Peggy Noonan

On Wednesday Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld met with the troops at Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base to grip and grin, take questions and fill them in on the war so far. The troops were gathered photogenically in what CNN called the living and dining area of the base and what looked like a big cavernous hangar, which happened to have a jet parked in the background.

It was billed as a town-hall meeting with American airmen, and it reminded me of what Richard Brookhiser once said of presidential campaigns, that it’s the outside story—the public statements and speeches, the things voters can see and are meant to see—that tends to be more interesting and important than the inside story of who said what at the meeting.

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Mr. Rumsfeld’s appearance gave rise to some thoughts, mostly about him.

He has of course, since Sept.11, emerged as a singular presence in the war. At first it was startling: all that interestingness wrapped up in such blandness. Mr. Rumsfeld looks like the competent mayor of a midsize metropolis, or the savvy CEO of a midlevel company. Gray hair, gray suit, silver-rimmed glasses. He looked the other day like a beige and silver guy in a tired red tie.

And yet these days he seems, as leaders go, a natural. Much has been written about his skills, and though the amount of interest being paid to him is inevitable—he’s a WASP wartime consigliere, an interesting thing in itself—a lot of it misses the point.

As a communicator he’s clear as clean water. He seems ingenuous. He talks with his hands. He’s thought it through and knows a lot and tells you what he knows. At first you sense his candor and clarity and enjoy it without realizing it. Then you realize you must be enjoying it because you’re still listening. Then you sense that his candor and clarity are in the service of intelligence and clean intentions. You find yourself following what he says, following the logic and the argument. Which makes you ultimately lean toward following him.

He’s Bushian, but he seems more interesting than George W. Bush, and not only because he is more experienced, an accomplished veteran of past governments. (He was first elected to the House 40 years ago; the first time he was Defense Secretary was in 1975, when he was the youngest ever.) He has a certain merriness, which is a good thing in a war leader when it is not a sign of idiocy, and it is a knowing merriness. Mr. Bush in contrast has comic, joshing moments, and Dick Cheney has genuine wit.

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Mr. Rumsfeld, like Mr. Bush, uses plain words to say big things. He can use plain words because he isn’t using words to hide. He can afford to be frank, and in any case it appears to be his natural impulse. He can afford to be frank because we are at war, and part of winning is going to be remembering that we’re fighting, and why, which is not easy when there’s so much on sale at the mall. Part of Mr. Rumsfeld’s job is to tell the American fighting man and woman, and the American people who pay for the defense establishment, what is going on in the war, and how, and where, and why, and what the future holds. It’s his job, in effect, to be blunt, to increase consciousness, and to enhance our determination while damping down pointless anxiety. It’s a delicate dance, and yet he doesn’t seem to be dancing.

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When asked by an airman how long the war will last, Mr. Rumsfeld said that question is quite close to him because every morning when his wife wakes up she asks about Osama. “Don, where is he?” He tells the airmen, “There’s no way to know how long. It’s not days, weeks, months; it’s years for sure.”

Asked if the U.S. military will wind up occupying Afghanistan, he calls that “unlikely,” but says the U.S. wants to help Afghanistan build and train its own army. He foresees “a military-to-military relationship.”

It’s clear when he speaks, and because it’s clear you can follow it, and because you can follow it you consider following him.

This as we all know is not always the way with leaders. Usually people like secretaries of defense and secretaries of state and United Nations representatives say things like this: “We have to remember, Tim, that the infrastructure of the multinational coalition in conjunction with the multilateral leadership entities inevitably creates potential for a disjunction of views that requires cooperation, coordination and cohesion from member states.”

Some of them talk like that because they’re hopelessly stupid and are trying to hide it. Some of them are just boring. But a lot of leaders talk like this because they don’t want to communicate clearly. They want instead to create a great cloud of words in which the listeners’ attention and imagination will get lost.

They’re not trying to break through with thought, they’re trying to obfuscate. They are boring not by accident but by design. Because they don’t want people to understand fully what they’re doing. Because they know what they’re doing won’t work, or is wrongheaded, or confused, or cowardly, or cynical, or just another way to dither, or will more likely yield bad outcomes than good.

We should all try to keep this in mind when we watch “Meet the Press” and someone is being especially boring. Henry Kissinger once joked that the great thing about being famous is that when you’re boring people think it’s their fault. But it’s almost never “their fault.”

Anyway, instead of giving a dull, windy and dissembling answer when asked about the war coalition, Mr. Rumsfeld cut through to the heart of it. He said it exists to do a job, and the job, not the coalition, is what counts. “You have to let the mission determine the coalition, you don’t let the coalition determine the mission.”

So that’s the key to Mr. Rumsfeld: candor and clarity plus specificity, and all of it within a context of a war that itself, so far, makes sense and is just.

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Mr. Rumsfeld offered one answer that, while demonstrating a grasp of the question’s many different layers, failed to capture something that probably needs capturing.

Asked by an airman what the armed forces are going to do to retain experienced personnel, Mr. Rumsfeld spoke of pay raises, spare parts, morale—“every one of you has to know that you’re needed.” He said we need a military command that has enough imagination to see who’s good at what and make sure they’re assigned to it.

All good as far as it went—pay and parts and a psychological sense that one is noticed and appreciated are key, always. But so is something else that one senses has gone by the boards the past decade or so, and it has to do with the whole mysterious tangle of motivations that leads a man (or woman) to join up to defend his country. The thing that make him take as his job protecting the strangers who are sometimes ungrateful countrymen; the thing that tells him to put himself in harm’s way and live the loneliness of the job; that tells him to risk his life so that my son and yours can sleep peacefully through the night. The whole mysterious tangle that leads them to join is also, in part, what leads them to stay. And to my mind it comes down to sissy words like love.

“Only love will make you walk through fire,” it was said of the firemen of New York on Sept. 11; only love will make you enter that cave in Afghanistan, too. We just don’t call it love. We call it a solid job and a good pension system.

The other day I got a letter from a guy in the army in Bosnia, telling me about his duty there and including an essay about the Christmas party the troops at his base threw for the badly damaged children in an orphanage west of Tuzla. Friends and relatives of the American troops had sent wonderful gifts for each of the hundred or so children; the children in turn had dressed up in paper party hats and put on angel wings and sung songs and recited poetry. When it was over, the American soldier thought of something his history teacher back home in Michigan had taught him. You cannot escape history, the teacher had said, for history is not what happens in books, history is what will happen to you.

The American thought of how history had smashed the lives of the children in the orphanage. And then he thought of how history, in the form of “the treasure and sweat of America’s finest” had also given those same children a new chance “to grow in peace.” It was American troops acting through history who had done that.

It was clear from what the soldier wrote that his spirit and intelligence were engaged not only in the fight in Bosnia but in protecting Bosnian children, and therefore Bosnia’s future. What that knowledge did to his pride and sense of mission was obvious. He didn’t use the word love—he is a soldier—but that’s what he was writing about.

Last summer I went on a U.S. Army Web site, a recruiting site actually. I’d gone there because I wanted to write something about Medal of Honor citations, and I wanted to read them. I found to my surprise that when you go to a U.S. Army Web site what you mostly see is how much money they pay and how they’ll put you through school. That’s good and needed information, but there wasn’t any of the deeper meaning of serving—no history of the U.S. Army, no Medal of Honor citations, no essays from Bosnia. It was all slogans and salaries. It was all about pay. Which recruitment specialists apparently think is the prime motivator for joining up. Surely it’s part of it, but it couldn’t be all, and if it is we’re in trouble. An army runs on its stomach, Napoleon famously said. But it fights with its heart and its spirit and soul.

Mr. Rumsfeld (U.S. Navy, 1954-57) seems the kind of leader who would appreciate this, and give it some thought. Maybe there are things that can be done to remind the world—and the members of the armed forces—who they really are, and have been, and can be. It may be in part a whole mysterious tangle, the motivation of the men and women who fight for us, but Mr. Rumsfeld better than most could probably see that it’s addressed with clarity and candor.

The other night in New York, the Council on Foreign Relations hosted a fascinating debate between the always interesting Richard Perle, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration who now serves as an adviser to the administration on the Defense Science Policy Board, and Leon Fuerth, whose career in foreign affairs has taken him from Capitol Hill advising Democrats to the office of the vice president, where he was Al Gore’s national security adviser.

The subject of the debate was Iraq, and what the Bush administration’s plans and attitude toward it ought to be.

In the spirit of Kausfiles’ “Series Skipper,” which as a public service boils down the information in long newspaper series, I will attempt to capture the more than hour-long debate. (I was not there but listened to reports from friends who were, and later read the transcript.)

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Mr. Fuerth began with a striking directness. American policy toward Iraq begins here: “We need to get rid of Saddam Hussein.” But we need to get rid of him on our schedule—“at a time that we have prepared under conditions that we have set in motion.” Mr. Fuerth opposed “pivoting out of Afghanistan and moving on to the attack in Iraq.”

The current crisis, he continued, began with an attack by a terrorist network, not a state. What happened in New York and Washington was an international event, plotted in Germany, financed by money from around the globe, executed by operatives trained in the U.S. This is a global network. It didn’t come out of Baghdad or Tehran. We must focus our time and resources on preventing terror networks from using weapons of mass destruction against us. They had attacked us before—our embassies in Africa, the USS Cole. Because it is a global network, the fight against it must be global.

At the same time we cannot ignore Saddam. We should see to it that he is forced to spend time and effort “defending himself” from internal challenges that the U.S. can help set in motion. Perhaps the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress could become a force; perhaps internal opposition will rise. A return to “draconian weapons-inspection rules” under U.N. auspices is also needed.

Also, America must “prepare a homeland defense against the moment when we take on” a nation-state such as Iraq. This job will not be finished in six weeks or six months.

But yes, he said, ultimately we’ll have to reckon with Saddam. “A moment does have to be picked. Right now, exactly now, coming out of Afghanistan, is not the right moment.” Now is the time to focus on the global terror network.

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Now Mr. Perle spoke, with the bluntness and occasional sarcasm that characterize his rhetorical style.

“We cannot wait,” he said. Saddam is “attempting to acquire nuclear weapons.” He may have them in a year or two. He does already, as we know, have chemical and biological weapons and has already, alone among nations, used chemical weapons against civilians, Mr. Perle said.

Saddam’s hatred for the U.S. is murderous. “He is a threat to us,” argued Mr. Perle. He is a tyrant whose loathing is “undisguised.” He is “in contact with networks of terror.” He is in a position to use weapons of mass destruction against us “delivered anonymously.”

We cannot wait and hope he’ll do nothing, Mr. Perle said. As we wait, we risk giving Saddam time to distribute his biological weapons to al Qaeda.

As for the Iraqi National Congress, the Clinton administration in eight years and the Bush administration in one year have done nothing to make them ready to help on the ground in Iraq. They are not ready and indeed will not be ready to rise against Saddam until America moves on Saddam, Mr. Perle said. “At that point we will set in motion what it takes to make them ready.” Only then, once we move, will they be “our allies on the ground.”

Mr. Perle concludes: We waited too long to deal with Osama, and he struck. We must not repeat this mistake with Saddam.

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Mr. Fuerth answers. Yes, he agrees that Saddam is “malevolent and dangerous.” But why then march on Iraq and not Iran, which is also dangerous? Mr. Perle speaks of the risk of waiting, says Mr. Fuerth. But what about the risk of “premature action”?

The INC is not at this time a fighting force, it is fractious and untrained.

Intriguingly, Mr. Fuerth seemed to imply that the Joint Chiefs of Staff would have to be “overruled” by President Bush if he ordered a fast military action out of Afghanistan and into Iraq.

Mr. Perle replies. If Mr. Fuerth thinks Iran is as big a threat as Iraq, why doesn’t he recommend action against Iran? “I don’t think he’s prepared to take any action against any state,” Mr. Perle says. Which, he implies, is the real reason Mr. Fuerth puts emphasis on moving against a nonstate entity, the international terror network.

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Mr. Perle says it is good that Leon Fuerth agrees we must win the war against terror. But we must “take that war to the states that harbor and support terrorists.” Once those states know they will have no peace until they throw the terrorists out, the terrorists will be thrown out, be exposed, and we will get them. If we “shy away” from taking on “the states that support them” the terrorists will continue to find and enjoy state sanctuary from countries such as Iraq. Which is to say, they will continue as a real threat.

As for homeland defense, Mr. Perle’s definition of it was limited, and his attitude fatalistic. “An open society” such as ours has “poor prospects in making this country impermeable,” Mr. Perle says. Now the most ringing and direct Perleism: “We have to take the war to them because of our inability to prevent them from bringing it to us.”

Mr. Perle said he is not advocating making a move a month from now, or two months from now. But we must make the decision to move, and choose strategy and tactics now. Mr. Fuerth, he said, doesn’t want to take the risks. But the greater risk is doing nothing and leaving Saddam more time to plan, gain strength, take the initiative.

Moderator Les Gelb asked the question of the hour. If Saddam believes the U.S. is coming after him—and with the administration’s “axis of evil” rhetoric and the strong poll numbers supporting the president, Saddam might certainly likely conclude the U.S. is coming—then why shouldn’t Saddam come after us now?

Mr. Perle’s reply was both low-key and chilling. “He may.” Saddam may indeed “act pre-emptively.” But we cannot let that fear stop us. Indeed, it should stiffen our resolve: Saddam has got to go.

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In the question-and-answer session that followed, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg asked what we knew, essentially, about Saddam’s sanity. “It seems to me an important question in this debate is the extent to which Saddam is rational,” he said. Will Saddam refrain from attacking us in a way that would cause us to remove him from power?

Mr. Perle replied. “I tried to suggest earlier, and let me make it more precise, Saddam has available to him the option of empowering anonymous terrorists to do great damage in this country. There’s a great deal of evidence that suggests he would be immensely pleased if damage were in fact done. So working deterrents against an anonymous threat is extraordinarily difficult. Suppose a significant quantity, a few pounds, of anthrax were released over this city from a tall building. Suppose we suspected that Saddam was behind it, and suppose the terrorists who did it committed suicide in the course of it. Could we then act, and how?

“We might have the option of a brutal attack against civilians in Baghdad,” Mr. Perle said, but that “hardly seems to me an appropriate or an effective way of protecting the United States. Which is why I think it’s essential that we get ahead of the problem, since he has the capacity to do something like that, and conventional deterrents cannot be made effective.”

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So, that’s the Series Skipper version.

Some thoughts. One does get a sense of what a Gore administration foreign policy might have been from Mr. Fuerth, who himself might have become an NSC advisor for President Gore. One senses that policy would be marked by talking, hoping, waiting and worrying. There’s a lot to worry about so that’s not all bad, but it’s not all good either. From Mr. Perle, on the other hand, we get a sense of impatience: move, and now! But he did not communicate an impression that he is thinking of the civilian cost that might be incurred by the operatives of an invaded and enraged Saddam.

It is interesting, the tradition whereby the very best, most imaginative and textured discussions and delvings into world politics have come not, as a rule, from the elected officials of the world’s democracies but from, if you will, the hired hands of diplomacy—those who do not run for office but help those who do. Part of the reason is obvious—elected officials have real reason to avoid dramatic thoughts colorfully put. And part is less obvious. The hired hands are almost always cleverer, and often deeper, than their principals. St. Thomas More was, in all ways but power, the superior of Henry VIII, and George Kennan—who among other things developed the policy of containment—is a cleverer man than most of the presidents he served. This isn’t surprising, but it’s always interesting.

As for the debate itself, Mr. Fuerth did not elaborate on exactly what he meant by “homeland security,” and Mr. Perle chose to define it for him, and narrowly. Homeland security, he suggested, is the daily effort of our government to keep terrorists off our planes, away from our nuclear plants, out of our country. With our famously porous borders and our famous personal openness, this is indeed difficult. A determined bad guy has many points of entry.

But I thought that when Mr. Fuerth referred to homeland security he was speaking not only of law enforcement. I thought he was also referring to what I think of homeland defense, which includes the putting in place of systems whereby American citizens are made safer when an attack has come. This would include but not be limited to increased efforts to produce various vaccines and medicines, the return of some kind of fallout shelters with independent ventilation systems, etc., and increased production and availability of nuclear-biological-chemical suits and masks. Whatever will make our citizens a little safer, or a little safer a little longer, is a good thing. If it means taking some time to help people survive a dirty bomb or the unleashing of smallpox, and the time can be taken, why not take it?

That is my first point. My second is more frivolous but I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while, and actually it’s not frivolous. Since we have entered the age of weapons of mass destruction, since we are immersed in the fact of them and will no doubt be shaped in part by their existence, we need a way of speaking of them with a phrase that is easier to say and easier to grasp than “weapons of mass destruction” or WMDs. Ideas for a new name for WMDs are welcome, and will be forwarded to the administration.

Third, and as important as the first point: The Perle-Fuerth debate, for all its disagreement, underscored what most observers have sensed the past few months but few have clearly said. The debate reflected a most extraordinary change in our foreign policy. Only a year ago the idea that left, right and center in America would be saying “Saddam must go” would be too farfetched. The idea that a year ago we would be engaged in a war in Afghanistan with left, right and center behind it would be similarly unthinkable. The idea that all would back hunting down and killing the head of a terror network—again unthinkable. The idea that the only real question on moving on Iraq is how and when—unthinkable.

How did this all happen? It happened after we all woke up happily on Sept. 10, 2001, and went to bed happily that night. And then, a few hours into the next morning, the world changed forever. Talk about the law of unintended consequences. The man who planned and created the terrible deed that day signed his own death warrant, signed the death warrant of his movement, may well have signed Saddam’s, and left an America stronger and more united than it had been in a very long time.

This is fortunate indeed. May our good fortune continue.

A small band of former aides and friends of Ronald Reagan were all over TV this week talking about the former president on his 91st birthday. Our memories and reflections were treated with thoughtfulness and respect by the media. It wasn’t always this way but I’m glad it is now, and I think there are reasons for it.

Journalists feel an honest compassion for Mr. Reagan’s condition—everyone is saddened by the thought that this great man who was once so much a part of our lives no longer knows he was great, no longer remembers us. It’s big enough to be called tragic: this towering figure so reduced by illness. Part of it too is a growing appreciation of Nancy Reagan, who is doing now what she did for 50 years, protecting him, protecting his memory and his privacy. Only now she does it 24-7 at the age of 78, and without the help and comfort of the best friend of her life: him. She told me some months ago how to this day she’ll think of something and want to say, “Honey, remember the time . . .” Or something will happen and she’ll want to ask him what he thinks. And of course she can’t.

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It is also true—I am sorry to be cynical, but I have worked in media, have enjoyed and even shared its cynicism—that the hungry maw of every network and cable news show is hoping, on the day the former president leaves us, to get the Get. To get Mrs. Reagan on the air, or the former president’s children, or his associates in history. The more sympathetic they are now, the better the chance they’ll get the Big Get. And this is understandable. It’s what news people want to do: Get the story.

Whatever the reasons, it’s good to see Mr. Reagan’s memory held high by those who admire and understand him, and have the arguments for his greatness heard with respect in the media.

But let me tell you why we make those arguments as often as we can. When I talk about Mr. Reagan, media people often preface my remarks, or close them, with words like this: “You adore him.” Or, “You of course have great affection for him and so it’s your view that . . .”

These are not unfriendly words, but they’re a warning to the viewer: Take what you hear with a grain of salt. Needless to say the grain-of-salt warning doesn’t come when the subject is, say, JFK or FDR or Martin Luther King, all of whom had friends, supporters and biographers who have spent decades advancing their causes with affection and respect.

And that’s why those of us who talk about Mr. Reagan talk about Mr. Reagan, why we stick to the subject. After he leaves us the media may well conclude that they have no particular reason to listen politely when we speak of him. So we do it now.

And we do it because history is watching. Because young people are coming up. Because new generations rise and look at the past and think: Who was great, who was worthy of emulation, who can I learn from? Children whose parents have not for whatever reason led them or nurtured them sufficiently sometimes feel a particular need to look at the historical past and think: Who can I learn from there as I try to put together a good life?

Who indeed. There is something the past few days I’ve found difficult to communicate on TV, in part because it sounds pretentious in the chatty atmosphere of the newsnook, but it’s at the heart of what I’m trying to say. Laurens van der Post, in a memoir of his relationship with Carl Jung, said that we all forget the obvious: “We live not only our own lives but, whether we know it or not, also the life of our time.” We add to that larger life or detract; we give or withhold, we lead or shrink back, we put ourselves on the line for the truth or we ignore the summons, we meet the great challenge of our age or we retreat to our gardens. It is not bad to tend your garden, and is in fact necessary; you can find wholeness, solace and truth there too. But to tend it and also step forward into history, to step into the life of your age, to step onto history’s stage and seek to take part constructively, to try to make your era better—that is a very great thing. And that is what Mr. Reagan did, and successfully. He helped his world.

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Ronald Reagan’s old foes, the political and ideological left, retain a certain control of the words and ways by which stories are told. They run the academy, the media; they control many of the means by which the young—that nice, strong 20-year-old boy walking down the street, that thoughtful girl making some money by yanking the levers of the coffee machine at Starbucks—will receive and understand history.

But the academy and the media may not in time tell Mr. Reagan’s story straight; and if they do not tell the truth it will be for the simple reason that they cannot see it. They have been trained in a point of view. It’s hard to break out of your training.

Those of us who lived in and feel we understood the age of Ronald Reagan have a great responsibility: to explain and tell and communicate who he was and what he did and how he did it and why. Where he came from and what it meant that he came from there. What it meant, for instance, that he came from the political left, was trained in it, and then left it—for serious reasons, reasons as serious as life gets. And: what it cost him to stand where he stood. That is always one of the great questions of history, of the story of a political or cultural figure—“What did it cost him to stand where he stood?” You learn a lot when you learn the cost.

If we don’t tell the young they’ll never know.

That is why we don’t let the subject pass. It’s too rich with meaning. To speak of Mr. Reagan honestly, to speak of his fabled life and his flaws, is to make a contribution to the young, who 10 and 20 and 40 years from now will be running history, and who will need lives on which to pattern their own, lives from which to draw strength.

The young could do worse. The young often have.

State of the Union addresses are usually reviewed in terms of “eloquence,” or “drama,” or how the overnight polls register the public’s reaction. But for sheer seriousness, for the depth and scope of the information imparted, the president’s State of the Union the other night was, simply, staggering.

I’m not sure everyone fully noticed, but about five minutes into it George W. Bush laid the predicate for what will no doubt prove a costly war marked by high casualties some of which, perhaps many, will likely be civilian.

That is what he was saying when Mr. Bush asserted that North Korea has weapons of mass destruction aimed at the West, that Iraq continues to hide its WMDs, that old allies such as the Philippines are increasingly overrun by those who want the West dead, that the Mideast and Africa are the home of similar and connected terror movements. Nineteen men caused havoc on Sept. 11, he said, but the camps they were trained in have pumped out 10,000 more, “each one a ticking time bomb.”

The president was blunt in unveiling what will perhaps be known as the Bush Doctrine. And that is that the United States will no longer hope for the best in the world and respond only after being attacked; we will, instead, admit and act on the facts of the WMD era and actively search out our would-be killers wherever they are and whoever supports them and shut them down dead. The Clinton model of inadequate response based on ambivalent feeling is over; likewise the Bush I model of cat-herding coalitions and anxious diplomacy is over, though coalitions and diplomacy are nice, especially when everyone agrees to do the same thing at the same time in the same way.

This is about as big as presidential statements get. Where and when will America move next? Mr. Bush did not say. How long will it take? Ten years. Or, as he put it, this “decade” will be “decisive” in “the history of human liberty.” This was not rhetoric. In fact, the speech was blessedly free of the faux poetry that is often mistaken for eloquence. Mr. Bush’s eloquence is in his plainspokenness, in the fact that each word is a simple coin with a definite worth. The speech was fact-filled, dense and not airy. Its main point was to tell the American people we are in the fight of our lives and that we had better win, and will.

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It was not a laundry-list speech, as State of the Union addresses usually are. It was not a laundry list because we are at war, and so there are essentially only two items on the president’s list, the war and reviving the economy that, among other things, supports the war.

Mr. Bush also is not by nature given to laundry-list speeches. One senses he understands that politicians who do them are trying to obscure the fact that they don’t have a philosophy. They hope the adding up of program upon program will give the appearance of philosophy. But Mr. Bush has a philosophy. It is conservative. Freedom is the God-given and natural state of man, the government exists to protect man’s freedom, and the greatest and most reliable freedom protector in all of human history is: us.

That’s what “Let’s roll” means to him. Let’s be us.

For a man who is famously not smart Mr. Bush certainly is smart. The president seems to me these days to be operating as a person of essentially two halves. The first half is Sheer Gut—a sharp and intelligent instinct, an inner shrewdness, an ability to see the bottom line, decide priorities, and see the difference between what is desired and what is needed. The second half, as the liberal pundit Bill Schneider said on CNN after the speech, is “character.” People can tell, Mr. Schneider said, that when Mr. Bush says he’s going to do something he actually means to do it.

A great gut plus a reliable character is maybe the exact perfect mix for any president, but certainly for a wartime president.

*   *   *

On non-war issues the president continued to paint himself merrily and sympathetically as a man who stands for giving the little guy the tax cuts he needs . . . for using honest faith to answer public problems . . . for a strong defense, a strong military, a pay increase for the soldiers sailors and Marines who put themselves in harm’s way so we can sleep safely at night. He put himself forward as the man who stands for winning the war and encouraging the rise in well-grounded patriotic feeling.

Mr. Bush’s opposition at the moment appears to have been reduced to agreeing with the president on just about everything and then saying, “But let’s make sure we don’t run a deficit!” Mr. Bush is talking life and death, love and honor and they’re running around talking like accountants. The Democrats of Congress seem at the moment to be acting like liberal Republicans during the Great Society, always worried about the cost of things and never the meaning. Without a message they wince; they are acting like what H.L. Mencken said of the Puritans, that they lived in constant fear that someone, somewhere is having a good time.

And I am not sure the coming deficit will have much traction as a political issue for the Democrats. The public by and large seems to know that (a) there’s a war on, (b) we all want whatever defense systems or weapons that can keep us alive to be bought and deployed, and we’ll worry about the cost later when we’re still alive, as opposed to dead, and (c) oh heck, Ronald Reagan said we’d grow our way out of the last deficit and we did, let it go.

I quoted Bill Schneider praising Mr. Bush. After his speech, the liberal historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said the president’s words were “galvanizing.” Chris Mathews compared him to Jack Kennedy. The New York Times said Mr. Bush has “soared to new heights.”

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In the old days elite opinion held that Mr. Bush was a scripted trust-fund dullard whose rise was greased by luck and birth. Those were the days. Those of us who stood with Mr. Bush then were a small and hardy band of criticized contrarians. It was fun. We had secret handshakes and everything. Now everyone’s in on the act.

It is not, in general, good for presidents to be so universally praised. Politicians are made dizzy by love. They lose their edge, their purpose, and coast. But Mr. Bush has earned this support, and in any case wartime is a good time to unify behind a president—particularly this war, particularly this president.

And it’s also true that those who once dismissed Mr. Bush and now praise him are demonstrating an honesty and high mindedness that is wonderful to behold after the sapping, sour 1990s. It really is refreshing—literally refreshing—to have a president people admire and can follow cleanly again.

I know a man who once ran a big international company, who had done very well in life and was happily retired. Years after he left the company, it went public in an IPO that would make all the company’s officers even richer than they were, which was already pretty rich. The company’s retired executives got together and decided to press for a piece of the pie. They had to fight for it, and it got messy, but in the end they all got some more money.

I asked my friend, during the controversy, why the retired members were fighting so hard. Had some fallen on hard times? No, he said, not to his knowledge. Did they need the money for immediate and pressing concerns? No, he said, not that he knew of. “Then why is this such a big deal to them if they’re already rich?” He looked at me with the kind of face people get when they hear something truly inexplicable. And then he said in a pleasant, explanatory tone, “Everyone wants more.”

It was my turn to get the inexplicable look. Because not everyone wants more, or at least not everyone wants more in circumstances like that. The idea of getting into a struggle to squeeze out another $5 million when you already have a $100 million seemed to me absurd, a misallocation of energy and interest. It’s not as if you can buy a better steak if you’re already that rich. It’s not as if you can buy a better anything. So why fight for another five?

*   *   *

I have thought of this conversation ever since the Enron scandal began. Enron’s officers, its leaders and top dogs, were really rich. They created a big company out of nothing and did very well. But then when things went bad—when their own decisions, apparently, drove the enterprise south—they made sure they would stay rich. They did this by quietly selling off their stock while the peons below them were not allowed to. While the peons below watched the worth of their stock erode, and then fall, and then plummet. The big guys had to stay rich. Everyone wants more.

It is, to me, an amazing, an almost unbelievable story. And I bring a particular and personal knowledge to it.

You have heard the past few weeks of journalists, political figures and others who were advisers to Enron or served on its board. I was not an adviser or board member, but in 1997 I spent two days in their Houston headquarters touring the place and meeting with their top officers to get to know the company so I could work on a speech with the CEO, Ken Lay, and work with his people on the CEO’s letter in an upcoming annual report. They wanted the report to be interesting to read, like Jack Welch’s famous letter to shareholders at the beginning of General Electric annual reports. I’d never done work like that before and wound up never doing it again, in part because I wasn’t good at it, and in part because I realized I just didn’t get modern big business.

*   *   *

The people I dealt with at Enron were mostly middle-level workers, and they were terrific—smart, dedicated and loyal to their company. They worked like dogs. They’re probably among those who just lost much of their money. One of the things they believed in as good public policy was deregulating the sale of consumer electricity in America. I supported it too but had reservations about it. I understood the basic arguments: that deregulation held the promise of lower energy costs for consumers, cleaner and more efficient energy, profit for private sector investors in those companies that would compete to provide energy, such as Enron, and, ultimately, a spur to more inventions that would make consumers’ lives better.

Deregulation was part of the reason Enron asked me to come down and talk to them. For I had told an Enron worker I’d met in Manhattan that making the case for the deregulation of anything these days, especially a commodity that has been a public utility since before almost everyone in the country was born, would be difficult.

When I went down to Houston, I met with Enron’s No. 2, Jeff Skilling, and told him I felt Enron would have a big problem in persuading the American people to support deregulation. The reason? Two words: Too complicated.

He told me that deregulation of electricity is certainly not complicated.

Well, I said, maybe you’re right, but this is how I see it. American consumers have a myriad of choices on almost everything now, which is wonderful in the abstract but often hellish in the particular. For instance, telephones. When I was a kid you got a phone from the phone company. There was only one phone company, so you didn’t have to do research. They came and put in the jack and you called your friends. You didn’t even choose the color of the phone when I was a kid; all the phones were black. Everyone had the same kind of phone and the same service. It was easy.

Now there are 50 phone companies, 50 kinds of phones, 50 kinds of service, 50 package deals, five different phone bills every month, phone companies calling at dinnertime to sell their wares, secret codes to get our messages. And it sometimes makes you feel like you wish there could be one big phone company again, and one black phone.

I told him that it is fabulous that we have such choice, such progress, but that it’s burdensome too. I sometimes miss the simplicity of the old, limited world. And I thought if I did, some others did too. Asking people to make individual decisions about what local electric company to use just might be one item too many on the average consumer’s Daily Decision List.

Mr. Skilling got a sort of dark look as I spoke. And finally he said, impatiently, that phone deregulation has made telephones not more expensive but less. “Do you know what it costs to call London now compared to the way it was?”

I said I didn’t, and thought: Most people even today, in 1997, aren’t calling London all the time. That’s not how normal people judge progress. And anyway it’s not the point. Life has gotten too complicated for a lot of people, that’s the point.

*   *   *

Let me tell you what I saw when I was there. I saw cavernous rooms with big monitors on the walls, and on desks too. The monitors and computers were blinking out numbers. I remember the numbers and words on the screens as bright green. Young future Masters of the Universe were standing with phones, monitoring the numbers, saying things, buying and selling. I met with a woman famous in the company for being in charge of putting big natural gas pipelines into Central or South America and India. She seemed intense and intelligent and, like the men, very Armani but kind of Texas Armani—everyone well tailored but with more gold, more colors than Wall Street people, who are sort of more gray-hued.

I thought Ken Lay intelligent, soft-spoken, somewhat opaque. At one point I met Mr. Lay’s wife. It was just after I returned from Houston, and I met with him in an Enron suite at a hotel in New York. Mrs. Lay was visiting New York and had just come in from a long day of shopping. I was introduced to her and what I remember was she was wearing beautiful soft tailored black leather slacks. They were like movie-star pants. And I thought: Boy, these people have a lot of money.

And I thought, they spend a lot of money. That was one thing that hit me hard in Houston: They were “hemorrhaging money!” as Tom Wolfe’s Sherman McCoy said. They were building this and tearing down that, they were, they told me, talking to legislators in various state houses, lobbying to get deregulation bills passed. All of it seemed expensive, labor-intensive, time-intensive.

And it all seemed so tentative, so provisional. The Enron building was huge; the Enron sign outside, the big tilted E, was huge; the gold earrings on the women executives were huge; the watches on the men were huge; the paychecks were huge; the company’s ambitions were huge. But all of it seemed to depend on things that were provisional. If they are able to build the big pipeline in India, it will be great and profitable—provided it happens. If they are able to get states to deregulate electricity, and Enron is able to provide it, and it all goes well, it will be great and profitable—if it happens. If the Central or South American pipeline goes through and works and runs a profit it will be great—if it happens. An empire built on ifs. It all seemed so provisional.

*   *   *

I went away for a few weeks and worked hard and tried to put together a speech and make a contribution to the annual report, but none of it really worked. Mr. Lay used at least part of the speech I worked on, about deregulation and its challenges. Some of what I tried to write for the annual report made it in. But mostly my contributions weren’t helpful, and I think for two reasons. One was that the guys at the top, and in the middle, seemed unable to communicate to me exactly what it was the company was doing to make money. So I didn’t absorb the information and make it understandable to others. The other was that I think I sensed a sort of corporate monomania at the top—if you can’t understand what we’re doing then maybe you’re not too bright.

But the key part was that I couldn’t help them explain their mission because I didn’t fully understand what their mission was. I understand what the Kenneth Cole shoe company does. It makes shoes and sells them in stores. Firestone makes tires. I couldn’t figure out how Enron was making its money, what exactly it was selling, and every time I asked I got a kind of gobbledygook answer or a cryptic one, like “The future!”

We should all have a realistic sense of our limits, and I decided that one of mine is that I don’t have a mind that appears to be able to understand the complexities of modern big business. But my dimness was in this case helpful to me. It meant I would have not a long relationship with Enron but a short one that lasted about a month. And it allowed me to make another choice. A friend, on being told I’d been to Houston and was working on an annual report, told me: “Get paid in stock, that company is golden.”

But it didn’t seem golden to me, it only seemed confusing. So I sent them a bill, charging, if memory serves, $250 an hour for the 100 to 200 hours I worked, which is more than a first-rate psychiatrist and less than a first-rate lawyer. This is what I used to charge for speeches in those days when I did them.

I never worked for Enron again. I stayed in touch with a few of the midlevel people for a while, but they all left in time. I’d think of them now and then, wonder how the company was doing, read or hear that it was No. 1, top in the field, golden. Until it wasn’t anymore.

*   *   *

I’m speaking of all of this because I feel I have to in order to write about Enron. And I have to write about Enron because I have strong views about the scandal.

I am a conservative, and so a Republican. I believe that conservatives and Republicans have a special responsibility, as the party that stands for free markets, to see to it that free markets work, and are not abused, gamed or finagled. Republicans and conservatives have, I believe, a special responsibility to come down hard on people who cheat their shareholders and their employees.

Obviously the primary question at the moment is whether anyone from Ken Lay on down literally violated the criminal code. The Justice Department is investigating. This is good. But it seems to me the administration might consider a special prosecutor in the case, too.

President Bush yesterday changed his tone about Enron, admitting that what its leaders appear to have done angers him. That’s good. But more anger is needed, or rather a greater and more obvious commitment to get to the bottom of the scandal.

Representatives of Enron, as everyone knows, met with Vice President Dick Cheney’s office before the administration put forward its energy bill. Congress is demanding the notes and records of those meetings. The vice president is refusing, on principle: It would be a violation of executive privilege. Mr. Cheney explained the other night to Tom Brokaw that the principle is an important one: A president and vice president simply have to preserve their ability to meet with and talk candidly with citizens and groups on policy issues, and the candor is compromised if all the details of every meeting are made public.

He is no doubt correct, and his arguments would, one suspects, be upheld by the courts.

But the administration could both insist on the principle of executive privilege and, in this case, waive it. Just waive it. They could announce that Congress can, in this special case, see all of the notes and materials on the Enron meetings.

Why should the administration consider doing this? Because the Enron case is special—huge, damaging to individuals and damaging to faith in free markets. Because, as I’ve said, Republicans have a special responsibility as the free market party to support the transparency of those markets. And there is a third reason, which is merely political, but then politics is rarely mere. If the administration continues to resist the request for documents and fight in the courts, its victory may well be Pyrrhic and its potential loss even more painful. Because as long as the administration doesn’t come forward with everything, the issue remains alive and potent for the opposition’s use.

(Yes, Enron was, like most big corporations, a corporate whore in terms of its contributions. It gave to both parties; it gave to both Clintons. But the Republicans will be hard-pressed to shake the Democrats’ insistence that this was largely a Republican problem. And in any case it would be good to see just how Enron operated politically in its dealings with both parties—which is to say, it would be good for the public to have more information about big business and politics, not less.)

Finally, those who insist the law should change with respect to accountants certainly seem to be correct. It appears to be a conflict of interest when an accounting firm that audits a company also receives millions of dollars for consulting—that is, millions for advising the company on business decisions even as they’re getting millions for reviewing its books. This is what appears to have happened with Arthur Andersen and Enron. It’s hard to understand why and how this is legal.

*   *   *

It’s not true that everyone wants more. It’s not true that “everyone does it.” And it’s not true that free markets are rigged, a sucker’s game. But it does seem that the party that stands for free markets and free economic dealings has a special responsibility to make sure that those who abuse them are given one big Texas whippin’.

Someone once said the White House is the only sieve that leaks from the top, but the Bush White House is, so far, famously leak-proof. Or rather almost leak-free.

And that is amazing.

How could it be? How did it happen? And is there any chance it will continue?

*   *   *

The Bush White House doesn’t leak because George W. actively and affirmatively does not want it to.

From 1981 to 1993, George W. Bush spent 12 years of his life, from the ages of 35 to 47—the years of full adulthood when you absorb Life’s Major Lessons—watching leaks almost kill the administration in which his father was vice president, and then arguably destroy the administration in which his father was president.

Dubya learned to hate leaks. And to hate leakers. And boy do his people know.

Here are some of the leaks Dubya witnessed in the Reagan-Bush era. A year into Ronald Reagan’s first term, his most influential domestic adviser, David Stockman, went to the liberal Atlantic Monthly magazine and spilled into its pages the darkest night of his dark soul. The tax cuts were evil, the deficit irresponsible; spending can’t be controlled; we’re in “an economic Dunkirk”; supply-side theory is nothing more than “trickle-down economics.” Mr. Stockman was speaking of course at the exact moment in history when the economy, as Mr. Reagan prophesied, was beginning to burst from its old constraints and yield the Great Abundance, which, for all its ups and downs, is with us still.

But Mr. Stockman’s leak was truly destructive, not only to Mr. Reagan personally but to his administration’s standing as an earnest and believable entity. For it gave Mr. Reagan’s great nemesis, the American establishment, enough ammunition for the next 20 years of propaganda. “It was all smoke and mirrors, his own budget director admitted it.”

Mr. Reagan soon said he’d had it “up to my keister” with leaks, but, being Ronald Reagan, he ultimately treated Mr. Stockman with mercy. Mr. Stockman repaid him by suggesting in his memoirs that if Mr. Reagan had been a real leader he would have canned him. Mr. Stockman then left for Wall Street, where he prospered in the greatest peacetime economic expansion in all of U.S. history—which resulted from the policies he’d done so much to denigrate. Life is funny.

*   *   *

George W. Bush saw that leak and more. He saw the ketchup-is-a-vegetable leak, the White-House-staff-in-constant-turmoil leaks, the Iran-contra leaks in which operatives on Capitol Hill and in the independent counsel’s office whispered to the press that Vice President Bush was soon to be named, subpoenaed, indicted.

It was all so damaging. The Reagan-Bush years were a leak feast, and every morning sophisticated White Houseians woke up to grab the Washington Post to find out what reporter David Hoffman had today. They’d read, interpret, analyze, deconstruct. I can remember conversations in the halls of the Old Executive Office Building in which Joe would say to Bob, “I know that was Frank’s unattributed quote in the Hoffman piece, no one else around here would use a word like ‘coruscating.’ ”

I knew a man who was an infrequent but truly gifted leaker. He was so good at it that he managed to leak in other people’s language. One of the man’s enemies was a guy down the hall who had the habit of punctuating other people’s remarks with “Absolutely!” My friend the leaker would use “Absolutely!” in his unattributed quotes so his enemy would be the first suspect.

George W. Bush in those days witnessed a political culture in which Lee Atwater was leaking against Ed Rollins to Time in one office and Ed was simultaneously leaking against Lee to Newsweek in another. I remember hearing one story of a 1984 Reagan campaign staffer who leaked so much and so often about strategy—he never came up with any strategy, he just heard about it at meetings and then spent the rest of the morning on the phone telling reporters what we were going to do next—that one day one of his bureaucratic foes locked him in his office and told him he was going to watch the outside lines, and if one of them lit up he’d come in and drag him straight to his boss. Everything was strangely quiet for a few hours, so the fellow poked his head into the leaker’s office and found him under his desk—literally under his desk—with someone else’s phone in his hand, leaking.

This really happened.

*   *   *

Part of the reason for the leaking in the Reagan-Bush era, especially the Reagan era, was that both White Houses were riven by a left-right split, by philosophical and ideological divisions. People leaked bad stuff about Team Conservative to help Team Liberal. In the Bush administration it all culminated in the most destructive leak of all.

In 1991-92, when Budget Director Dick Darman, a liberal Republican, wished to give his version and view of Bush 41’s tax-cut pledge and its rescission, he went to his friend Bob Woodward, of the Washington Post. The Post of course is the Washington establishment newspaper, read by all Washington powers and all embassy staffs, which wire home its contents. And so when Mr. Darman leaked to the Post, part of his intention was to make his claims, memories and point of view the Official Version.

But Mr. Darman got tripped up. Mr. Woodward had told Mr. Darman he was interviewing him for a book to be published down the road and Mr. Darman, as an old friend, took this at face value. But once Mr. Woodward had everything he wanted from Mr. Darman and others, he informed the budget director that, unfortunately, he has an agreement with the Washington Post that any time he discovers major news while working on a book he has to share it with the paper’s news desk.

And so, shortly before Election Day 1992, with President Bush struggling against the odds to hold onto his presidency, the Post published a series saying that Mr. Bush never meant the tax pledge, never intended to keep it, and the president’s own pollster had been eager to raise taxes from day one.

It was devastating. And Dubya was watching it all. And he hated what he saw.

One of the things he saw, by the way, was not only that leaks were destructive, but they were uniquely destructive to conservatism. Liberals had big media, elite media, establishment media, from the newspapers to the networks, to leak to. It was the liberal pipeline: Turn it on in the Post or Times and it will flow into ABC and CBS. Conservatives didn’t have a media structure to effectively leak to. They had small weekly papers like Human Events, the fortnightly National Review, the brand-new Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. But there was no Non-Liberal News Alternative in those days, no conservative media infrastructure, no Rush, no Drudge, no Internet, no Fox News Channel.

So Dubya learned that not only did leaks destroy but they tended to destroy conservatives. And Dubya was a conservative.

*   *   *

From the minute he went into politics, in Texas, at the top, the governorship, George W. Bush let his people know: Leak and you are out. He told them they could be frank with him and frank with each other in meetings, that he needed their candor and expected disagreement. But as soon as he read about it on the front page of the Houston Chronicle, you are out of here. He let them know he would find out who did the leaking, for leaking is something he understood. He had spent 12 years watching the masters.

Mr. Bush also surrounded himself in Texas with tight, talented and competent people as opposed to visionaries and venturesome thinkers. Visionaries and venturesome thinkers talk; communicating is what they do. They fall in love with their ideas, and come to dislike those who oppose them. They sometimes lash out at them; they sometimes leak.

When he got to the White House, Mr. Bush kept his Texas staff and added on people he respected from his father’s term—people who to a man hated the culture of leaks and had been damaged by them in their previous lives.

*   *   *

So: Mr. Bush’s White House doesn’t leak. But how does Mr. Bush enforce his No Leak Law? In a way he doesn’t have to. It enforces itself. It’s in place; he brought it with him; it’s there.

But there’s more. On deep background I spoke to someone I know/have never met/once had lunch with in the Bush White House/Executive Office Building/Cabinet. He/she/it did not want to be identified. I asked, “How do you guys/gals/things get the word that you can’t leak? How does the White House enforce it?”

The man/woman/top aide/peon answered—this is a real quote, which on the rules of background I’m not supposed to use but so what: “Let me close my door. The reason this place doesn’t leak is because people have to look up and down the hall before they talk. Killing leakers might have a deterrent effect!”

But he/she/it said it was interesting, no one ever tells you not to leak, it’s just something you pick up. There are signs and signals. They are expressed institutionally.

Certainly Mr. Bush showed his resolve on leaks when, after Sept. 11, classified information he’d shared with some congressmen wound up in the press. Mr. Bush came down hard, spared no feelings, slammed the Hill and ordered a directive limiting the dissemination of U.S. intelligence. Jake Tapper of Salon compared him to “a master hitting his dog with a rolled up newspaper.”

The Bush White House is a White House of empires—Karen Hughes’s empire, Karl Rove’s, Josh Bolton’s, Andy Card’s. The people who work for them take their cues from them. If Ms. Hughes doesn’t leak, her empire doesn’t leak. And Karen doesn’t leak.

I called Mary Matalin and asked her why this White House doesn’t leak when every other White House she ever worked in did. She said, “There’s this notion (in the press) that this White House is just so well disciplined and well organized. They think it’s run like a camp!” But the real key to the success of the No Leak Law is simple: “Because we have a common agenda we’re not trying to advance any position but the president’s. So we don’t use the vehicle of leaks to advance our own agenda. The Washington press thinks of leaking as ‘conflict leaking’—you leak to them to advance an agenda that is apart from the president’s, or to force an argument in a certain direction. We don’t have that. There aren’t any separate ideological or policy vents, we’re here to advance his policy. Previous administrations, you didn’t like the way it was going you’d leak it out in the press.”

Then she said something no White House aide in modern history has ever felt compelled to say, “We do leak!” she insisted. “We leak stuff all the time about what we’re doing and why, but it’s not conflict leaking.”

And they leak what Mr. Bush wants leaked. “He speaks in English not just to America but to us. He makes the agenda clear. It’s not unclear, there’s no guessing, what he’s thinking or wanting or going—he’s straightforward.”

There’s another way Mr. Bush enforces the No Leak Law, and it’s that he appears to obey it himself. He doesn’t leak. He doesn’t share with an aide details of a conversation he had with a Democratic senator and then wave his hand as if to say, “Make sure the Post finds out.” He doesn’t leak against Democrats. He doesn’t leak against Republicans. He doesn’t against his staff.

Previous presidents have, thinking they had to become part of the game. Mr. Bush just thinks he had to shut the game down.

*   *   *

What is the public benefit of the No Leak Law?

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy often chose not to meet with his top military and civilian advisers as they gathered down the hall trying to come up with options on what to do about the Soviet missiles aimed at America from 90 miles off the Florida coast. JFK’s instinct: When the president is in the meeting some people become inhibited, some are afraid to be candid. And what he needed was their uninhibited candor.

So he didn’t go. He was briefed later, by his brother and others, and made his best choices based on the best thinking.

In the Bush White House it’s the press that isn’t there, at the meeting. It is “briefed later,” by “others,” such as Don Rumsfeld in his daily news conferences.

The president gets what he needs to hear, the public gets what it needs to hear, and there are fewer harem-scarem headlines, which in wartime even more than at other times is a good thing.

But—a big but—has a bright and industrious little serpent attempted to invade this leakless Eden?

Yes.

Guess who’s working on a book on Dubya’s first year, or Dubya’s first year and the war, or the Afghan war, or the continual fighting between State, Defense and the National Security Council over Dubya’s first year, the war and Afghanistan?

Big Bad Bob. Woodward, that is. He is reported to be hammering all over the place looking for leaks, trying to make them spring. Who would be his sources? I can guess and so can you, but the more sophisticated and experienced guesser would be one George W. Bush.

I wonder how he intends to handle it. I wonder what he’s doing about it. I wonder if the No Leak Law will prevail or, if it doesn’t, I wonder if Mr. Bush will choose to cooperate, and have his people cooperate, on the old theory that if you cooperate with certain people you’re paying a kind of protection money: Talk and the whole story won’t be told to your disadvantage, refuse to talk and you’ll be portrayed as the fool. “In this town,” as Bob Novak once famously said, “you’re either a source or a target.”

Wonder what Mr. Bush and his people will choose to be. Wonder if they’ll figure out a way to be neither.

There’s a small but telling scene in Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down” that contains some dialogue that reverberates, at least for me. In the spirit of Samuel Johnson, who said man needs more often to be reminded than instructed, I offer it to all, including myself, who might benefit from its message.

The movie, as you know, is about the Battle of the Bakara Market in Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993. In the scene, the actor Tom Sizemore, playing your basic tough-guy U.S. Army Ranger colonel, is in charge of a small convoy of humvees trying to make its way back to base under heavy gun and rocket fire. The colonel stops the convoy, takes in some wounded, tears a dead driver out of a driver’s seat, and barks at a bleeding sergeant who’s standing in shock nearby:
Colonel: Get into that truck and drive.
Sergeant: But I’m shot, Colonel.
Colonel: Everybody’s shot, get in and drive.

“Everybody’s shot.” Those are great metaphoric words.

*   *   *

Let me tell you how they seem to apply metaphorically. An hour before I saw the movie, I was with friends at lunch, and they filled me in on the latest doings in our beloved country while I was away. Cornel West is very, very angry at Larry Summers for suggesting that Prof. West shouldn’t essentially perp-walk his way through the halls of academe. A Secret Service agent—a presidential Secret Service agent!—had a hissy fit when an airline pilot refused to let him board a plane carrying his gun with dubious paperwork. The agent is not only threatening a lawsuit, he says he doesn’t want money when he wins. He wants the airline to be forced to give sensitivity training. I thought: I think someone needs sensitivity training all right, but I don’t think it’s the airline.

Just after the movie, I picked up Ellis Cose’s latest book, “The Envy of the World,” about the “daunting challenges” that face black men in 21st-century America. I read and thought, Earth to Ellis: Everyone faces daunting challenges in 21st-century America.

Because everybody’s been shot.

What does that mean? It means something we used to know. It means everyone has it hard, everyone takes hits, everyone’s been fragged, everyone gets tagged, life isn’t easy for anyone.

*   *   *

I turn on morning television and see Rosie O’Donnell referring again to the fact that her mother died when she was young. This of course is very sad, and Rosie has spoken of its sadness very often, and with a great whoosh of self-regard. Her sympathy for her loss made me think, the other day: She doesn’t really know that other people lost their mothers when they were young. She doesn’t really know that some people never even had mothers.

She doesn’t know everybody’s been shot.

I put on HBO and see their new young poet’s show. Young poets—well, they say they’re poets; I guess they’re more like performance artists—come on and sort of strut around a stage and yell, and the more authentic their anger seems, the more the audience applauds and hoots. These poets seem attached to their separateness and in love with their grievance. “I am one angry Lebanese lesbian,” “I am one angry NewYorican mother-lovin’ whatever.” They pour out their pain. But they don’t actually seem to be in pain. They all look like they went to Brown and hang out downtown and have invested fully and happily in the Misery Industrial Complex. They look like they want an agent.

They’re not old enough or, in spite of Brown, bright enough to know: Everybody’s been shot.

A young friend of a friend is still so depressed by Sept. 11 that school and social life and going to a show are now out of the question. “I’m staying home. I’m hurting.”

I know, I said a few days ago when we talked. But everyone’s hurting, I explain. Then I thought of Tom Sizemore. “Everyone’s been shot,” I said, “ya gotta get in and drive anyway.”

*   *   *

When I was a child in the old America, people said things like, “It ain’t easy.” Then they’d shrug. Or, “Whatta ya want, life ain’t easy!” I think people actually sighed more in those days, issued forth big long sighs that said: Life is hard. There was a sort of general knowledge that each day would not necessarily be a sleigh ride, and that everyone hits bumps along the way, and some of them are really hard, and everyone sooner or later hits them.

But now, more so than in the past, something has grown in our country, grown perhaps because of good things like psychotherapy and bad things like group-identity politics. And that something is an increasing tender regard for one’s own sensitivities and quirks and problems and woes—twinned with a growing insensitivity to everyone else’s quirks and problems and woes.

This is not progress. If we became more aware of others instead of demanding that others be more aware of our needs, we would probably get a better fix on life, a better perspective, a better sense of everyone’s context. We’d wind up more patient with others, more sympathetic. We could actually wind up sensitive to someone other than ourselves.

*   *   *

I sound earnest today. I am earnest today. But I will make this more fun. The week included the story of a congressman, who through no fault of his own, was humiliated, treated with great insensitivity. I am speaking of John Dingell, the Democrat from Michigan. Mr. Dingell, as you know, is an important veteran congressman who has grown used to—how to put it?—asserting his needs and seeing to it that they are met.

John Dingell was trying to get on a plane the other day when his artificial hip set off a magnetometer. He pointed out that it was an artificial hip, and I suspect he pointed out that he was a member of Congress who does not fit the prevailing terror profile. But you know what the security guards did? They took him into a side room, made him take off his pants and wanded him. John Dingell had to stand there in his underpants proving he wasn’t carrying a gun.

When the story became public, the secretary of transportation called him and apologized. Mr. Dingell waved him off and told him it was OK, he understands, everyone’s doing his job.

Now that’s someone who knows that everybody’s been shot.

One year ago he stood before us, right hand raised, a new president chosen by a shade less than half the American adults who are responsible enough to bother to vote. He had been certain of victory and shocked by the closeness and the Florida aftermath. The weekend before the polls opened, Al Gore strained for every vote; George Bush went home early, making the almost fatal decision of responding with what seemed wan disinterest to a well-wired last minute revelation of a drunk driving incident in his past.

And it all seems so long ago.

He is not the minority president anymore, he is the president. His approval ratings are in the 90s. He saw that happen to his father, whose popularity was at 90% a year before he was voted out. Because George W. Bush remembers this well he does not operate under the illusion that 90% of the people think he’s just great, and mean to rehire him in 2004. He thinks of polls as thermometers: Today he is at 98.6, hale and healthy. Tomorrow he may run a fever. Things change.

He knows his father’s popularity slid in part because his father saw his numbers as a jewel you could wear. He didn’t have to do anything with his popularity, he just had to wear it. This works if your luck holds and doesn’t if it doesn’t. The economy began to falter. People looked at him and thought: “I’m getting laid off and he’s walking around with a jewel called ‘The American People Love Me.’ I think I’ll take it away from him.” They did.

George W. Bush watched and learned.

A year ago he stood before us and spoke of “the angel in the whirlwind.” In the last year he found whirlwind and angel, and the finding changed everything.

*   *   *

Sept. 11 did many important things. Somewhere on the list is this: It gave shape, purpose and meaning to the new president’s presidency. On Sept. 10 the Bush administration was about faith-based social assistance, tax cuts, an improved military—the modern conservative agenda. And like all agendas it had many parts, and the parts became a blur. That happens in politics. Sept. 11 blew the blur away. The presidency is now about two things: ridding the world of madmen who seek to terrorize, and making America safer from weapons of mass destruction. Everything else comes after that.

He has become, as everyone has pointed out, a leader. Our leader, the American president. There are some who knew he always had this potential, had the gift of figuring things out quickly, deciding, delegating, saying what he was doing and why, getting folks to see things his way. A year or so before he announced he would run for president I read a quote about him from the Texas Democrat Bob Bullock. He and George W. had become friends as they worked together during Mr. Bush’s first year as governor. Bullock was smart and tough. And when he was asked about Mr. Bush, shortly before he died, he said, “Let me tell you about that fellow. He’s going to be a president, and he’s going to be a great one.” I watched him closely after that and read everything about him. In time, I came to think: Bullock is going to be proved right.

One of the things I realized about Mr. Bush in the late 1990s was that his politics were different from his father’s in an interesting and subtle way. His father was a low-budget liberal who accepted liberalism’s assumptions but thought Democrats spent and taxed too much. George W. is a high-budget conservative, who believes in conservatism but doesn’t worry too much about spending money to, say, reform the military. And, it seems, a high-budget conservative is what he will continue to be as president.

Mr. Bush continues to prove that he is not eloquent, and that he does not have to be. People need a plain speaker who’ll tell them what he thinks and why. Mr. Bush does this. He does it with the words of the average American, simple flat words. I like the way he talks because I understand it. Bill Clinton was always issuing great smoggy clouds whose meaning I could not fully decipher. Mr. Bush gives you arrows of speech that have a target and land. It’s good.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush is not obsessed with his legacy. This is good because it suggests he is emotionally and intellectually mature, which is how we want our presidents to be. When you walk into the presidency as a fully formed adult your first thought is “What should I do first and how and when?” When you walk into it with more vanity than sense, more hunger than purpose, your first thought is of what history will say of you. This is like moving into a new neighborhood and deciding the first thing you’ll do is find out if the neighbors like you, as opposed to the more constructive, “I think I’ll cut the grass, paint the house and join the civic organization.” Mr. Clinton spent all his time thinking about his legacy, and by the end he had one: He was the president who spent his time thinking about his legacy while Osama made his plans. He wasted history’s time. Mr. Bush isn’t like this. Be grateful.

Mr. Bush works well with the competing personalities around him. He keeps Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney and Condi Rice and Paul Wolfowitz close, listens, seems to have an acute sense of what each can give him. He appreciates Mr. Powell’s power as a leader and man of respect, and means to keep him close. He will have to, in 2002, which he has called “a war year.” That war has many fronts and there are many ways to move forward on each; the war can become bigger or smaller, hotter or cooler, wider or narrower. When he makes his decisions he will announce them, explain them and argue for them with a striking plainness. The quality will be needed, and it is good that the president has it.

I have not read a newspaper in seven days, nor heard a news report, gone online, or called the States in four. Apparently you’re all well, or I would have heard about it on the beach. I find it very easy, for the first time in three months, not to know what is going on. It is a real pleasure. When the young man at the beach comes to sell newspapers, I do not call out to him as I did last year. I have no idea what columnists are saying. Shortly before I left home I heard that Charles Krauthammer had compared the American Battle of Afghanistan, in terms of historical impact and implications, to the battle of Agincourt. I mentioned this at dinner on Christmas night to a large table of beloved friends. A teenager piped up, “We few, we happy few, we band of Afghans.” The educational system of our country is not a complete dud.

*   *   *

I am in Mexico. It is warm, in the high 80s, and humid, but softly so. We are on a little bay in a little town on the western coast. In the Spanish-language daily there is no talk of Osama and war, only of Argentina and its financial/political crisis, which for those who live here is of great importance.

On the porch this morning there were hummingbirds floating above the pink-red bougainvilleas. A big ceiling fan turned slowly. A little boy, the three-year-old son of friends, walked in with tiny, half-inch-wide lemons and oranges. “Smell,” he said as he put them to my nose. They had a full, sweet citrus smell. I told him they were fruits specially grown for infants. He thought about this and walked away.

*   *   *

Overnight a huge white cruise ship dropped anchor in the bay. It looks very important and mighty. A local friend told me that it doesn’t dock because the town would charge it too much, so instead the ship sends little launches full of tourists to town. But they don’t walk through the town and buy things, they are met by a bus at the docks which takes them to a local and newly discovered archeological dig. There they walk around and look at it and ask questions and then get back in the bus and back to the ship. This all strikes me as not fully courteous. It is only fair if you’re going to use the town’s roads also to go to its shops, which are very nice, and give them money in return for products.

There is a little local agitation about all this. But it made me think of a subplot for a movie. A small and obscure town in Mexico is going broke. It is never frequented by tourists or cruise ships, for there is nothing there. The locals decide they must change this, or they will all have to leave and seek a living elsewhere. And they don’t want to as they love their sleepy little town. So they decide to make their own archeological site.

The mayor claims they have found great archeological discoveries 10 feet underground beneath the old bus station. It appears to be a 600-year-old Spanish mission. It has old bricks and old crucifixes and old friar’s shoes. Word gets around and tourists start coming. The locals create the dig site in a really professional way, with little dug-up and pre-dug-up areas, and little brushes for gently brushing dirt off bricks and pieces of masonry; and everyone wears big pocket khaki Gap shorts and eyeglasses and baseball caps bearing the names of movie studios and media outfits. When the buses arrive they are there, doing their work quietly and diligently, except when one of them exclaims, “But this could be pre-Columbian!” Another calls over the government site control official and says, “It is barely legible, but look—I think the lettering says C-O-R . . .”

And someone else says, wisely, “This is too exciting, do you understand what this might be?” There is silence. And then the oldest man there, soft white hair and a face baked for a century in the sun, says softly, “Cortez.”

Every day heavy launches full of tourists are met at the dock by local people with donkeys and old carriages. They charge a small amount to take the rich Americans and Germans and Asians to the site. They are well tipped. At the site the tourists ooh and aah, and watch as priceless old treasures are unearthed. A man playing the part of the local wiseguy takes one of the tourists aside. “There is loads of this stuff. No one will miss anything. We haven’t even catalogued it. You want to buy an old crucifix? I have one. Here, $50.” The tourist pays.

Everyone goes home, the tourists happily to the ship, the locals back to the little house where they make the old crucifixes, beating them with hammers and putting them on the stove for burn marks. They hammer out some new Cortez signs on old tin.

The town is saved, the tourists are happy, and one woman from Wiesbaden, holding her little burnt-up cross, experiences a religious conversion and attributes it ever after to the Crucifix of Cortez. I like this story.

*   *   *

Actually there has been one bit of local news, and I know of it because the people here who witnessed it haven’t stopped talking about it. It is what happened with the moon. Two nights before Christmas, people were outside walking along when suddenly they looked up and saw the moon and saw an amazing thing. There was a perfect brilliant white ring around it. As one who was there told me, if you imagine the moon as a one-inch-round ball of whiteness, about four inches from its circumference and making a perfect circle was a perfect white ring. “It was like a ring you would put on your finger,” a young man who saw it told me. His mother added: “It had that sort of shine to it.” And a doctor who has lived here for a decade told me, with a look of real wonder, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

They all discussed it as a meteorological oddity, but I of course immediately apprehended what it was: a celestial gift. A nod from God. For three days earlier, in Rome, Pope John Paul II had approved the canonization of Juan Diego.

Juan Diego of Mexico, the loving and humble Indian peasant who five centuries ago saw the Blessed Mother, talked to the beautiful lady and, through a series of amazing occurrences, convinced the local bishop and even ultimately the Vatican that the Lady was real and the Lady wanted a great church built. Her appearance to Juan Diego sparked what has been called the greatest religious conversion in all of Western history; it is the point at which Mexico became wedded to Catholicism.

In 1990 Juan Diego was beatified. And soon he will be recognized a saint.

And on that night, around the moon, a wedding ring to mark a marriage that for all its ups and downs endures, and was that evening acknowledged in a spectacular manner.

This is a wonderful time to be alive. I just thought I’d add that.