The President on a Tightrope

...Last fall was dominated by the case of Anita F. Hill v. Clarence Thomas (also known as the Supreme Court confirmantion hearings) and the case of Patricia Bowman (also known as the woman behind the blue dot) v. William Kennedy Smith, charged with rape in Palm Beach, Florida...

...In an open letter I explained: "Your controversial picture gives the word 'controversy' a bad name...

...And the Heritage Foundation, the high priest of conservative ideology, turned against him as a betrayer of the cause...

...A 47-nation conference on aid to the former Soviet Union was hastily convened here on January 23...

...On top of this, as the date for delivering the address approached, his "approval" rating in the polls dropped to under 50 per cent for the first time...

...By constant repetition of the "stay tuned" and "just you wait" theme, Bush built up expectations almost impossible to fulfill...

...The "womanizing issue," as it has come to be called, had been a vague, almost subliminal factor from the start of the Clinton campaign...

...The issue quickly ballooned, propelled by reputable news figures who bemoaned their inability to avoid the question...

...He plucked at Tory heartstrings by evoking the 1964 Barry Goldwater slogan, "In your heart you know he's right," and the battle cry,'' Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," amended to tell isolationists that "pursuit of peace is no vice...

...On January 15 it forced the European Community to join it in recognizing the independence of Croatia and Slovenia, thus sealing the dismemberment of Yugoslavia...

...Now that flabby giant has started flexing its muscle...

...Governor Clinton tried, in effect, to shift the focus from adultery to adulthood—the maturity of the American people and their news media...

...That escalated the matter from the issue of infidelity...

...A generation of scandals from Watergate to Irangate, a generation of politicians sowing distrust in government, a generation of television blurring the line between fact and fantasy have left many of them with an 'unreality immune deficiency.' "So, they are susceptible to your fanciful 'what ifs,' presented in powerful images...

...This is a time when America cannot afford much more mind scrambling...

...On National Public Radio's Weekend Edition program, I told the host, Scott Simon, I wished the radio audience could see the bitter tears of vexation we were shedding...

...Nor to discuss why none of the theoretical conspirators from the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, Pentagon, and White House has ever been fingered, or come forward to plea bargain, or to write a book that would make—pardon the expression—a killing...

...To a new generation, the Kennedy assassination is a new experience...

...For Bush, the issue was the State of the Union...

...It emerged full force when the sensational tabloid weekly, the Star, quoted onetime nightclub singer Gennifer Flowers as claiming that from 1977 to 1989 she had an affair with the Democratic candidate...

...As a broad-based statement to Americans to kick off his election campaign, this didn't make it...

...What if all the bad guys—up to and including Lyndon Johnson—wanted a wider war in Vietnam and therefore conspired to kill the President, and possibly his brother, and maybe Martin Luther King Jr...

...The United States will send the Commonwealth of Independent States 54 planeloads of food and supplies left over from the Iraq War, a good deal of it facing spoilage if not used soon...

...It sets legislative priorities...

...By the time this appears, we may have definitive answers to those questions...

...But, in contrast to the Superbowl "show," this one had no rules to determine scoring and sacking, no instant replays to resolve doubts...

...But more significant kinds of aid were discussed in informal settings...

...German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher diplomatically, yet rather incredibly, compared this with the 1948-49 Berlin airlift...

...The Bush suspense was Administration generated...

...On both the Left (Democrats) and the Right (Patrick Buchanan), meanwhile, Bush was facing mounting criticism that he was shortchanging domestic problems in favor of his global predilections...

...His challenge: Should that fact, as embroidered by paid testimony to a disreputable newspaper, be allowed to disqualify him from seeking higher office...

...But, at the risk of being added to the great conspiracy, I must tell you that I cannot join in celebrating your cinematic blockbuster?or, shall I say, truthbuster...

...After first making general denials, then scheduling and canceling several television appearances, Governor Clinton finally agreed to be interviewed, with his wife Hillary, on CBS' 60 Minutes—directly after the Super-bowl...

...To cushion the effect of defense cuts on conservatives, Bush resolved: "This deep, no deeper...

...it came off as an unseemly mix of begging and bashing...

...His trip to Japan had gone badly, even without the unsettling pictures of physical distress from a gastric ailment...

...Inevitably, yet perhaps unfairly, since the role of postwar Germany has been generally constructive...

...So, Mr...

...He somehow got himself into the position of standing on a tightrope, swaying in the wind, and inviting people to hold their breaths while he prepared for his death-defying oratorical leap...

...Lacking the Panama foe of two years ago and the Iraq foe of a year ago, he issued a 52-day ultimatum to Congress to pass his program, and he put the recession on notice, like Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Kuwait: "This will not stand...

...Both appearances became invested with the kind of suspense that attends a high-stakes make-or-break challenge—something between the football Superbowl that preceded Clinton's appearance, and the 1952 "Checkers speech" that saved Richard M. Nixon's place on the Dwight D. Eisenhower ticket...

...The gathering of foreign ministers came up with offers more symbolic than substantial...

...There is not the space here to go over the many exploded theories presented as new revelations, the many pieces of fiction presented as fact...

...Unlike the relief efforts following the two world wars, while the text continues to be mercy, the subtext today is fear—fear of what can happen if a nuclear giant is allowed to go hungry...

...Is America ready to join older civilizations in distinguishing between private lives and public performance...

...In the Washington Post, a Russian economist, Alexei Izyumov, wrote of "The 16th Republic, Armed and Dangerous," referring to the Soviet military-industrial complex selling weapons to civilians and illegal militias, and ready to sell fighter planes and radioactive materials...

...With the recession showing signs of stretching into spring and summer, the President began responding to demands for action by assuring voters that he had heard them, that he "cared," and that convincing answers to problems of employment and health care would be provided in the State of the Union message...

...Whatever, Germany is again a political as well as an economic force, responding not only to its European and Atlantic commitments but to domestic political pressures...

...He inferentially acknowledged some marital infidelity in the past that the marriage had dealt with and survived...

...When people lose the ability to distinguish history from make-believe, they lose a foundation on which nationhood rests...

...What if...

...Are Americans ready to reconcile a puritanic public morality with the knowledge that few private lives, including those of several Presidents, could sustain full disclosure...

...Flowers, who was paid a sum reportedly in the neighborhood of $100,000 by the Star for her story, had taped telephone conversations with the Governor in which he appeared to be pleading for her silence...

...Most of the Bush specifics were similarly tilted to the Right rather than the middle-class—a freeze on Federal regulations, a proposed freeze on domestic spending, and a bigger cut in the capital gains tax than he had previously asked...

...Itfalsifies reality to exploit a national trauma...

...Virtually up until the weekend before the January 27 speech, White House advisers seemed sharply divided—except when it came to the widely-leaked tax and spending proposals—on what posture the President should take: above politics or sharply partisan, contrite or bellicose...

...From Adultery to Adulthood Governor Clinton's predicament, unlike the President's, was hardlyinvited...

...The assertions that "by the grace of God, America won the Cold War," and that the American taxpayer footed the bill for the Western alliance may gladden the hearts of America Firsters, but not of America's allies...

...When government loses all credibility, it goes the way of Eastern Europe...

...Both in rhetoric and recommendations, the President seemed to be trying harder to rehabilitate himself with conservatives in Congress and in New Hampshire than to win back disaffected working-class voters...

...That guaranteed an audience of perhaps 100 million people, many of whom probably were still intent on seeing whether the players would score or be sacked...

...John F. Kennedy used it to sound a call for getting the country moving again...

...In that crisis, many will recall, a population of 2 million was kept going by the delivery of 2.5 million tons of supplies over a period of 10 months...

...But never in the past did a President stake so much of his future on this one speech as George Bush...

...The Clinton episode lacked the elements that had made it easy to condemn Gary Hart four years ago—a current affair complete with photo aboard the S. S. Monkey Business, lying about it, provocatively daring a reporter to follow him, betraying not only his wife but his staff and supporters...

...Was it only a year ago that a newly unified Germany, claiming to be hobbled by its constitution, stood by passively while other countries squared off for the confrontation with Iraq...

...A Subtext of Fear Much as it may seem that way, White House fever is not the only concern in Washington these days...

...So, besides humanitarian aid to the CIS, plans for assisting in the dismantling of nuclear weapons were considered, along with measures to feed and house the military, and peaceful research projects to absorb the talents of nuclear scientists...

...There is no precedent for an effort to prop up a crumbling edifice whose total collapse could produce a great many dangers for the rest of the world...

...A newly assertive Germany inevitably stirs memories of times when that nation's assertiveness wrote bloody pages in history...

...An Open Letter to Oliver Stone Allow me, in closing, to weigh in on Oliver Stone's much-discussed film, JFK...

...Early entries for the most gripping media cliff-hangers in this Presidential election year were provided by President Bush and a would-be successor, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas...

...The specter of nuclear scientists going to work for Libya, or uranium being sold to Iraq, or the Soviet Army kicking over the traces and scuttling arms control has become, intentionally or not, a sort of blackmail against the world...

...It should properly carry a warning label, 'Hazardous to your mental health.' "Younger people seem more willing than their seniors to embrace your conspiratorial speculations...

...Lyndon B. Johnson used it to launch the Great Society programs...

...for Clinton, the state of his union...

...I was invited to be among those on the dais when Stone spoke a few weeks ago to the National Press Club, and I declined...

...To the criticism that the capital gains tax cut favors the rich he responded by repeating a club-car joke about a Puritan who can't sleep for fear that someone somewhere is having a good time...

...The German press hailed that as a victory for Bonn's foreign policy...

...At the news conference winding up the emergency aid meeting, Foreign Minister Genscher, following Secretary of State Baker, started speaking in English, then switched to German, saying he wanted to emphasize the "international aspect" of the gathering...

...In both instances the men won, which is perhaps neither here nor there...

...Chancellor Helmut Kohl has also recently asked that German be added to French and English as an official language of the European Community...

...The State of the Union address—delivered in writing starting with Thomas Jefferson, in person to a joint session of Congress starting with Woodrow Wilson, and only in recent years on prime time television as well—is always important...

...Ronald Reagan used it to launch his attack on high taxes and government spending...

...German officials have in addition been talking lately of the need for greater "burden sharing" in aid to Eastern Europe, tossing back the common American complaint about its allies...

...The anniversary of the triumphant war against Iraq for the liberation of Kuwait had taken on a defensive tone as it became evident that the problem of Saddam Hussein and his nuclear ambitions was still very much with us...

...Stone, you may be a great movie-maker and you can certainly stir up a lot of excitement...

...In the end, the address turned out to be anticlimactic—more a Republican unity document than the outline of an election campaign platform...