Peggy Noonan

On some new level and in some new way George W. Bush burrowed into the presidency Tuesday night. Like him or not, he is a man to be taken seriously. He spoke to the House and Senate with apparent ease and confidence, but more important his address was a deft document, and a revealing one, too.

The overnight polls called it a success, and when it was over I wondered what the writers for Leno and Letterman will do for new material. Dopey Bush seems over. They may have to start writing jokes about movie stars and funny things they saw in the paper, just like in the old days. It will be odd to have a president who isn’t the main subject of the monologue every night.

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Mr. Bush sometimes shows a clever way of flipping reality, and he did it in his speech. He approached the Democrats not as if they were burly tribunes of the people, but as if they were anxious accountants, pale and cringing under fluorescent lights. He acted as if they had to be told “It’s OK, loosen up, take the green eyeshades off and come on out into the sun.”

“I’m not sure the numbers add up,” said Hillary Clinton, on message, as she walked into the speech. “His plan leaves no money for anything except tax cuts,” fretted Dick Gephardt in his official response. He’s the optimist, they’re the pessimists. This was clear not only in words but in the picture; Mr. Bush was (sometimes literally) bouncy. In the cutaways, the Democrats looked sour, resentful, as if they’d been hit in the face by a sock full of pennies. Which in a way they had.

Mr. Bush’s words were economical; he covered a lot of ground quickly. An artist “using statistics as a brush” would paint two different pictures of America. “One would have warning signs: increasing layoffs, rising energy prices, too many failing schools. . . . Another picture would be full of blessings: a balanced budget, big surpluses.” This was candor as strategy: If there’s a deficit, let’s not forget it’s not mine, and since there’s a surplus let’s use it.

He called for an end, interestingly enough, of the ideological disagreements that have cleaved our country: “Year after year in Washington, budget debates come down to an old, tired argument—on one side, those who want more government, regardless of the cost; on the other, those who want less government, regardless of the need.” This was the authentic sound of triangulation, and was merrily insincere: Almost no one on the right wants less government regardless of need, and not too many on the left operate in utter disregard of cost. But it set Mr. Bush up as the reasonable man in the middle, which is where he wants to appear to be.

And this reflected the primary fact of his party, circa 2001: It has been made more modest in its ambitions, for a number of reasons, and having won back power after the long trauma of the ‘90s, it is determined not to blow it.

The speech was moderate but not squishy. His argument on a tax cut was pointed and direct: “The American people have been overcharged, and I’m here to ask for a refund.” A typical family with two children will save $1,600 a year on their federal income tax, and “$1,600 may not sound like a lot to some, but it means a lot to many families. Sixteen hundred dollars buys gas for two cars for an entire year.”

More telling was his flipping of the standard tax argument from one of “lower taxes or lower the deficit” to “lower taxes, or Congress will keep the money and increase the deficit.” In the slyest part of the speech, he decided to portray some anxiety of his own: If we don’t cut taxes, Congress will spend so much they’ll endanger Social Security! This drew a horrified gasp from the Democratic side of the aisle, but you couldn’t help think they were thinking not, “Oh no, he is incorrect!” but “Oh no, the kid knows how to dance!’” At any rate, it was theft of a traditional Democratic issue, and left Connecticut’s Sen. Chris Dodd laughing with what seemed one dancer’s appreciation of another’s pirouette.

This was followed by the tale of Steven and Josefina Ramos, a middle-class couple who, the president said, will be able to save $2,000 on their taxes under his plan, enough to begin to retire their own debts. We’ve gone from the hero in the balcony to the citizen in the audience, but it seemed to work.

Mr. Bush portrayed himself as tribune of the people and savior of waitresses getting killed on marginal rates, and seemed to be saying to the opposition: How can you fat cats deny these people the help they need and deserve? The Democrats didn’t look too happy about it, and Tom Shales in the Washington Post summed up the impression they made: “They looked like yesterday. Bush was giving the audience tomorrow.”

The president eschews the overarching moral language of Ronald Reagan, who was guided by philosophy and who would have beat the drum on freedom, on the right of the citizenry to be free of the heavy, grasping hand of government. Mr. Bush is guided by practicality: Let the waitress keep her earnings, let’s give the economy the jump start it needs. Hey, let’s make sure it starts soon by making the cut retroactive! It was the speech of an MBA with a point of view and a commonsensical approach to achieving it.

The speech was also ideologically layered in its assertions. We need character education in the schools—and we need more money for reading. We need teacher recruitment—and we need local control of the schools. We must support faith-based programs—we must end racial profiling! We must retire the debt—we must cut taxes! In short, we must be bold, but in a prudent way. Let’s put a trillion dollars away right away in case we make a mistake. He gave everyone something to cheer for, and Mr. Bush’s real message—I’m the least radical guy who ever walked down the block—came through loud and clear.

For a stupid man he sure is smart.

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Mr. Bush has a way of looking amused, both by himself and by the audience, but he manages to do it without seeming frivolous, and unlike his predecessor without seeming cynical. He has a kind of joshy gravitas. He also has a way of laughing with his shoulders that is goofily endearing if you like him and just goofy if you don’t. He frequently seems to bite his lip, like a businessman who’s trying to remember not to suck on a match at a meeting. His eyes are close together and dark, two little raisins on a beige muffin, and they both sparkle and are unexpressive.

For some reason, the way he looks always surprises me, and the surprise makes me think of what the late Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock said in Texas. He said of Mr. Bush, a few years ago, “He’s going to be a president some day. And he’s going to be a great one.” Big things can come in surprising packages.

But the headline on Mr. Bush right now, and on the speech, apart from its deftness, is the way he approaches friends and foes. He does not pierce, but envelops. Joe Moakley, a 29-year veteran of the House, a Democrat from South Boston, ill and well-liked by all, didn’t know he was going to be recognized by the president. “I would have preferred if he’d said I was going to Disneyland,” he joked in a telephone call. He was “flabbergasted” by the attention, and pleased to be linked to increased funding for the National Institutes of Health.

He sounded like someone who couldn’t resist liking a guy he wasn’t supposed to like.

Hugh Rodham, the brother of the first lady, is paid a reported $400,000 to secure from the president of the United States the commutation of the sentence of a wealthy felon who sells cocaine and a pardon for a wealthy felon who sells phony herbal medicines. The president’s closest aide, Bruce Lindsey, discusses pardon and commutation possibilities with Mr. Rodham twice, on the phone. Mr. Rodham stays at the White House a few nights during the final weeks of the Clinton presidency and presumably talks to the president, who lives there.

In the final days of his presidency Mr. Clinton commutes the cocaine seller’s sentence. He also pardons the seller of phony medicines.

This week, when the scandal breaks, the president doesn’t deny that Mr. Rodham lobbied, and does not say whether the lobbying influenced him. (CNN reported yesterday that the president told sources he “couldn’t remember” if he discussed the pardons with his brother in law.)

Mr. Clinton did say, however, that he was shocked to learn Mr. Rodham was hired and paid to do the lobbying he did. He and the first lady asked Mr. Rodham to give the money back, and he agreed.

Yesterday Mrs. Clinton met with the press in the halls of the Senate. It was the first time she held a news conference since the pardon stories broke last month, and it was obviously a damage-control attempt. Another pardon story had just broken: Mrs. Clinton’s campaign treasurer, William Cunningham III, law partner of Hillary intimate Harold Ickes, took a small fee to represent two other men who received pardons.

Mrs. Clinton’s message, to which she hewed with impressive discipline: I had nothing to do with it, I know nothing, my brother made a regrettable mistake, you must ask the president and those involved if you want to know more.

That was the text. The subtext: I’ve been done wrong by the men in my life.

“I did not have any involvement in the pardons that were granted or not granted,” she declared. She said she couldn’t comment on any pardon questions beyond her stated disappointment regarding her brother’s actions. She said she was sure reporters would understand. She said she never knew about the Marc Rich pardon, and suggested that things had been very busy in the White House and that she had only an abstract sense of her husband’s actions in this area.

But the president does have the right to issue pardons, she reminded reporters; it is in the Constitution. She said there were many others who were interested in various pardons: “You know, people would hand me envelopes, I would just pass them.” She said these people were friends and relatives of friends.

About her campaign treasurer, Mr. Cunningham, she said, “I don’t know any more about this than what has been reported. . . . He did not talk to me about it. I did not know about it.”

She called many reporters by their first names. And she mostly spoke in careful, lawyerly locutions: “I do not have any information”; “As far as I know”; “You’ll have to ask [the president] and his staff”; “Again, with respect to any of these decisions, you’ll have to talk to those who were involved in making them, and that leaves me out.” She consistently deflected blame and referred inquiries. On Roger Clinton’s involvement in the commutation and pardon: “That’s one that, you know, was obviously particularly personal to my husband, and you’ll have to ask him.”

“I believe that, again, there is a context for all of this. . . . There have been controversial pardons made in the history of our country.” Everything she said served to detach her from Pardongate: “What goes into the mind of the person who makes the decision is something that is very hard to determine.”

Asked for a response to Jimmy Carter’s labeling the Rich pardon a disgrace, Mrs. Clinton offered a bland, “I believe that, you know, people will have to make their judgements based on the facts as they were available. . . . People will have to make their own decisions. . . . We all, I’m sure, make decisions in our life that we believe we make for the absolutely, you know, right reasons and the right motivations which someone can disagree with.”

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Most of what she said was rounded, soft, the sentences long, not directly responsive and difficult to quote. When Mrs. Clinton wants to be quoted, she is terse, direct and sometimes colorful. When she does not want to be quoted—that is, when she wants a story to go away—her sentences become paragraphs and the paragraphs are lengthy, indirect, and often lack clear subjects.

Reporters did not interrupt Mrs. Clinton and cut her off as they frequently do when a politician involved in a scandal holds a news conference. (“Sen. Biddle, why do all the women who work for you say you’re disgusting? Why would they lie?”) Mrs. Clinton was allowed to stay on message. She kept her cool, said what she wanted, and looked like the Hillary of the campaign, fully made up, highly tailored and combed out.

When one reporter began to ask why the Clintons always seem to wind up in these messes, she nicely cut him off with a joke, laughed and addressed the question as if the reporter were subtly backing up her repeated contention that people are unduly critical of the Clintons, perhaps because of their many achievements.

She exhausted the reporters. By the end their questions had grown pale. She said she didn’t blame anyone but her brother for her trouble, then said she didn’t blame anyone because “we don’t need to be making judgments about this.”

But of course we do, and the story will not go away. Pardongate is both the biggest Clinton scandal since Monica and as big as Monica. It has changed and is changing what history will say of the Clintons.

Democrats have been almost as critical as the Republicans; the liberal press from the New York Times on down has been denunciatory. Yesterday’s lead editorial in the Times was “Another Pardon Disgrace.” The only disagreement between liberals and conservatives on this matter is over this: Are the pardon scandals uniquely awful or are they indicative and illustrative of the essentially sick character of Clintonism?

A fight is brewing over the response to the subpoenas of the House committee investigating the scandals; the Clintons’ lawyers are ready to respond to subpoenas they deem reasonable but not to “fishing expeditions” regarding lists of names of donors and those who’ve pledged to donate to the Clintons.

Also, still brewing is this question: When will the Democratic Party, a great party with a great history that has held high the honorable banner of liberalism, finally come forward and renounce what should be renounced and remove itself from a shadow that has grown for at least five years now? And what will happen to the party if it doesn’t?

What a terrific speech the president gave Tuesday on the need to cut taxes. He stood at the podium at the Economic Club of New York and seemed to radiate a youthfulness and dynamism that his advisers no doubt hoped would reflect on his economic program. Trim and youthful, relatively new to presidential power and yet already seeming to be at home with it, he declared that the question is not whether the U.S. dares to lower taxes, but whether it dares not to.

The speech was not on C-Span, so let me quote at some length.

“I know you share my conviction,” he told the assembled business leaders, “that proud as we are of its progress, this nation’s economy can and must do even better than it has done in the last five years. Our choice, therefore, boils down to one of doing nothing and thereby risking a widening gap between our actual and potential growth . . . or taking action at the federal level to raise our entire economy to a new and higher level of business activity. . . .

“The most direct and significant kind of federal action aiding economic growth is to make possible an increase in private consumption and investment demand—to cut the fetters which hold back private spending. In the past, this could be done . . . by increasing federal expenditures more rapidly than necessary—but such a course would soon demoralize both the government and our economy. If government is to retain the confidence of the people, it must not spend more than can be justified on grounds of national need or spent with maximum efficiency, and I shall say more on this in a moment.” Here the audience broke into applause.

“The final and best means of strengthening demand among consumers and business,” he continued, “is to reduce the burden on private income and the deterrents to private initiative which are imposed by our present tax system—and this administration pledged itself last summer to an across-the-board, top to bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes” to become effective next year.

“I am not talking about a ‘quickie’ or temporary tax cut,” he said. “Nor am I talking about giving the economy a mere shot in the arm, to ease some temporary complaint. I am talking about the accumulated evidence of the last five years that our present tax system . . . exerts too heavy a drag on growth in peacetime—that it siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power—that it reduces the financial incentives for personal effort, investment and risk taking.”

He said the time to move is now. We should reduce taxes “by a sufficiently early date and a sufficiently large amount to do the job required. Early action could give us extra leverage, added results and important insurance against recession. Too large a tax cut, of course, could result in inflation and insufficient future revenues—but the greater danger is a tax cut too little or too late to be effective.”

He went on to argue that after-tax income will provide stronger markets for American industry, and that while those in the lower brackets will likely spend their additional take-home pay, those in the upper brackets will be able to invest it, which will encourage expansion.

He had a blunt assessment of the difficulties ahead: “I do not underestimate the obstacles which the Congress will face in enacting such legislation. No one will be satisfied. Everyone will have his own approach, his own bill, his own reductions. A high order of restraint and determination will be required if the possible is not to wait on the perfect.”

He concluded, “this nation can afford to reduce taxes . . . but we cannot afford to do nothing. For on the strength of our free economy rests the hope of all free nations.”

It was a good speech—closely argued, simply put. It was a great success, receiving a lot of media attention. The young president left with what seemed an air of triumph, or at least of high optimism.

And his tax cut passed.

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Because the president—close readers will already know—was John F. Kennedy. The Tuesday on which he gave the address was Dec. 14, 1962. It had been a busy time for Mr. Kennedy—the U.S. space probe Mariner Two, approaching Venus, had that day begun transmitting back information on the planet, a first. And the president was putting the finishing touches on a letter to Nikita Krushchev, thanking him for his cooperation in ending the Cuban Missile Crisis just a few weeks before, and expressing hope for “a final settlement” of the Cuban question.

The audience that day really was the Economic Club of New York, which applauded several times, including the one I noted above. The only thing its members did not hear that they probably would have remembered was Kennedy’s pithy statement, uttered a few months before, that tax relief is fair to all because a better economy benefits all: “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

I remembered this speech and dug it out of my files the other day—we used to quote it in the Reagan era, to torture Walter Mondale—because Mr. Bush’s recent arguments in favor of his tax cut made me think of it, and reminded me of what Arthur Schlesinger has called the circularity of life—the fact that people, themes, and initiatives often seem connected, or at least seem to occur and reoccur, to pop up, go away and return again.

Economic numbers change, but economic arguments, when they are obvious and grounded in history, do not. It’s a matter of emphasis. Ronald Reagan could have given JFK’s speech but would have added a section on the right of citizens to be free of onerous government demands; he would have used the word “freedom” more than once. George W. Bush puts his emphasis on the family, what the average family of four will save and be able to spend or invest with tax relief.

At any rate, Kennedy’s arguments seem as fresh and timely today as they seemed to that audience 39 years ago. And it is interesting that he thought he might have the same trouble with his party members in Congress—others will have larger cuts; “no one will be satisfied”—that Mr. Bush may have with some of his.

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Obligatory mention of our former president:

To live in New York this week was to see, over and over, the pictures and videotape of Bill Clinton being mobbed by supporters on the streets of Harlem after he looked at office space. He was laughing and, as he once said of another audience, “just lapping it up,” reaching out to shake people’s hands as they strained to touch him.

When I see the former president I think of the invisible man on the stairs—”He wasn’t there again today / I wish that he would go away.”

Mr. Clinton looks happy because he derives such pleasure from confounding his enemies. That’s one reason he always makes sure he has them.

The key to Mr. Clinton’s character, as I’m sure has been said, is that he derives satisfaction from getting away with it. He likes doing something wrong or illegal, getting caught and escaping. It’s as if the escape is proof, to him, of his superiority, his cleverness. Of his chosenness—he was chosen by God or the fates to frustrate and stop the Bad People—the other party, the opposition, the Republicans, or, as he sometimes in the White House referred to them, the Nazis. He hates them, and feels his hatred is justified. It’s not really bad, after all, to aggress against the wicked. In fact it’s fun. This is why people used to call him a rascal and a scamp and not, say, a psychopath.

But he isn’t really a rascal. What keeps him from being a rascal, among other things, is his joylessness. Rascals love the game, get the joke, love the chase; rascals laugh out loud. Mr. Clinton simmers, obsesses. In private he is as joyful as Richard Nixon.

The only time he seems to feel happiness is (a) when people on stages and on streets are adoring him, reaching out to him in rapture, and (b) when he almost dies—Lincoln bedroom, Monica, China, choose the scandal—but manages to elude the posse and survive.

Not dying makes him feel alive, and grateful to be alive, and happy. So happy he goes out and makes more trouble so the chase can begin again, and be followed by the hunt, and the happiness.

He is addicted to trouble, and, because he was our president, makes his disorder our disorder.

As for the latest scandals, against the odds and for three weeks Pardongate and Giftgate have dominated the news, giving one last attack of heartburn to his foes and one last embarrassment to his friends.

But perhaps soon now the enough-is-enough brigades will arrive. “We have terrible problems facing us, we’ve got to stop focusing on the past.” Or “we have a new president, let’s focus on him.”

*   *   *

President Bush himself is right to say let’s move on. He has a tax plan to sell and a military to refigure, a presidency to establish, dominance to claim.

All true and legitimate, but history has needs here too.

Somewhere around 2014, say, some young revisionist scholar, a brilliant young man who is at this moment putting the finishing touches on his master’s thesis at Yale, will come forward with a compelling retelling of the Clinton era. It will be a strong and memorable polemic, a revising of history that argues, with carefully marshaled data, that Mr. Clinton was great—tragic but great, and not sufficiently appreciated by historians. In fact in a philosophically murky time with a sated nation logy from getting and having and getting, he led our country forward, establishing both peace in the world and the fabulous long boom, establishing racial progress, moving quietly, softly, incrementally toward the greater public good. But he was tragic because his foes exploited his character flaws, which were the result of childhood misfortune that disfigured his psyche and distorted his gifts. Thus the scandals obscured his greatness.

The revisionist Clinton will be big, an Ozarks Lear. The portrait will be, um, arguable, but down the road it will be the new new thing, and the young will listen, and ponder.

None of this is terrible—history exists to be revised, to be reseen. But it is very much in the interests of history, and in the future’s understanding of it, to gather all the facts, so the young revisionist historian will have as a matter of intellectual integrity to include all the data, the findings, the testimony under oath, on all of the gates—including Pardongate and Giftgate.

We owe it to history to gather the facts. For this reason alone the current hearings and investigations should continue.

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As for Mr. Clinton himself, without the aides and assistants who tended to everything about him and on him from the cut of his suits to the spray on his hair, from the polishing of his shoes to the development of political strategy—without them, life will be harder. The best have left, and the rest don’t want to stay, for Mr. Clinton at the moment has political cooties and they don’t want to catch them. “Longtime Clinton aide” and “Diehard Clinton fan” are not phrases you want in your entry in Who’s Who, or in the first and second paragraphs of your obit.

So many have departed, and Manhattan has cooled on Mr. Clinton, and so has Washington, and we will see if Hollywood follows.

In time, “Clinton Alone” may become a great story. When I think of him in future years, I keep thinking of Howard Hughes—Mr. Clinton’s hair grown long and wild, the toenails, the sandals, driving around at night and dropping by all-night diners where the waitresses know him as a regular and give him donuts and coffee. Mr. Clinton has always had a nice way of just chatting with people, of connecting to people hauling through a shift, and I imagine this coming even more to the fore.

In time perhaps an enterprising young reporter will take to following him, and then hanging with him at the counter, and then putting the tape recorder next to the ketchup bottle. And from it might come another book—“The Confessions of Bill Clinton”—with long quotes, the free associative soliloquy of one of the most famous and unusual men of the past century. He’ll talk about the flat and dusty streets of Hope, the Little Rock childhood, the American yearning to get out of nowhere, to join history, to be big. And the discovery of glamour and fame and a constant sense that you were, finally, someone. Through the scandals, through his thoughts on history and people and what he daydreamed about as he looked through the glass of the residence at the normal life passing by on Pennsylvania Avenue . . .

It could be a really great book, revealing and eye-opening. Because beneath the squalor that’s beneath the cynicism that’s beneath the hunger that’s beneath the patina of dignity there is . . . an interesting man down there, a genuine eccentric, one strange American man. Everyone has a story to tell. His could be fascinating. (No, not the memoir he just signed for; that will just be assertive, defensive and bitter.)

So that is an imagined future. But to make sure it is complete, with a complete picture of what really happened, we should get all the facts, now, under oath. And put them in a file marked “To the Revisionist Scholar” and “To the Young Man in the Diner With the Tape Recorder.”

The past week was dominated by three presidents, the new one, the last one, a past one. It was instructive.

The new one continues to move forward, becoming accepted by the country as president. The recount seems if not long ago then just another strange mishap, like Al Gore’s makeup in the first debate. George W. Bush is pushing the programs he ran on, doing what he said he’d do. There have been interesting and even unusual appointments, such as John DiIulio, a public intellectual, a writer, to head the office of faith-based initiatives.

Normally someone with that résumé would be picked and publicized as an outside adviser, not as the person who actually runs the agency. This is startling, like Bill Bennett coming up from the University of North Carolina 19 years ago to head the National Endowment of the Humanities. But the president knows Mr. DiIulio’s work, knows his leadership in the area of kids and crime, probably knows of his caginess in advancing his ideas, and is no doubt pleased that Mr. DiIulio is a Democrat who looks like a union official. An engaging choice.

*   *   *

Is the tax cut too small? Probably. Is the education bill too modest? Arguably. Will the Pentagon get what it needs? “Let everyone argue,” Mr. Bush seems to be saying. “I’ll get as much as I can playing the moderate moderator.”

His lovebombing of Democrats is not mere Bushian bonhomie. He doesn’t think they’ll be bought off by nicknames. But in showing great warmth and regard for them he lays down a standard of behavior, shows the country he has the temperament to lead, shows Democrats he’s open for business, and loses nothing with his base.

Mr. Bush is a crossover artist. When Ronald Reagan entered politics in the 1960s it was a time of high drama, and of the extremes that drama brings. Soviet expansionism, the possibility of nuclear war, Vietnam, riots in the streets. The left was for this, the right for that, the twain did not, could not meet. When Mr. Reagan reached out to liberals and the left they ignored him; they shunned him. He shook his head, made jokes, and talked to the country instead. He’d go to the Rose Garden and make a statement, throwing the ball over the heads of the press and into the hands of the American people, who caught it and ran with it.

When Bush Senior came to the presidency, he announced that “the people didn’t send us here to bicker,” and literally offered his hand to the Democrats of Congress. They took it—and ran. Mr. Bush gave the left much of what it wanted: tax increases, high regulation. But you don’t impress your opponents by giving them half, you embolden them; they don’t respect you more when you break your word, they respect you less. He lost his base and gained no converts.

Bush the Younger does not govern in a time of Reaganesque drama and is able to lovebomb just as his father did early on—but with a difference. Bush the Elder, raised in wealth in Greenwich, Conn., and made to feel guilty about it, nodded to traditional liberal concerns and accepted liberal remedies, all while warning against breaking the bank. Bush the Younger embraces traditional liberal concerns—poverty, injustice, children—while rejecting liberal remedies. “We’ll stimulate through tax cuts, educate through accountability, add choice and freedom to the mix.”

When you know what you stand for and why, when you know you won’t sacrifice those things because to do so would be self-defeating and wrong, then you can lovebomb the other side forever.

It is all interesting to see, and holds promise. The American people are not the same as they were a generation ago, when Mr. Reagan threw the ball over Sam Donaldson’s head. Mr. Bush will have to throw straight but soft for the American people to catch it, and urge them to run.

*   *   *

The last president, Bill Clinton, has experienced a fall as steep as Mr. Bush’s rise. Never has a departing president’s reputation so crashed and broken.

We all know the obvious and well-publicized reasons, but it is surprising nonetheless to see his final abandonment by his friends, by the previously respectful in the media, and by those who loved posing with him at fundraisers. For some of us it is startling: He gave China military technology in return for cash, and you’re mad because he pardoned Marc Rich? But perhaps it shouldn’t be. Maybe his supporters had been as embarrassed by Mr. Clinton as his critics—maybe even more so. What better time to show your independence and disgust than when he leaves power?

And the Bush White House had little to say, appearing dignified, but following the tough old maxim: Never interrupt your enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.

*   *   *

And the past president, whose 90th birthday came as the new president rose and the old one fell. Ronald Reagan, though he cannot know it, has lived to see himself lauded and embraced not only by the country but by its opinion leaders, its media, its historians and elites.

It is 20 years since Mr. Reagan walked into the White House, and so much is now clearer. Ideas such as missile defense, once spoofed as Star Wars, are now being judged more coolly, and fairly; what was visionary then is more acceptable now. The origins of the economic miracle of America, 1980-2000, are clearer too. Proving that so much depends on perspective: Up close, a mountain’s just a mass of rocks, but travel some distance from it and you can look back and see how it towers, how it changed the landscape.

All week in the Reagan specials they celebrated, without saying the word, his character. But that’s what his political victories were about. He swam against the tide, always—in Hollywood, when the whole town was going this way and he went that, in his political career, in the way he ultimately led. He swam against the tide, moved forward, made progress, and got, ultimately, to shore.

The last time I saw him was in January 1999, in Los Angeles. I brought my son, then 11. He had seen a recent PBS documentary on Mr. Reagan, and suddenly Ronald Reagan was real to him, not a family rumor or a man in a picture but a figure in history. “He ended communism,” my son told me. Close enough. Mr. Reagan walked into his office like the Reagan of old—erect bearing, hands cupped softly at his sides. But eyeglasses, and thick hair, longer, gray-streaked. He wore his old brown suit, but it had been altered, because he has lost muscle mass.

I had wanted to thank him for all he’d done to change the world, but I looked and knew: Don’t. Don’t make him come up with the response.

Instead, I introduced myself and said, “I just came here from New York because I wanted to tell you that I love you.” And he smiled a wonderful smile and said, “Oh thank you!” And we held hands and gently moved them back and forth. Words can confuse and communications go awry, but everyone understands love, from little babies to great old men. He posed with my son, we chatted, and someone took a picture.

Later my son and I walked wordlessly to the McDonald’s down the street, and finally as we sat down he said something. “You know that picture of Clinton and John F. Kennedy? When Clinton was young and he met him?” I nodded yes. And then I realized what he was saying, and how his moment with Mr. Reagan had struck him.

*   *   *

The young are moved by greatness. They are inspired by it. Children need heroes. They need them to lift life, to suggest a future you can be hungry for. They need them because heroes, just by being, communicate the romantic and yet realistic idea that you can turn your life into something great. The key, of course, is to have the right heroes—to be lifted by greatness and not just by glamour, to be lit by the desire to do good, as opposed to the desire to do well.

The lesson, compliments of three presidents: Be brave, have guts, do what you think right no matter the cost, and mean it, be sincere, it’s not a game. Do these things and you will be remembered, whoever you are, whatever you are, with love and gratitude. Fail to do them and you’ll wind up an object of embarrassment and derision. Who’d have thought three presidents could teach us so much, in one week?

George W. Bush’s first trip to another country as president will be in two weeks, to Mexico. He wants to show respect and support for Mexico’s new president, the intrepid Vicente Fox. As a former Texas governor, Mr. Bush has long had a foreign policy toward Mexico, and the trip will demonstrate Mexico’s continued precedence to his new administration. And it will not have escaped the Bush White House that the visit is an opportunity to impress and draw the interest of American Hispanics.

Republicans, as we all know, are concerned about the Hispanic vote, and not only because it is growing in key states. Hispanics vote more for Democrats than Republicans, which is especially frustrating for the latter, because they’ve long thought they share with Hispanics the kind of assumptions and beliefs that amount to a worldview.

Taxes and crime, which always anger Republicans, have oppressed America’s immigrants. The Republicans have been the party most encouraging of a place for religion in public life, and Hispanics have traditionally put their belief at the center of their lives.

But first-generation immigrants often have entry level jobs, and it is the Democrats who will raise the minimum wage, and who present themselves as more sympathetic to immigration and more generous to immigrants. (It is impressive that no matter how many million-dollar fundraisers the Democrats hold with the nation’s elites, no matter how many billionaires they cosset and pardon, the Democrats still seem to so many Americans—especially perhaps recent ones—to be the party of the little guy. This is a triumph of public relations that is the biggest thing the party has going for it, still.)

*   *   *

When Mr. Bush goes to Mexico, he will hold meetings with President Fox, and their ministers will hold meetings, and there will be a great party or two, and events in Mexico City. This is appropriate and predictable. But Mr. Bush might also consider straying from the beaten path in order to capture the imagination of the Mexicans of Mexico, and of America.

He might add another significant city to his itinerary. It is the site of an astounding occurrence that some see as a quaint and pious legend, and others will always understand to be an immensely moving if improbable fact of history. Either way, no one disputes the occurrence’s impact, which was huge.

Everywhere you go in Mexico, from where I have recently returned, you see portraits and pictures of the great occurrence. They sell prints of it in food stores, and you can’t go by a jewelry store or trinket shop without seeing medals commemorating it. I brought half a dozen back for friends, and ended up giving all of them to the men who make me coffee at the deli next to my home.

The great occurrence happened 470 years ago, in a Mexico only recently conquered by Cortez. The Aztec Indians still dominated, and one who was steeped in that culture was a 57-year-old Indian named Juan Diego, an intelligent and humble man.

The Aztec—their common name as a people was Mexica—were a formidable people, gifted, brave, strong, cultured, bloody and fierce. A religious sense touched nearly every part of their lives, from art (their sculpture was largely religious) to sports (games named after the gods) to medicine (illnesses and wounds had to be healed through appropriate prayers). They built vast temples.

But their religious feeling included, or was in time hardened into, something else, a culture of brutality. Human sacrifices were made to the gods, the most common being self-sacrifice, with men, women and children giving blood. The most brutal involved an enormous number of victims sacrificed in cold blood—hearts ripped out of live victims, beheadings, incineration. For many years there were, historians estimate, 250,000 victims a year, of whom perhaps 20,000 men were burned alive during a four-day religious ritual.

Why were such a cultured people so bloody-minded? Because they thought their gods demanded it. “The common religious foundation of all the Meso-American peoples,” Octavio Paz has written, “is a basic myth: the gods sacrificed themselves to create the world. The mission of man is to preserve the universal life, including his own, by feeding the gods with the divine substance: blood. . . . The dual nature of sacrifice appears very clearly in Meso-American myth: the gods shed their blood to create the world; men, to keep the world, must shed their blood, which is the food of their gods.”

*   *   *

In 1531, the year of the great occurrence, the Aztec culture was still strong among the people but was being challenged by the culture and beliefs of the new settlers—the Christians of Spain, who’d had their own bloody moments and their own cruelties, especially toward the Indian peasants whose country they now ruled.

So, the story:

Early on a crisp Saturday morning, on Dec. 9, 1531, the Aztec Juan Diego was walking to the town of Tlatelolco, where he had begun to receive Christian catechism lessons. As he reached a nearby hill, he heard a sweet and full sound, like the rich and beautiful singing of birds. Juan Diego listened, stopped, and told himself, “I must be dreaming.” In a kind of ecstasy he followed the sound, looking up to the top of the hill where it seemed to lead. Suddenly the music ended, and he heard a voice calling from the top of the hill—”Juanito, Juan Dieguitto.”

He climbed to where the voice was coming from. (Later he would say he felt not fear but great peace.) When he got to the top, he saw a young woman, who motioned for him to come closer. When he stood before her, he was amazed: Her dress shone and shimmered like the sun; the cliff on which she stood seemed like a bracelet of precious stones. And she was beautiful, with dark hair, dark brows, big eyes, like a Mexica (or, they later said, like a young girl from the Middle East).

Her voice was warm and gentle as she asked him where he was going. He said: To Tlatelolco, to learn of God.

She said, “Know this as true, my smallest child: I am the perfect ever-Virgin Mary, mother of the most true God through whom everything lives, the creator of persons, the master of closeness and proximity, the master of heaven and earth.” She said it was her desire that a temple be built to glorify her Son. She asked him to go and tell this of the bishop of Mexico. “You have heard it, my little son, my strength, my word: Go and do your part.”

At this, Juan Diego fell to his knees and said, “My lady, my little girl, I will carry out your desire.”

And he went straight to the heart of the nearby city, to the palace of the first bishop of Mexico. He begged to see the bishop. He had to wait a long time, but was finally called in. The bishop, a Spaniard, Fray Juan de Zumarraga, heard Juan Diego out, but he did not seem to believe him. Juan Diego was just an Indian, an old man with a fanciful tale.

Juan Diego left, and on the way home he passed the hill and found the beautiful lady waiting for him. He told her he wanted to do what she wished and that he had seen the bishop but he was not believed. He pleaded with her to relieve him of the task, and to give it instead to a nobleman, a somebody. “I am a peasant, a porter, a tail, a wing, a poor leaf,” he told her.

But she told him to rest assured—”I do not lack for servants or messengers”—but it was important that it be he who carried the bishop the message again, tomorrow.

Juan Diego agreed, and the next morning he walked back to the bishop’s palace. After a great deal of effort he was allowed in. The bishop asked detailed questions, insisting on specifics. Juan told him everything he could remember. The bishop said he would need some proof. Could Juan ask the lady to send it to him? Juan agreed, and left.

He did not know that the wily bishop had sent some servants to follow him home and spy on him. But the servants soon lost him in the hills. This was humiliating for Aztec trackers, and when they returned to the bishop they angrily denounced Juan Diego, calling him a liar and a troublemaker. They vowed among themselves that when they next saw him they would beat him.

Juan went to the lady and related the bishop’s request for proof. She promised to send him a sign, and asked Juan Diego to return the next day and receive it from her. But he did not return the next day. His uncle, who had been like a father to him, became violently ill that night, and in the morning he asked Juan Diego to go for a priest to give him last rites. Juan Diego went to town but by a different route, so the lady would not see him. First things first, he thought. But as he walked the other way around the hill, she appeared to him anyway and asked him where he was going. When he told her, she told him not to be anxious, that at that moment his uncle was being cured.

Juan believed her, and thanked her. She asked him to go to the top of the hill and gather the Castillian roses he would find there. He climbed, knowing he would not find roses in the December frost. But when he got to the top, he saw flowers spread over the hilltop—hundreds of roses that gave off a sweet fragrance. He cut as many as he could and put them in his tilma, the rough woven blanket Indians wore tied behind their necks. When he showed the roses to the Virgin, she rearranged them in his tunic.

Juan Diego returned to the bishop’s palace. But the doorkeeper and the servants, warned that he was trouble, pretended not to understand him and ignored him. Juan Diego remained outside at the gate, standing there for hours, motionless, head bowed. At daybreak the next day, the servants saw he was still there. And for the first time they noticed he was hiding something in his tilma. Now they surrounded him and told him they’d beat him if he didn’t show what he was hiding. As they drew close, they smelled the perfume of the flowers. They tried to snatch them, but each time they took a rose, it would seem to disappear, or seem somehow to be painted on the cloth of the tilma.

They ran to the bishop. He listened to them, realized this might be the proof he had asked for, and went to Juan Diego, who was now surrounded by the entire household. As Juan Diego opened his tilma to show the bishop the roses, an amazing thing happened. At the moment the rough material unfurled the image of the woman on the hill suddenly appeared on it. The bishop and all present fell to their knees. The bishop cried out and asked the lady to forgive him for not having carried out her will. Then he stood, untied the tilma from Juan Diego’s neck, and carried it to his chapel.

The whole city was shaken by the event. It took Indians and Spaniards working together only 14 days to build a small adobe shrine on the hill where Juan Diego saw the lady. The tilma itself was put in the main church, and then carried to one larger still.

In his home, Juan Diego’s uncle told everyone that a beautiful young woman with dark hair and dark eyes had come to him and cured him. She had called herself “the perfect Virgin Mary of Guadalupe.” Soon he was brought to see the tilma. That is her, he said.

*   *   *

Now, much of this is taken from a translation of excerpts of the Nican Mopohua, a great Aztec narrative written about Juan Diego in the first half of the 16th century, when many of those who had witnessed and lived through the events recounted were still alive. The excerpts are quoted in a beautiful little book called “Guadalupe—What Her Eyes Say,” which was published in the Philippines in 1988, and which is indispensable to those who want to follow the more recent developments surrounding the great occurrence.

Here are the older ones. The story spread through all of Mexico and soon miracles were attributed to the tilma and to the Virgin of Guadalupe. The story triggered an event of epic proportions, the religious conversion of an entire people. The small holy house the Virgin asked for became a huge basilica that is visited each year by millions of pilgrims. The tilma still hangs in it.

The story of the Virgin and Juan Diego helped improve the way the Spaniards treated the Indians. (It was an Indian, after all, to whom the Mother of God revealed herself and trusted to give a Spanish prince of the church his marching orders.) It helped change the way the Indians viewed the Spanish—as brothers now in faith. The story became a strong bond between the Spanish and the Indians, and for hundreds of years was arguably the strongest factor of unity among the people of Mexico.

Juan Diego was ultimately declared a saint of the Catholic Church, which came to recognize the apparition of Mary as miraculous.

The tilma hanging in the great basilica of Guadalupe is 450 years old now but shows no sign of decay, which seems a miracle in itself as it is made of woven maguey fiber that disintegrates after 20 years. The image has not faded. An analysis of the image carried out by Richard Kuhn, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, and another by two NASA researchers, concluded that the colorings in the image were of unknown origin, and do not belong to any vegetable, animal or mineral. They are not synthetic. The researchers didn’t know what they are.

A satellite imaging expert named Aste Tonsman a few years ago studied the image using image digitization; he was amazed when in studying the corneas of the eyes of the image he saw in them a series of people and objects—an Indian unfurling a tilma before a priest, another young man, a halfinaked Indian with his lips open and his hands together, pieces of furniture, a ceiling arch, and so on.

From “Guadalupe—What Her Eyes Say”: “In some way, the eyes captured the same scene related by the legend at the moment Our Lady appeared and left her image” on the tilma.

One hopes more studies will be done.

*   *   *

Mexico has been many things since it became Catholic—a revolutionary country, an anticlerical country, and now a country growing richer, more sophisticated and so more detached from the old beliefs. (Ireland is like this too: The accomplished and successful, the telecom millionaires and CEO’s, the young and upwardly mobile, are not so often or usually in mass. But the old are, the “peasants” of the new economy are—the immigrants, the workers in blue-collar and the lower clerical jobs.) Mexico now is a fiercely sophisticated country, and a proud one. But perhaps, like Ireland, its belief is imbedded like a harpoon in the heart, unseen, unfelt, unremovable.

It would be a wonderful thing if the new president would go to the great basilica at Guadalupe and see the piece of history displayed there. It would not be a political pilgrimage or a specifically religious one—I don’t know of any Methodists who are keen on this story. But it could be a powerful statement of shared culture and shared belief in the transcendent.

Which is, essentially, what Mr. Bush’s inaugural address was about. How gallant if he went to visit the image of the woman who is for so many, in Mexico and here at home, “an angel in the whirlwind.”

Well, that was an interesting first week from Mr. Bush. He became president, established himself as the new top dog. It’s always surprising how quickly new presidents seem to look comfortable signing orders and holding meetings with the congressional leadership.

An important Democratic senator (Georgia’s Zell Miller, who took the late great Paul Coverdell’s place and seems to be showing Coverdellian courage) surprised everyone by deciding to join Texas’ Phil Gramm in sponsoring Mr. Bush’s tax cut. The new president put forth comprehensive, moderate and apparently fully thought-through legislation on education, and rescinded a presidential order on abortion. By doing so seemed to put a big fat headline on week one: Extremism Is Over, Normality Is Back.

*   *   *

Rescinding the abortion order—a Clinton order that used U.S. tax dollars to support groups that provided abortions and abortion counseling for Third World women and even lobbied governments for changes in abortion laws—seemed tough but was in fact moderate, a happy combination for a new president. Mr. Bush was returning to U.S. policy before the Clinton era.

Bill Clinton, in breaking with that policy, had taken a radical step that severed policy from prudence in a stark and showy way. It was strange to decide to fund groups that give foreign women abortions.

When there is an issue that is so charged, so divisive that for more than a quarter century it has disturbed the peace of your huge and passionate nation, does it make sense to export that issue so it can roil other nations? Is that wise, or even friendly? Or is it conceited and aggressive: I’m sick, and if you had any understanding of how superior I am you’d share my sickness. It is as if America, roiling from the slavery question in 1855, decided the most helpful thing it could do to settle the issue is make sure the Ottoman Empire is able to maintain slavery too.

The Clinton decision to export and disturb reflected the way abortion in the past eight years became an issue dominated by radical thinking, by extremist views. If we like abortion then you must like abortion; if we like abortion then any restriction on it whatsoever, any limit, even in the eighth month, is bad, and must be stopped. If abortion is a legitimate act then it is legitimate at all times and in all ways. And if you have qualms or questions about this then you are the enemy, you are insufficiently supportive of women’s rights, you must be defeated at all costs.

It was all so radical. And it may ultimately prove the undoing of abortion proponents. They have ceded all claim to reasonableness. They look radical. Because they are.

Mr. Bush’s decision seems to reflect a mindset he revealed in one of his election debates with Al Gore, when he said he favored a stance of humility toward the world. He’s so modest he won’t tell other people they should have abortions just because we do, and just because we’ve made abortion into an ideology. This is refreshing, and rather a humble thing. About time.

Mr. Bush’s decision has been compared to Mr. Clinton’s attempt to rescind the ban on active and public homosexuals in the military. But the rescinding of that ban, apart from all issues of rightness or wrongness, practicality or helpfulness, did not have half the country behind it, or a quarter of the country behind it. Nor did it have the American military behind it. It had organized homosexual-rights groups that had funded and supported Mr. Clinton in the just-ended election behind it.

If you ask the American people if they want to spend money to promote abortion overseas, the majority would say: Um, no, we don’t.

The decision is not extreme but mainstream. But Bush gets credit for guts from the press, which cannot believe any scaling back of abortomania could be anything but radical and which played the story as startling and dramatic. Fine. Let the president take ironic bows.

*   *   *

It seems to me the abortion announcement plus the elements of the education bill—concern for poor students, concern for failing schools, a slow run up to the possibility of vouchers—are a one-two punch that may suggest much about the new president’s style. One seemingly tough move, and one soft and compassionate one. More soft shrewdness, although perhaps it is shrewd softness—tough guy/soft guy. Not bad. And inherently antiextreme.

Mr. Bush may prove tough for the Democrats to negotiate around. They seemed rather flat-footed this week, no doubt in part because, as Rush Limbaugh has noted, they don’t have the White House war room to tell them what to say and how to fight anymore. But Mr. Bush seems to be obscuring their voices by smothering them in a blanket of sweetness and moderation. This will probably be a good combination as long as the sweet part doesn’t turn out to be softness and naiveté.

*   *   *

A fashionable New York woman told me Laura Bush looked good on Inauguration Day but a little too Texan, to which I thought: Well, the whole country is probably a little too Texan, which is good. Mrs. Bush, in her interview last week on “Today,” in her inaugural appearances and remarks, in her meeting with authors, with her handsome and not too beautiful or too dorky blue coat and dress, is very quietly making a good impression.

What is most interesting about her to me is that she seems as natural and happy as someone who always wanted to be first lady, when of course she never did, and somehow you sense she’d still just as soon not be. This is in sharp contrast to Hillary Clinton, who had always wanted the power of the White House, and who in her first days seemed a whirlwind of unhappiness, dressing her husband down and swearing at him in front of the Secret Service on inaugural morning, castigating her husband and a White House steward the next day, during the Clintons’ first open house. (It was captured on tape and was a humdinger.) I wonder what it tells us that the happy one who didn’t want it is happy and the unhappy one who wanted it and got it was unhappy. Perhaps it just illustrates what Lincoln said. He observed once that he figured most people are just about as happy as they want to be.

Anyway, watching her, one gets the sense of a quiet power being born. They called Barbara Bush the Silver Fox, they called Rosalyn Carter the Velvet Hammer. I wonder what they’ll call Laura Bush.

*   *   *

Ari Fleischer’s press briefings seem competent and professional. I liked what he said when a reporter pressed him on why the new president chose as one of his first moves the abortion order. “Because he believes in it. Next question.” Already Mr. Fleischer seems to know a lot. He seems amiable and open-featured, not like a furrow-browed mouthpiece for the mob, or a furtive ironist.

The new speechwriting staff looks to be the most weighty and highly regarded in many years. Chief of speechwriting Michael Gerson comes in as a former journalist and respected policy wonk who has been an integral part of the Bush operation since the presidential campaign began. He will be a deputy assistant to the president, the first speechwriter in many years, perhaps a generation, to have an office in the West Wing.

Moreover he has opened his staff not to talented and obscure young people but to the gifted and established—serious talents already proven in their fields. This suggests several important things. That this White House and president will take the written word seriously, and approach it, and writers, with due respect. That speechwriters will be in on the creation of policy, which is very important and has been true in most successful administrations. (Speechwriters, as the elegant writer Landon Parvin has observed, are always the first to know when a policy is shallow or ill thought out, because they’re the first who have to explain it.)

The high place held by Mr. Gerson and the stature of those who will be in the shop suggests President Bush is thinking not of the Carter or Reagan models for his speechwriting staff, but the old FDR-JFK-LBJ-Nixon models: get first-rate talent and integrate it fully in the workings of the machine. This is good and bodes well. It is not how Mr. Bush’s father did it—the speechwriters of his White House weren’t even allowed to dine in the White House mess, and so missed out on the daily information flow by which assistants learn and affect what’s happening.

And it’s not how Ronald Reagan did it, either. Mr. Reagan’s White House was split down the middle between Baker-Deaver-Darman and the famous pragmatists on one hand, and Ed Meese and a dozen conservative intellectuals on the other hand. The speechwriting shop was considered the home of The True Right Wing Nuts, as indeed, God bless us, we were. Every time a speechwriter got near Mr. Reagan, he ended up saying something like “the evil empire” or “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” which the pragmatists (who were not actually very pragmatic) didn’t like at all. They kept us as far from the president as possible. We sometimes called ourselves the mushrooms, after the Beirut hostages—”kept the in the dark and covered daily with manure.”

Mr. Bush the younger may be going back to the days when Ted Sorenson and Arthur Schlesinger had the run of the joint, and went on to write fine (and flattering) histories of the presidents they knew so well.

*   *   *

Everyone I know is talking about the “pranks” of the departing Clinton-Gore crew on the incoming White House staff—the W’s pried off the keyboards, the garbage left in the vice president’s offices. You just know when you read about it that it’s worse than anyone is saying—the Bush people being discreet because they don’t want to start out with complaints and finger pointing, the Clinton-Gore people because it is in their obvious interests to play it down.

I would like to say the stories did not surprise me, but they did. White House vandalism is actually something new. Some of it—the purloined letters from the computers—was no doubt just silly. But some of it seems proof, yet again, that leaders consciously and unconsciously summon to their side, and work closely with, people who are like them. The Clintons were at heart vandals, tearers-down in many ways and on many levels. As George Stephanopoulos recently told Ted Koppel, the Clinton staff entered the White House without feeling enough respect. They were immature. They left as immature people would, upending trash cans, like rock stars without talent.

*   *   *

I think the most interesting thing Mr. Bush said this week was not in his announcements of policy or the swearing-in of staff but in the interview with Fox News’s Britt Hume. (Idiotic disclaimer: Like many in the Western world, I am a contributor there.) The president told Mr. Hume that he didn’t think the American people had elected him. “I wish I could, you know, say it was my charming personality or the ability to string a few sentences together,” Mr. Bush said. “The truth of the matter is I am sitting here because I took firm positions on important issues and didn’t back off. And I’m not backing off the minute I arrive in Washington.”

This offered more than the usual insight into his thinking. His father campaigned as a Reaganite in 1988; he ran as Reagan III. He was elected because the people thought he would govern like Mr. Reagan. But he became confused by his landslide, and thought the people had elected him. And so he acted Bushlike, not Reaganesque, got taken to the cleaners by the Democrats in Congress, and lost his presidency.

I wondered if the new president was saying: I learned my father’s lesson, and won’t be making his mistake.

*   *   *

A note recently from a White House reporting hand, telling me the first Bush week is distressingly peaceful. The Clinton people were full of drama and stories, never a dull moment. The Bush people so far: polite, courteous, dignified, dull. It reminded me of a conversation with a reporter friend years ago. I had asked her how she liked covering the new Bush White House of 1989, and she said it was awful. The Carter people were vicious about each other, the place was full of gossip and back stabbing. And the Reagan White House had been a nonstop war—tongs with full daggers drawn, blood on the floor. But Bush’s White House was so—buttoned down and polite!

I laughed. It started that way, but it didn’t end that way. It ended with Dick Darman being fooled by his friend Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, who decided he would have to publish the Bush team’s finger-pointing recollections of the creation of their recession and budget deals, just in time for election day, ‘92.

Reporters will get a story. Reporters always do. People in White Houses always provide them. Or at least it has always been so.

President Bush’s inaugural address had a specific weight. Some speeches just float away because they’re light and full of air, but this one had weight and stayed and settled. It was a speech that declared the new president’s thinking as he assumes the presidency. This is what he thinks: God is here and asks us to do good.

The tone was properly ecumenical, but the content was God-filled: “We are guided by a power larger than ourselves, Who created us equal in his image”; “Abandonment and abuse are not acts of God, they are failures of love”; “Church and charity, synagogue and mosque, lend our communities their humanity, and they will have an honored place in our plans and laws”; “Sometimes in life we are called to do great things. But as a saint of our times has said, every day we are called to do small things with great love.”

It was the speech of a compassionate conservative, of one who sees need, and who will neither ignore it nor respond to it with the cold buying-off of constituencies. It was the speech of someone who doesn’t think this is all a game.

That is the deeper meaning. As for the political meaning, it seemed full of shrewd softness. George W. Bush did not speak, as many talking heads including my own had said he would, and as his father 12 years ago had, of bipartisanship. He spoke of civility, by which he meant bipartisanship.

*   *   *

In using civility, his plea was unimpeachable. Who could disagree with the need for more of it? But by not explicitly lauding bipartisanship, he stayed clear of the murky waters of its meaning and mutuality, not to mention what one-way bipartisanism did to his father’s administration. Now, when the Democrats of Congress assault his motives as he puts forth his program, he can sigh, shake his head, and refer to his high hopes for greater civility. This is so clever I would call it Clintonian, except it isn’t sick.

Also, his speaking so much and so feelingly of God’s place and precedence, his speaking so explicitly of poverty and disadvantage as failures of love, puts the Democrats of Congress in another interesting position. If you don’t give room to faith-based help, and freedom-based assistance to children in trouble in school and on the streets, God and I gonna open up a can of whupass on you.

In terms of the rhetoric and presentation, two things: Mr. Bush in the past has sometimes seemed not as good as his material; it lifted him, he didn’t lift it. But in this speech he lifted it. He gave it not just as a president, but like a president, with gravity and sureness. Gone was the squinting, awkward fellow of the acceptance speech; here was the serene and serious man of the new era.

The overall rhetoric of the speech was somewhat less successful than its content. It was fancy, and quite un-Bush-like in its fanciness. At times, at least for me, it was opaque. I had to read the “Angel on the Whirlwind” twice before I took its meaning, but most of those listening at home and in the Capitol did not have a text. There is a simplicity in the best sense to Mr. Bush’s thoughts. There should be an unlabored simplicity to his expressions.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush’s eyes filled with tears as he took the oath of office—quite possibly a historical first—and people have discussed why. Family redemption, old losses now avenged. Maybe. But I suspect they were the tears of a 54-year-old man who hadn’t amounted to much in his first 40 years—poor student, average athlete, indifferent businessman, all of this in contrast to his father’s early and easy excellence. He had struggled to find himself and his purpose; amazing and fantastic things had happened, and he had gone on to make himself a president—”Called to do great things.”

I think as he stood with his hand held high he felt deep gratitude, deep love, and a hunger to do right, to actually serve and not only dominate his country. Historians should press him on what those tears meant, and see if he can explain.

There was something portentous to the day. The unrelenting overcast, the gloomy skies, the bone-chilling wet; through the slightly tinted glass of the Fox studios the heavy skies made things look like they were happening in a Martian atmosphere. It was dark early. At 4 p.m., the lights of the limousines shone on the slick blacktop of Pennsylvania Avenue. The inaugural parade was marked by protests. It was as if fate, or God, had decided to tell Mr. Bush one last time: Nothing in this will be easy.

*   *   *

I spent three days at the inaugural. I cannot say I have never seen conservatives so happy—I saw them in 1980 and 1984. But I have never seen conservatives so warm, so grateful, so unified, like still vital veterans come together not only to tell old stories but to plan new campaigns.

They gathered at many places, but one of the most rollicking was the Embassy of Uzbekistan on Massachusetts Avenue on inauguration night, where hundreds kissed and hugged and showed pictures of the kids. It is nice to see conservatives triumphant, but it is better to see them sweet. At least for a night.

As for the former president, Bill Clinton rejected the option of controversial last minute pardons, saying that they would be construed as cynical. He eschewed his weekly radio address as a courtesy to the incoming president on his inaugural speech day. He and Mrs. Clinton accompanied them to the swearing in, where Mr. Clinton ceded the spotlight to Mr. Bush, sitting quietly, almost contemplatively.

*   *   *

After the inaugural, he and Mrs. Clinton left the Capitol by a side door with a small detail and arrived at Andrews Air Force base, where they met with a band of supporters, quietly bid them goodbye, waved from the door of a military transport and disappeared into the skies to return to Arkansas.

Oh wait, that didn’t happen. Mr. Clinton forced himself into every picture, did the big-chested big jaw through every photo op, held a political rally at Andrews, actually reviewing the troops with trumpets and flourishes. He then reassured the nation that he was not leaving. Then, having insisted on a huge Air Force One-size plane to impress the rubes of New York, he arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport to which he had invited 10,000 supporters for yet another political rally. A thousand came. He called himself Citizen Clinton with his usual false modesty and faux bonhomie. What a disturbed and disgusting individual. What a wonderful thing for our country that he has been replaced as president.

*   *   *

But let’s not end there. At every inauguration there is a heightened sense of history happening. There is a tenderness. Most everyone feels the heightened sense, which expresses itself in a laughter that you fully understand and a choked-up feeling that you don’t.

We don’t do so much flag-waving in the new America, but suddenly the streets are full of floats with giant American eagles and bucking broncos and men dressed up as Buffalo Bill Cody. I was on the top of the Health and Human Services building early in the morning and in the darkness there were echoes of the music of a band rehearsing, and bright white lights trained on busy little white tents, and cannons being put in place for the salute. Suddenly for me it was Lincoln meeting with his generals in the tents near the Wilderness.

On an inaugural morning there is nervous laughter and banter in the motorcade, in the green room, on the set, in Blair House, in the holding area as the marching chorus waits to be waved into the parade. There are tired eyes that are red-rimmed already at seven in the morning, and the tired sour breath of workers who’ve been up all night—readying the platform, planning the broadcast, lighting the stage, setting the tables.

The morning of the swearing-in, Pope John Paul II sent Mr. Bush a beautiful telegram, which ended with these words: “Upon you and your family and upon the beloved American people I cordially invoke the Lord’s abundant blessings.” When I heard it read aloud—“I . . . ask God, the father of all nations, to guide your efforts”—I thought it was not a telegram but a prayer.

It was the old world talking to the new, the receding world of 1978, the year John Paul was “inaugurated,” to the new world of 2001, the world in which the new president will do his work. Another salute on inauguration day, and it made you want to touch your chest and say, “May it be so.”

The question going into Bill Clinton’s farewell speech last night was this: Is this the last speech of the Clinton presidency, or the first speech of the new Clinton era? It was very much the latter, which is why he never said the word “goodbye” or “farewell.”

There was a time—it lasted more than 200 years—when American presidents came from America, journeyed to Washington to serve and then, when they were done, followed the tradition of George Washington and went back home to America, where they lived out the rest of their lives. The tradition underscored the ideal of citizens who left a good life to serve their country at considerable cost, and who then, work done, returned to normal life and the higher title of citizen.

In modern times Harry Truman did this, and Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter, who went back to the peanut business, and Ronald Reagan, who retired to California. George Bush returned to Houston. But Bill Clinton will never leave, and he made this clear when he said, “My days in this office are nearly through, but my days of service, I hope, are not.”. He has never been much interested in traditions, or their meaning.

*   *   *

As a speech it was not terrible. He looked, finally, comfortable in the Oval Office, as if he thought he belonged there. In outlining his economic triumphs he congratulated the American people—”you have risen to every new challenge”—in the same tone with which on your bad days you congratulate your child for doing well at school or sports. He said that he had taken the steps and given the leadership that ignited the American economy, but he noted that “I’ve tried to give all Americans the tools and conditions to build the future.”

He claimed to have created “a new kind of government: smaller . . . more effective.” He said, “Our schools are better.” And so a presidency that began essentially with lies ends essentially with lies. There is a lovely egg-like completeness and perfection to this.

The speech was mostly a legacy speech, similar to the dozen or so goodbye speeches and interviews with which Mr. Clinton has been filling his last months in office. (Ronald Reagan gave only one farewell interview and one farewell address, and that in December, so as not to intrude on the new president’s inaugural. But he was old fashioned—and a gentleman.)

Once again, last night, Mr. Clinton argued the case for his greatness—the economy up, a world at peace, Americans never so happy. He refrained, however, from saying, as he has in speeches in the past week, that it is possible some other president will come along some day and be as good as he, nor did he note that the wonderful things he has done he learned first in Arkansas.

He said he wanted to leave the American people with three thoughts. The first was that we must stay the course on fiscal restraint. By this he meant: Don’t pass Bush’s tax cut.

His second point, and a long one it was, was that global poverty “requires more than compassion.” I think a deconstruction of this thought is: It requires programs, i.e., liberal programs. In other words: When Osama bin Laden and his henchmen blow up an American city, it won’t be my fault, it will be President Bush’s.

His third thought was that America is a nation of many ethnic and racial groups, and we must continue to honor this fact and help those in need. We need programs for this, he suggested. “Compassion isn’t enough,” he said, in the speech’s clearest shot at Mr. Bush. What he was really saying was: That compassionate conservative guy is a big phony.

*   *   *

That the speech was lacking in grace or largeness goes without saying, that it offered seemingly wise and even avuncular words with a subtext of political aggression and competitiveness was in its way perfect. That is what Mr. Clinton’s career has been, aggression offered as sympathy.

I watched the speech with a gathering of Democratic and Republican speechwriters, veterans of the craft who approach presidential speeches with a mixture of sophistication and sympathy. It was a sparkling group, and I always feel honored to be among them, for history walks the room when they are there. Their reviews of the speech:

From a Democrat: “Listening to Bill Clinton is like eating cotton candy. it’s sweet going down but it’s only air.”

From another Democrat: “He didn’t say, ‘So long’; he said, ‘I’ll see you Monday.’ ”

The Republicans were similarly negative.

There is a great cliché in America, among conservatives, that the American elite like Mr. Clinton, while the good common people are more likely to deplore him. But in my experience, no one has contempt for Mr. Clinton like sophisticated Americans, particularly sophisticated and accomplished liberals. I think it is to some degree snobbery—they do see him now as a low-rent oaf with a squat and grasping wife—but it is more than that. They understand what he has done in letting foreign nationals buy U.S. foreign policy, and deep down they are not amused. They think he is a weak egomaniac, a man who’ll do anything from fear and hunger. Also they’ve all been in therapy, and they see his sickness. They know who he is.

But now he is over, or rather his presidency is. He will stay in Washington and New York. I was interested to see that no one back home in Arkansas seemed upset or surprised about this when he went home to speak at the state house in Little Rock this week. They knew he was never coming back, and they knew that he was not really of them, but only using home as a base to stay viable within the system.

*   *   *

Mr. Bush comes in tomorrow, and that is good. Even if he is a bad president, he will be better than what we’ve got. There is something I hope he does as soon as he gets into the White House. It has to do with a fanciful, perhaps, sense of evil. I think that all places of concentrated power have within them the devil’s little imps—little imps, unseen, sitting on the cornice of the doorway in this office, giggling quietly in a corner on a book case in that one. They are in all places of power I think and they feel very much at home in such places, and the good people working in them don’t even sense their presence, have no awareness of them, but get tripped up by them, tormented by them, even wind up sometimes doing their work for them and not even knowing it.

All White Houses have them. But in the one just ending the imps ran wild. It would be a very good and important thing if Mr. Bush invited in a fine and good priest, a wise and deep rabbi, a faithful and loving minister, and had them pray together in that house, and reanoint it, and send the imps, at least for a while, on their way. Perhaps they could include the prayer of old John Adams, that only good men serve in this great and stately mansion.

It’s good to start out clean. And it’s good to begin any great enterprise with prayers, which seems to be something the Bushes know well.

And so it begins, one week and one day from today. On that bright morning—well, at just about 11:59:59 a.m.—you will place your left hand on the King James Bible your father and George Washington before him used for their swearing-ins, and take the oath of office. I wonder if when you finish you will bend slightly to kiss the big black book, as some new presidents have.

You will shake the hand of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, kiss your wife—president’s wives didn’t stand with their husbands at the swearing-in until Lady Bird Johnson decided she wanted to in 1965, and every president’s wife has since, usually holding the Bible. You’ll kiss your daughters, hug your parents—your mother will be smiling, and your father will have wept—and receive from an aide a dark leather notebook holder containing a print version of your inaugural address. You’ll turn to the podium, open the holder, look out at the crowd, scan the TelePrompTers, and begin.

“My fellow Americans . . .”

*   *   *

Of course you could use “fellow citizens” (JFK, Reagan), “fellow-citizens” (Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Lincoln in 1861—he meaningfully changed it to “Fellow countrymen” four years later, as the Civil War ended), “my fellow countrymen” (LBJ), “citizens of the United States” (Grant), or “my countrymen” (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover).

Your father used “fellow citizens, neighbors and friends.”

Whatever salutation you choose, and you can create a new one, what follows will go into the history books, as you well know.

An inaugural address is a special thing; we have had only 53 of them since the first, Washington’s in 1789. Each has been a spectacular opportunity for the incoming or re-elected president to appear at his best, with all eyes upon him; to speak unfiltered, uncut and uninterpreted by the press, at least while he speaks and even for some time afterward. (Pundit politesse: Almost no columnist is tough on an inaugural address right away; it feels and seems ungracious.)

An inaugural is a special kind of speech in other ways. It is not an argument for a candidacy, but it can be an argument for a cause. It is not a laundry list of legislation, and it does not speak the language of legislation, or shouldn’t. It’s more like a tone poem. A State of the Union address, which you’ll give in late January, is a policy statement. It lays out specific goals and announces legislation in pursuit of them.

But an inaugural address speaks of root meaning. It declares a way of looking at the world. It tells us directly or indirectly about the new leader’s attitudes and intentions toward the great problems of the day. It is in fact a unique opportunity to define those problems (FDR, economic depression; Lincoln, looming war; Kennedy, freedom endangered; Reagan, freedom besieged.) An inaugural address names what it is we face, and declares the new president’s thinking on it.

You are in a good position. It is the opposite of Lyndon Johnson’s in 1965. Johnson that year gave his inaugural address in the shadow of a murdered president who four years before had given the finest inaugural of the modern age. LBJ was not, and would not be called even if he had been, JFK’s equal in stagecraft and eloquence.

You give your speech four years after the worst inaugural address of modern times, Bill Clinton’s second. It won’t be hard to surpass it. It’s good to follow inadequacy.

*   *   *

Right now you’re still fielding suggestions and getting long e-mails with ideas and “language,” the word used in politics and business to mean this is not only an idea, this is how you should speak of the idea. Old friends and relatives are sending you bits of poems and verses of Scripture and saying, “Use this, George.” And you’re smiling and saying thanks and promising you’ll look at it later.

People, especially oddly enough people in politics, usually think the great challenge with an inaugural address is how to say things. How to come up with an “Ask not what your country can do for you” or a “Let us go forth to lead the land we love” or a “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” But the real challenge is deciding what to say, not how to say it.

FDR decided first that he must reassure the American people that they would make it through the Depression. It was after he’d made that decision that he and his speechwriters came up with “nothing to fear.” The key moment was when he decided reassurance was necessary. The style of the reassurance followed.

Right about now, today, you’re still deciding what’s necessary. You’ve been jotting down notes and getting them to Michael Gerson, your speechwriter. And since everyone is still giving you ideas, I will too.

You have often referred to the need for more elevated attitudes in Washington, for bipartisanship. This is appropriate, and good. But with a Democratic Party and apparatus emboldened by Linda Chavez’s collapse and gunning for John Ashcroft and Gale Norton, your references to bipartisanship might seem like the gratitude of the young missionary who thought his new friends the cannibals were awfully nice to have him for dinner, when of course they were having him for dinner.

Your father spoke of bipartisanship in his inaugural address. “The people did not send us here to bicker,” he said, to great applause. Your father meant it, as you well know. He put out his hand and offered it to the opposition. And you know what his bipartisanship yielded: a one-way street that led to a single term. It yielded bad policy, and produced Ross Perot and Bill Clinton.

Are you going to speak of bipartisanship? Maybe you can do it in a way that makes it clear what you mean when you use the word. What is your vision of it, how do you conceive it, how will you achieve it, what will you not sacrifice to get it?

What is compassionate conservatism? You have spoken of it often, it is the phrase that stands for you. But in a concrete and specific way, how does it differ philosophically from the Democrats’ kind of compassion, which is in their view a harnessing of government resources to help the disadvantaged? How does your philosophy differ? Does it accept liberal concerns but differ with traditional liberal remedies? Does it amount to a philosophical shift in how the government will be encouraged or allowed to approach the disadvantaged?

This is a chance to talk about your philosophy. How does it differ from the old conservatism, from the thinking of Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, and then Ronald Reagan, and of Bill Buckley when he was young (for he too was a great leader of the conservative philosophy)? Compassionate conservatism is what you stand for domestically. You can reach a lot of people in your explanation of it in your inaugural, and make it memorable for them, more than a phrase.

*   *   *

You will speak of America and the world. What is our country’s position now, and what should it be? The old bipolar world of U.S.-Soviet dominance, the old bipolar disorder, is over, and no one in politics has quite defined or argued for what must replace it. What is our place in the world now? Are we its leader? What does that mean and entail? What are we leading for, what are we trying to achieve, how do we mean to achieve it?

What is the biggest challenge facing our country now? Many of us, a minority but one senses a growing one—and one also senses that you’re one of us—feel that the great issue facing us, the one history will talk about years from now with wonder and horror, is an issue that shows up nowhere in the polls and has not had a national leader, a national voice.

And that is homeland security. The fact that we have virtually nothing protecting our continent from nuclear attack, from missile attack, that we have no infrastructure created to deal with nuclear terrorist attack, no strong broad civil-defense system to deal with chemical or biological attack, that we are utterly open to and vulnerable to cyber-terrorism, that we have an essentially unwarned populace. And this when everyone in Washington knows what’s coming, and knows that the only question is when.

You would do a great service to speak of these things in your inaugural. But it would cost you because it would be unpleasant. People won’t like it. But they need to hear it. They need someone to say, at least somewhere and soon if not next week: This is going to happen, and we have to unite and take strong measures now. (Maybe this is best for the State of the Union. And maybe a way to approach it is to make the Federal Emergency Management Agency, long a backwater, one of the most crucial government agencies. Maybe you signaled your intentions by putting Joe Albaugh, your friend and confidante, in charge of it.)

*   *   *

Those are a few ideas on what is necessary. As for how to say it, you’ll follow your instinct and speak the way you speak—with simplicity, with common words. You speak the language of business and politics. It’s part masculine, part Texan, part modern, sporty. You say things like “the bottom line” without irony.

That’s fine. You can do a lot with plain words humbly spoken.

Mr. Clinton’s second inaugural was so bad because he never decided what he wanted to say, and finally just strung together a bunch of high-sounding phrases that sounded to him as if something serious were being said. He tried to camouflage with faux eloquence the fact that he had nothing to say. A famous historian turned to me, furious, in the moments after the speech was given and said, “It was junk! Just junk!” But he did not say that in public.

You, Mr. Bush, can do the opposite of Mr. Clinton. Don’t worry about how to say it, give your attention now to what to say. You don’t need fancy phony phrases, you don’t have to do “ask not” and “let us go forth.” Hold the “let us.” The country’s heard every one of these overblown, orotund phrases the past 40 years. Plain speaking would come like a blessing and be received like a gift.

A few small things that maybe aren’t so small. Dick Hauser, a Washington attorney and member of the Reagan class of ‘80-’88, has suggested you include some meaningful symbolism that would be a concrete benefit to the District of Columbia, and to all Americans. Announce that you are going to reopen Pennsylvania Avenue, the great broad thoroughfare that in the Clinton years was closed to traffic in front of the White House. You can make it a great dynamic boulevard again, make it a place of movement and commerce again, and give us all a sense of spaciousness returned and energy restored, on a two-way street.

Something else. Jack Kennedy did a moving and beautiful thing to his father the day he was inaugurated. Old Joe was up on the parade reviewing stand as the beginning of the inaugural parade came by in front of the White House. At the beginning of the parade was his son, in an open car. As JFK’s limo passed in front of the stand, the new president saw his father, stood and doffed his top hat to the old man.

Your parents will be in that reviewing stand too, including Barbara Bush, the first woman since Abigail Adams to be both first lady and mother of a president. If that doesn’t deserve a tip of the hat, what does?

Do good. An inaugural is a golden trumpet a president gets to blow at most twice in his life. Blow hard and true.

Bring your joy. Surprise people with your excellence. Give your foes second thoughts, and your friends new certitude. As your old man used to say, “Onward.”

I return from 10 days away to find on the front page of every newspaper in America the official swearing-in of Hillary Clinton, Sen. Clinton, dressed in a pantsuit of robin’s-egg blue, her right hand raised, a radiant smile upon her face. Moments later, Strom Thurmond rose and asked if he could hug her, which made everyone in the chamber chuckle.

And so it begins. And appropriately enough with what appears to be another of Mrs. Clinton’s transformations. She appears to be in the middle of another metamorphosis. The last was of her outward appearance—there is almost no recognizing the Hillary of 1997 in the Hillary of the campaign trail three years later. But the latest transformation seems to be connected to personality, or even character—from full of presumption to lit by humility, from imperious to collegial, enraged to endearing. She no longer seems like the kind of person who, in Dick Morris’s words, sets off the alarms when she walks past a bank.

Since her victory in November, gone has been the Hillary of the Angry Visage. As she breezes into parties and past the press, as she greets her new colleagues and makes sure other, lesser known freshmen get in the picture, she seems not at all like the strange and cunning lady who railed bitterly at the White House staff, got Billy Dale canned, attacked conservatives, maneuvered and misled.

This is a sudden change, and there are probably two kinds of people who can change so suddenly. The first is a person with a lot inside, a person of true depth who is capable of true growth, and who might be transformed by desire and commitment, by a hunger to be a better human being, and who might get the strength for this mighty work from religious conversion, or a serious and successful therapy.

The second kind of person might appear to change, and easily and quickly, not because he is so full but because he is so empty. If your inner self is essentially absent, or is only a bundle of desires and habitual responses to them, it’s no great deal to change, or seem to. It’s like turning a ship with an empty hull: It takes less strength. A change of course can be made quickly, with little strain, and more changes can follow.

Mrs. Clinton, of course, has a great deal to be happy about—a new kind of political power, an independent base, a bright future in her party, new wealth. Good fortune makes most of us smile, and perhaps it’s only that.

*   *   *

One of the things that is most amazing and impressive is how Mrs. Clinton continues to get politically like-minded individuals and groups to underwrite her career. The great institution of American publishing, for instance, which is, in general, politically and culturally liberal, is giving her $8 million for a book—which she reportedly demanded in a lump-sum advance. This shows that she truly is not a normal writer, and I say this meaning that she is different not only in that she cannot write.

The agreement looks for all the world as if she were being given money not as an advance, but to advance an agenda—her own. Or perhaps it is simply a shrewd investment. Mrs. Clinton will soon be in a position to smile or frown on the interests of the publisher’s parent company, Viacom, a communications empire with much, always, at stake in Congress and before numerous government agencies. With the $8 million, the publisher pays for her new Washington mansion, where the senator can function as a powerhouse fund-raiser for other candidates for national office, who will, when they win, pledge their loyalty to her, and to Clintonism. When Hollywood shows the home of a senator in a movie, it’s a McLean mansion, but most senators share apartments or have houses out of town. Mrs. Clinton’s living arrangements will be truly extraordinary.

But what is important to note is that this is the left underwriting the left, not with the usual fellowships and grants and MacArthur “genius” awards, but underwriting Mrs. Clinton’s daily concrete ability to proselytize for, and build, and institutionalize, her particular kind of leftism in America.

The publisher has suggested that the $8 million advance is in lieu of the stratospheric sales that will be spurred by Mrs. Clinton’s stunning revelations. This, they seem to be saying, will move millions of books. But they must know this is not true. Mrs. Clinton has been many things the past eight years, but forthcoming is surely not one of them; she has shown no tropism toward the truth, and in any case would be foolish to start telling it now. She is more like what was said of Nixon, that he doesn’t think honesty is the best policy but he does think it’s a policy. If she now tells the full truth about the scandals, from Travelgate to the Puerto Rican FALN terrorists, she will undermine her own past statements and insistences.

All she can do now is repeat with new words. Nor is she likely to tell the truth about her politics, which, again, she has not done in the past. She will continue to cloak, with words like “concern” and “compassion”—for those who bowl alone, for those who suffer from various diseases—her apparent desire for a maximum accrual of wealth and power to a government run by those whose higher understanding entitles them to run it. That would be her, and her friends.

In the broadest sense, Mrs. Clinton, like Tony Blair, like every sophisticate in Europe and bureaucrat in Brussels, seems to be in pursuit of one world—of the end of nations, and the beginning of a world federation. This would make a bleaker world—more regimented, more uniform, more controlled by the values and desires of an elite, less free, less spacious.

But I don’t imagine Mrs. Clinton will start talking about that, whatever the promptings of the person who ultimately writes the book, or those who publish it, whose motives are no doubt more immediate. Mrs. Clinton knows what the $8 million is about, and what it can be used for, and will no doubt use it well.