Like a gyroscope he (George W. Bush) keeps his bearing, always rising above the coming horizon. He intuitively knows where he must lead like the needle of a compass shows us the north.
I don’t agree with very much of his domestic program. It is too limited and based on an assumption of governmental inactivity that I do not share. I think that Bill Clinton was the better president up to the water’s edge.
But, on the critical aspect of his presidency, the war on terror, he is right on and has always been. He keeps his political balance as he maintains his internal ballast. His clarity of vision rises above that of his predecessor and his grasp of the requirements of history is deeper and more thorough.
Clinton always lamented that he was not in office during a time of overwhelming national emergency. He once told me that you needed a war to rise to top ranks among presidents. Yet it is the bitter irony of his presidency that he had a war to fight, he just never realized it and never fought it.
Bush would be wasted in another era. His skills would not have been as finely developed as they have been under this challenge. We would never have truly known him. He likely would not have even come to know himself as well as he now has. full story