Bush-Watchers Wonder How He Copes With Stress
Yet a longtime friend of Mr. Bush’s recently spotted a tiny crack in that armor. “He looked tired, for the first time, which I hadn’t seen before,” this friend said.
Mr. Bush has never been one for introspection, in public or in private. But the questions of how the president is coping, and whether his public pronouncements match what he feels as he searches for a new strategy in Iraq, have been much on the minds of Bush-watchers these days.
Can the president really believe, as he said on Wednesday, that “victory in Iraq is achievable,” when a bipartisan commission led by his own father’s secretary of state calls the situation there “grave and deteriorating?” Is he truly content to ignore public opinion and let “the long march of history,” as he calls it, pass judgment on him after he is gone? Does he lie awake at night, as President Lyndon B. Johnson did during the Vietnam War, fretting over his decisions?...
Of course, it is politically perilous for any president to wallow in the nation’s troubles, or his own. The last modern president who did so was Jimmy Carter, in what came to be called his “malaise” speech, during the energy crisis of 1979. He was drummed out of office the following year, crushed during his election campaign by the optimism of Ronald Reagan. Yet at the same time, presidents can ill afford to appear overly upbeat when the public is down.
“The American public wants their chief executives strong, confident and optimistic, but you can’t look like you’re detached from reality,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, who was President Bill Clinton’s political director and who engineered the Democratic majority victory in the House...
Being commander in chief means learning to cope with stress. Abraham Lincoln went to the theater to relax. Franklin D. Roosevelt, paralyzed from polio, lulled himself to sleep by imagining himself as a boy sledding down a snowy slope at Hyde Park.
Mr. Bush sweats out his stress on weekend mountain bike rides. On weeknights, the Bushes watch football or baseball on television, “to try not to worry a little bit,” Mrs. Bush told CBS.
Presidents in trouble often look to history for solace, and Mr. Bush is no exception. He has sometimes likened himself to Harry S. Truman — a president who struggled to explain the nation’s involvement in Korea, but whose reputation was redeemed after his death. Mr. Bush also seems to have Lincoln on his mind; he told People magazine that Ms. Goodwin’s recent book, about Lincoln and his cabinet, “Team of Rivals,” was his favorite this year.
Ms. Goodwin, though, sees a comparison to another of her subjects, Lyndon Johnson.
“Even toward the bad days of Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson still believed this war had to be fought,” she said. “He couldn’t argue in the end that it was working, but what he could argue to himself was that if it hadn’t been fought, that somehow we would have been fighting the enemy somewhere else.”