[ALBSA-Info] NYTimes.com Article: For Bush, a Mission and a Defining Moment

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For Bush, a Mission and a Defining Moment

September 22, 2001 

By FRANK BRUNI


 

WASHINGTON, Sept. 21 — When President Bush first sat down
with his full cabinet after last week's terrorist attacks,
he told them that nothing about their roles or charges as
federal officials would ever be the same. 

"I expect you to work hard on our agenda," Mr. Bush said,
an almost obligatory nod to the various initiatives, like
education reform and prescription drug coverage, that had
consumed their attention before Sept. 11. 

Then, a senior administration official said, Mr. Bush made
it clear that all of that paled beside the war on terrorism
that he planned to wage. 

"This," he told them, "is the purpose of this
administration." 

That statement, which echoed and amplified others in the
days after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon, was apparently more than a succinct bit of
White House cheerleading. 

It was a window into what some of Mr. Bush's friends and
advisers say is his own wholly transformed sense of himself
and his presidency. He believes, they say, that he has come
face to face with his life's mission, the task by which he
will be defined and judged. 

"He frequently says that we will be known to history by the
way we approach this great cause," said one of his top
White House aides, adding that Mr. Bush had made that
statement to the religious leaders with whom he met in the
White House just hours before his address to Congress on
Thursday night. 

One of the president's close acquaintances outside the
White House said Mr. Bush clearly feels he has encountered
his reason for being, a conviction informed and shaped by
the president's own strain of Christianity. 

"I think, in his frame, this is what God has asked him to
do," the acquaintance said. "It offers him enormous
clarity." 

That is not something that Mr. Bush has always had. He
often meandered through his life, occasionally ambled
toward the presidency and exhibited a palpable ambivalence
about his good political fortune along the way. 

During the protracted, bitter denouement of the 2000
election, there were times when he seemed to shrink from
the tension and recoil from the messiness, his eyes dazed,
his shoulders slumped. 

But many of the people around him say that now, facing an
extraordinary crisis in his first year in office, he has
acquired a kind of certainty that perhaps eluded him
before. He is sure, they say, about what he should be
doing. He is sure he cannot turn back. 

Administration officials and others who have recently
spoken with Mr. Bush differed in their assessments of how
overtly religious his approach to his — and the nation's —
current crisis is. 

But they agreed that he was interpreting this juncture in
grand, emphatic and even Manichaean terms, a perspective
evident in his recent use of the word "crusade" and in his
speech to Congress, in which he said that "this is
civilization's fight," that freedom and fear were at war
and that "God is not neutral between them." 

People close to Mr. Bush attributed his poise in that
speech, which he delivered without the stiffness or
hyper-earnestness that characterized many previous turns in
front of the teleprompter, to a heightened self-assurance
about his priorities and a deepened determination about his
responsibilities. 

Karen P. Hughes, the counselor to the president, said that
three nights before the speech, when he went over the first
draft of it on the telephone with her, he said: "This is a
defining moment. We have an opportunity to restructure the
world toward freedom, and we have to get it right." 

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who has
met with Mr. Bush repeatedly since Sept. 11, said, "He has
told me several times that he is staking his entire
presidency on this — that the mark of whether he's
successful is whether he can succeed in his goal of wiping
out terrorism." 

Not everyone who has observed Mr. Bush's ardor and
commitment views them as indisputably positive
developments. Although the current moratorium on
presidential criticism in the nation's capital prohibits
most on-the-record carping, there is off-the-record
concern, expressed not only by Democrats but also by some
Republicans. 

They fear that there is something headlong and immature in
some of Mr. Bush's exhortations over the last few days.
They wonder if he is making promises he cannot keep and
threats he cannot back up. 

They note it is impossible to know how — and how much — Mr.
Bush has really changed, because efforts by the White House
to control what gets said about him, and who says it, have
been unusually aggressive. 

Most of the people in a position to talk knowledgeably
about Mr. Bush's emotions are not talking at all. Those who
do talk have often sought the administration's permission,
and they reel off the same adjectives, like focused and
resolute, that White House spokesmen do. 

Moreover, there are indications that Mr. Bush's nonchalant,
jocular demeanor remains the same. In public, his
off-the-cuff language still veers toward the colloquial. In
private, say several Republicans close to the
administration, he still slaps backs and uses baseball
terminology, at one point promising that the terrorists
were not "going to steal home on me." 

He is not staying up all night, or even most of the night.
He is taking time to play with his dogs and his cat. He is
working out most days and arrived at a 6:30 p.m. speech
rehearsal on Wednesday straight from a half-hour session on
the treadmill. 

But administration officials said that the president was
investing certain duties, like Thursday night's speech,
with extraordinary care. Ms. Hughes said that Mr. Bush had
not been willing to schedule the address definitively until
he was certain that he and his aides had nailed the speech,
and she said that the event was not set in stone until
Wednesday. 

People who have visited the White House in recent days said
there was a changed, charged atmosphere there. One of them,
Mark McKinnon, a senior adviser to Mr. Bush's presidential
campaign, said that the president obviously feels that the
business at hand "is the country's destiny — and his
destiny." 

Others who are close to the president said there was a
discernible spiritual dimension to his thinking. A senior
administration official recalled Mr. Bush's response on
Thursday when one of the religious leaders said that Mr.
Bush's leadership was part of God's plan. 

"I accept the responsibility," the president said. 

One of
his close acquaintances said that Mr. Bush had essentially
"begun a new life that is inextricably bound to Sept. 11
and all that it implies." 

One implication, which he said he was sure that the
president understood, was that from this moment forward Mr.
Bush would be the despised enemy of violent extremists, and
it might affect the tightness of the security around him
even after his presidency. 

For now, the acquaintance said, it was giving Mr. Bush the
clearest, sharpest compass he had ever possessed. 

"There's no question of what Bush's legacy will or won't
be," he said. "He either beats this back — or we lose."

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/22/national/22MEMO.html?ex=1002144855&ei=1&en=b5deea09bb639d3a



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