Bush on the Home Front

...It was not surprising, therefore, that George Bush's 67th birthday greeting to the nation last June l2 took the form of a twilight address to community leaders from around the country on the south lawn of the White House, devoted entirely to domestic governance...

...The next day Saudi Defense Minister Sultan bin Abdul Aziz denied that there had been any defections, or that any Saudi official had reported them...

...The civil rights constituency that once held the legislative initiative is losing ground to the constituency of resentment...

...They were performing several kinds of secret missions deep in Iraqi territory in the run-up to the war—tapping communications, taking prisoners and laying down markers for laser-guided weapons...

...The Willie Horton commercial certainly helped Bush in 1988...

...At this writing, Sununu was saying that the White House liked its own bill and wasn't interested in a compromise...

...In the Senate, John C. Danforth of Missouri led a group of Republican moderates trying to fashion a compromise that would avoid a veto confrontation...

...Michael Kinsley of the New Republic recently wrote that "the Republican marketing of the quota issue has been brilliant and despicable...

...During the early battle in the House over an antidiscrimination in employment bill that produced a majority short of the two-thirds needed to override a veto, President Bush used a curious expression to attack his opponents...

...There was also irony in Bush's discovery of a role for government after eight years of rash deregulation under President Reagan, who said that government was part of the problem, not part of thesolution, thereby contributingio the savings and loan fiasco, the chaos in the airline industry and the bewildering proliferation of telephone companies...

...Selling Capitalism The election of Boris Yeltsin as President of the Russian Republic by a decisive 60 per cent majority, in a field of six candidates, has been a watershed event in Soviet history—and not only in the symbolic sense that for the first time a Russian leader was chosen by the people...

...More accurately, it exploits existing divisions...

...Such pillars of the foreign policy establishment as Peter G. Peterson, chairman of the Council on Foreign...

...In naming Robert S. Strauss as ambassador to Moscow, President Bush seems to have selected a man almost made to order for the new situation, which appears to require a wheeler-dealer more than a diplomat...

...The defections were confirmed by an American military spokesman in Riyadh and by Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams...

...In the present age it is most unlikely that there will be any such event to derail the East-West relationship, but the Bush Administration is keeping a wary eye on the Baltics, where flare-ups of military activity occur at surprising moments...

...One was left to conclude that they had vanished into a desert version of the Bermuda Triangle...

...Before the lid could be clamped down, Saudi officers started boasting of their coup...

...Then, on June 2, a report by the Procurator General appeared to blame the victims for the killings, saying that the Army had reacted to "anticonstitutional" activities...

...A few journalists, myself included, had been tipped off that something of that sort had occurred...

...He said, "They wanted to grind me into the political dirt...

...Inattentiveness to these issues is regarded by Democrats as the most promising Achilles heel of a President still riding high in the opinion polls...

...He chided the Democrats for not meeting his 100-day deadline for passage of highway and anticrime legislation, but the burden of the speech was an effort to soften the harsh Reagan antigovernment legacy by acknowledging unmet objectives and saying that, along with the free market and voluntary effort, there is a role for "government properly defined" (which he did not attempt to do...

...It must surely have seemed to Gorbachev like sabotage when his Army and bureaucrats highlighted the conflict in the Baltic republics just as he was going to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and President Bush was relaxing trade restrictions in recognition of the USSR's human rights advances and more liberal emigration policy...

...President Gorbachev claimed that an attack on demonstrators in Vilnius, Lithuania, last January had not been authorized by him—itself a disconcerting statement...

...Gorbachev must sometimes feel like the orchestra conductor in Ninotchka, Greta Garbo's classic spoof of Stalinist Russia, who reacts to hearing a sour note by laying down his baton and snarling, "There is sabotage in the string section...

...In 1936, President Roosevelt sent the hard-headed Joseph E. Davies to stand up to Stalin...

...Nor can Gorbachev any longer solicit foreign aid for the Soviet Union without having Yeltsin's proxy, as was demonstrated by the negotiations between the two men before the Soviet leader met with the Group of Seven in London...

...In 1979, President Jimmy Carter sent the retired IBM chairman, Thomas J. Watson Jr., whose stewardship ran into the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, putting American-Soviet relations into deep freeze...

...Solving a Gulf Mystery A footnote to the Gulf War: The time has come to clear up the mystery of the disappearing Iraqi helicopters...

...The speech was long on banalities and short on concrete ideas, and the White House was well advised not to offer it to the networks for live coverage...

...officer: The helicopters, Soviet made, painted with Iraqi markings, had been flown by a unit of American Special Forces...

...Undoubtedly, greater control over their economies will have to be ceded to Russia and the other eight republics participating in the "nine plus one agreement" than was originally foreseen...

...The transition to a free market already has had to be altered to accommodate the views of Yeltsin's radical economists and their Harvard collaborators...

...It was hard to see how Bush could present himself as a victim, considering that the Democrats looked less like grinders than grindees under the millstone of that emotional word "quotas...

...Recently, amid the victory parades and loosened secrecy, I was told what happened by a high U.S...

...Relations, and William G. Hyland, editor of Foreign Affairs, have been writing that America cannot be strong internationally while weak internally, and that it is time to turn to pressing needs at home...

...More specifically, the election changed the conditions for the political and economic reorganization of the USSR...

...We decided, however, that the story could wait until the Gulf War was over...

...Speaker Tom Foley, during the House debate, sounded utterly frustrated when he said that raising the quota issue creates divisions in this country...

...Strauss' nomination was apparently a second thought prompted by the course of Soviet events, since it had been expected that Ambassador Jack F. Matlock would be succeeded by Edward P. Djerejian, who has won high marks as ambassador to Syria...

...The unlucky six were returning from one such mission when they were spotted by F-15 fighters of the Saudi Air Force, which knew nothing of these operations...

...On January 7, nine days before the start of the fighting, Saudi officials announced that six Iraqi helicopters had flown into Saudi Arabia to defect...

...But there were situations that seemed to call for capitalists...

...School "choice" is a fine issue because it divides Catholics and blacks...

...He said that he could not provide any...

...The following day Williams stated that the Pentagon could "find nothing to confirm these reports" of Iraqi defections, and "we do not believe them to be true...

...The racial preferences commercial surely helped Senator Jesse Helms win re-election against a black in North Carolina in 1990...

...He was talking, if one can believe it, about the supporters of the Democratic civil rights bill...

...So it sounded almost surreal when President Bush expressed outrage that "political extremists roam the land, setting citizens against one another on the basis of class or race...

...With the euphoria over military victory in the Persian Gulf receding, a continuing recession or sluggish recovery (depending on the economist you listen to) is assuming a higher profile, as are the problems of infrastructure, underclass, education, the tattered "safety net," and access to health care...

...Does racial separation work...

...And quotas represent a wonderful issue because they separate blacks from white blue-collar workers...

...Iraq, meanwhile, denied that any helicopters had defected...

...In pre-election-year politics, fear bids fair to be a more potent galvanizer of votes than hope...

...Thus, trade with Mexico is a "great" issue because it drives a wedge between labor and Hispanics...

...In the 58 years since President Franklin D. Roosevelt established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, some notable career experts have served there, including George F. Kennan, Charles ("Chip") Bohlen and Llewellyn ("Tommy") Thompson...

...At his Pentagon briefing January 10, Williams was besieged for clarification...

...In 1943, he sent W. Averell Harriman to handle wartime relations and lend-lease arrangements...

...Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, wielding power without much real influence, has been obliged to come to terms with President Yeltsin, who wields influence without much real power...

...Fearful of being shot down, a helicopter pilot responded to a radio challenge by saying the six were defecting...

...The President frequently asserts that he is seeking to avoid polarization, but those around him, like Chief of Staff John Sununu, clearly enjoy divisions, especially those that cut through traditionally Democratic constituencies...

...This is not the first time that a President has chosen an envoy who represents American entrepreneurship more than Soviet expertise (Strauss actually has none, having visited the Soviet Union only once...