclaimed a decade ago. The vacuum produced by the Soviet collapse was filled by a great burst of freedom, but that burst did not spread as globally as expected.
Until now, our "new world" has been defined more by the absence of Soviet expansionism than by an American evangelism for democracy. The result of this complacency, it was belatedly discovered, was a new menace — militant Islam — tempted to challenge the hegemony of the free world.
Bush, like Truman, is defining the architecture of the West's response to a global enemy it was slow to recognize. It is no coincidence that Bush has found himself challenging the U.N. to deliver or step aside. This is the stuff new orders are made of.
The Bush architecture begins, in a sense, where Truman left off. Truman's order was based on containment. Bush's discovery has been that, when facing an amorphous enemy with increasingly deadly gadgets and decreasing moral compunctions, containment is not enough. His new architecture, therefore, faces outward. As Bush's introduction to the U.S. National Security Strategy put it, "We seek to create a balance of power that favors human freedom ... We will defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants. ... We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent." The difference between containing tyranny and expanding freedom is a sea change; if Bush sticks with it, his place in history is assured.
— Saul Singer is editorial-page editor of the Jerusalem Post. This essay originally appeared in the Post; it is reprinted with permission.