WASHINGTON — What words alone can do has now been done by President Bush. Overnight polls taken after his Thursday evening televised address to a joint session of Congress showed the American people rallying almost unanimously to his call for action against the terrorist threat.
Bush’s approval scores are at the stratospheric heights his father attained at the end of the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein’s army had been driven out of Kuwait and was reeling backward toward Baghdad. The elder Bush’s popular support came at the end of the military action, and it did not last. George W. Bush’s support reflects the patriotic response to the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and came before the first American or allied counterstrike was launched.
No one can gauge how long this unity will last. But the statements and actions which have brought the president to this point are important in themselves, for this is a vital moment for both him and the country. As a friend of mine remarked, "Bush was inaugurated eight months ago, but he became president on Thursday night."
This most unrhetorical of politicians — a man who until this crisis had shunned public appearances, avoiding both news conferences and TV speeches, a man who appeared equally uncomfortable both in unscripted settings and in reading from a TelePrompTer — has gotten steadily stronger in a crescendo of informal and formal talks since September 11.
How to explain it? The sources of the language are clear; the roots of the personal transformation are more speculative but discernible.
In framing Bush’s words, the speechwriting team under Karen Hughes and Michael Gerson almost certainly found inspiration in the rhetoric of our most eloquent president, Abraham Lincoln. The powerful but simple words in which the 16th president framed the issues of the Civil War have been the model for the 43rd president’s depiction of the struggle that divides the civilized world and the terrorist cabals.
Like Lincoln, Bush has tried to make it clear we are not warring on other peoples — not Muslims, not Arabs — but rather on those who threaten the safety of the Union and our God-given freedoms.
One sentence from Thursday’s address echoed Lincoln’s words at the outset of the bloody struggle that began at Fort Sumter and ended, thousands of lives later, at Appomattox. "The course of this conflict is not known," Bush said, "yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them."
In thinking about the steely determination Bush has shown in this crisis, my mind has turned to another Lincoln quotation, one which John F. Kennedy used often in the 1960 campaign, when as a young man, he was preparing himself for the burden of taking over the leadership of the Cold War from the commanding figure of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
During Lincoln’s 1860 campaign, Kennedy said in dozens of stump speeches, "when the issues were much the same in a smaller sense as they are today, whether this country could exist half-slave and half-free, Abraham Lincoln wrote to a friend: ‘I know there is a God and I know He hates injustice. I see the storm coming, and His hand is in it. If He has a place and a part for me, I believe that I am ready.’ "
Dissimilar as they are in so many ways, a common thread joins Lincoln, Kennedy and Bush. They came to the presidency after brief and less than notable careers in public office, were installed after elections that showed more division than unity in the land, and were clearly conscious of the doubts millions of their fellow citizens held about them. But each responded to the forces threatening the citadel of freedom in their own times.
A friend of George Bush’s told me something I found riveting. "Do you realize," he said, "that he is the first president since Lincoln who has given the military an order to fire on fellow Americans?" He was referring to Bush’s decision, made in the first hours of the terrorist attacks, to authorize Air Force jets to shoot down the hijacked airliner that appeared to be headed for another suicide assault on the nation’s capital.
The order was not executed, because the plane crashed in Pennsylvania, apparently after some of the passengers overpowered the on-board terrorists. But, as this friend points out, a president who will order the deaths of innocent Americans in order to frustrate terrorist designs will not find it difficult to issue ultimatums to nations and groups which harbor and support terrorists.
The rhetoric is Lincolnian, and so are the tragic forces that have forged the conviction in this president’s words.
David Broder can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200.
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