Bush's Business Administration

...On March 12, the Wall Street Journal wrote that as part of a "multipollutant regulation," Bush hoped to "revise the Clean Air Act by imposing limits on four major pollutants, including, most controversially, carbon dioxide...

...It is the premise for the ABM Treaty Presidents Nixon and Leonid I. Brezhnev signed in 1972, and it goes like this: Defense becomes offense when your adversary can't be sure of his ability to retaliate against a nuclear first strike...

...Thus, when opinion polls signaled growing support for a tax cut to boost the economy, the Administration struck swiftly for House action on a key component of the reduction...

...Some oldsters will remember 1971, when 42 people were killed in a prison uprising in Attica, New York...

...Stability depends on both sides being vulnerable, however contradictory that may sound...

...But Whitman declared that more hard scientific evidence was necessary before a decision could be made on the issue...

...StationKKTV'snews anchor, Eric Singer, agreed to interview them by telephone on the air...

...The Cheney energy team queried Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill about his views...

...He said he was coming out to surrender to "keep my voice in the media...

...That can become politically painful...

...That was his condition for halting the sending of murderous letter bombs...

...In 1993, after another spate of shootings, the Brady Bill was passed, named for press secretary Jim Brady, who was shot with President Reagan in 1981...

...A week later the mining industry was applauding the Administration again...

...A leader's health may also be a national security matter...

...He takes a straightforward position: It is not ethical for the news media to allow themselves to yield to pressure for attention from terrorists and criminals, even if it is a matter of saving lives...

...To understand that, you have to understand an acronym, MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction...

...You willhearthatthe Russians, the Chinese and a whole lot of other people are worried that NMD will undermine the agreement...

...In an area as ideology-laden as the environment, the Administration found itself caught between contending business interests...

...One is that they need to be perceived as strong and sturdy, not subject to the afflictions of ordinary mortals...

...Cheney may never have anothertwinge of pain...

...But let's return to what might be called the battle of the initials and acronyms...

...Members of Congress were also high on sympathy, but low on grappling with the National Rifle Association...

...In the Nixon Administration, Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger undercut and eventually replaced Secretary of State William P. Rogers...

...The Rumsfeld response: NMD is a limited program that might stop a couple of North Korean, Iraqi or Iranian missiles, but could never stop hundreds of Russian missiles...

...That's the state of play on NMD vs...

...in 1968, a law banned the importation, although not the production, of cheap handguns called Saturday Night Specials...

...Bradlee later said, "The truth is that none of us had any stomach for reading a headline in the next day's paper that went something like this: 'Hijackers Kill 62 Americans After U.S...

...Rumsfeld redux was not Powell's candidate for Defense Secretary...

...All five papers yielded and printed the propaganda statement...

...In the wake of Columbine the Senate passed a bill extending the background check requirement to gun shows, but that died in a SenateHouse conference...

...This time the occasion was the withdrawal of the Clinton rules about to take effect that would have reduced the percentage of arsenic permitted in drinking water from 50parts per billion (a standard set in 1942) to 10, a level set by a 1999 National Academy of Sciences study...

...President Richard M. Nixon, suffering from phlebitis in his leg, stood in torment in a motorcade with President Anwar Sadat in Cairo in 1974...

...Why President Lyndon B. Johnson showed his gall bladder scar for photographers...

...Editors Refuse to Publish Document.'" I guess that is how I feel...

...In March, Cheney, experiencing chest pains on Saturday evening, said on Sunday television, "I feel great...

...It is too early to speak of a conflict in the Bushforeignpolicy family—it'smainly "differences of nuance," a State Department official told me...

...In the years since, a violent episode would usually produce an outcry for gun controls that got debated in Congress and then disappeared from view...

...With Vice President Dick Cheney as virtual CEO, the White House is now running pretty much on time...

...His Environmental Protection Agency Administrator, Christie Whitman, repeated that promise several times, as though it was settled policy in the package of energy legislation being drafted by the Administration...

...This resulted in the most stunning turnabout of President George W. Bush's first months in office...

...Last November the Texas Governor was "pleased to report" that Cheney had suffered no heart attack when, in fact, he had...

...Nevermind that the Soviets could not win an arms race back then, and Russia certainly could not today...

...The political problem for him and the Administration, however, is that the public no longer feels sure...

...You may recall the 42-day manhunt for seven escaped prisoners in Texas that ended January 24 when the last two, holed up in a Holiday Inn in Colorado Springs, agreed to give up without a fight if they could get five minutes each to tell their stories on television...

...The countervailing axiom is that it can be politically damaging to conceal a leader's health problems...

...On the other hand, the White House can show surprising flexibility where ideology is tempered by a pragmatic marketing approach...

...Patrick Murphy said he had been driven to escape by an oppressive Texas penal system and he hoped that his escape would "open people's eyes to it...

...The difference was silence about trying to do something to curb such attacks...

...In the Reagan Administration, Secretary of State George P. Shultz was constantly at odds with Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger...

...This was not the first time the news media were drawn into a story they were covering...

...Itrequires background checks for handgun purchases...

...Yes, observe the Russians, but once you are able to shoot down a couple of missiles, nothing will keep you from expanding the program to be able to shoot down a lot of them...

...President Bush denounced the "cowardice" of the young killer in Santee and extended sympathies to bereaved families, but said nothing about guns...

...Recently released KGB files reveal a preoccupation with President Ronald Reagan's health...

...I have come to think that there are few absolutes in life, and that values have to be balanced against other values...

...It looks like he had it right...

...President John F. Kennedy suppressed word of his chronic back pains and Addison's disease...

...Foreign Policy 'Nuances' In February, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld raised hackles in Moscow by saying that one reason America needs a missile shield is for protection against the fruits of Russia's selling weapons to rogue states...

...Rumsfeld assuredly is not soft...

...That followed the shooting rampage on a Long Island commuter train in which six passengers were killed, including the husband of Carolyn McCarthy, now a member of Congress...

...Chuck Hagel of Nebraska warned of Clinton holdovers in the State Department plotting to promote a global warming treaty...

...Then there were the lethal incidents that produced debate, but no legislation: the assassination of President Kennedy and the assassination attempt on President Reagan...

...That argument proved more telling than the anticipated increase in costs of health care from repetitive stress injuries...

...And why there were daily briefings on President Reagan's condition after he was shot in 1981...

...In 1977, a disturbed man took a hostage in Indianapolis, wired a sawedoff shotgun to the victim's neck, and led him before the staked-out cameras yelling, "Get those cameras on...

...But history teaches that consensus is sometimes hard to achieve among strong personalities with intersecting responsibilities...

...Now he said he thought more study was needed...

...And the CIA did a study of heart attacks of principal decision-makers...

...There is also a sense that the Administration, many of whose members are former corporate executives, takes a marketing approach to some of its major initiatives...

...That is why, starting with Dr...

...That is what Mikhail S. Gorbachevtold President Reagan about his pet Star Wars scheme, SDI, or Strategic Defense Initiative...

...So, continue the Russians, NMD will kill ABM, and then we will be back in a dangerous all-out arms race...

...Three years ago, as Chairman of Alcoa, he had made a speech warning that global warming was a danger on a par with a potential nuclear holocaust...

...the shooting of Federal agents by the heavily armed followers of David Koresh in Waco, Texas...

...I discussed the Texas escape with my friend, Marvin Kalb, the former CBS News correspondent and founding director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard...

...Journalists' Dilemma Indulge me while I reflect on a dilemma of journalistic ethics...

...and the April '99 killings at Columbine High School in Colorado...

...More recently, in 1995, the Times and the WashingtonPosf responded positively to an FBI plea to publish a long tract written by the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski...

...For example, the proposal to channel more government money to religious charities was not testing well among religious groups that were the intended beneficiaries...

...Similarly, the Administration's support of legislation making it harder to wipe out debts by declaring bankruptcy was a probusiness decision, facilitated by the millions of dollars the credit card industry gave to the Bush campaign...

...On March 13, Bush replied to the four Senators, saying that his campaign promise had been a mistake and that a shift from coal to natural gas for power generation would lead to higher energy prices...

...Asked by Senator Edward M. Kennedy during his confirmation hearing if he would support President Bush on reducing nuclear weapons below treaty limits, Rumsfeld said he would always back the President, but reserved the right to convey to him his contrary views...

...After the assassinations of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr...

...You will hear a lot in the coming months about NMD, National Missile Defense, and the ABM Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty...

...It was left to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to try to smooth things over by meeting Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov in Cairo and agreeing to have their technical experts meet to discuss both offensive and defensive weapons...

...shouldn't need NMD unless it's aimed at somebody else...

...Meetings start and end punctually...

...Kissinger, in turn, found his influence being chipped away by Rumsfeld, named Defense Secretary by President Gerald R. Ford to replace the discharged James R. Schlesinger...

...Having gained his moment of recognition, he released his quarry...

...Cheney and Rumsfeld are said to oppose Powell's plan to ease sanctions on Iraq...

...Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz talked during his confirmation hearing of "a change of regime" in Iraq...

...When the President frowned at Counselor Karen P. Hughes for arriving 10 minutes late to an Oval Office meeting on Social Security, she explained apologetically that she was delayed briefing the press on Cheney's heart problems...

...Health Axioms There are two axioms about the health of our leaders...

...It was adopted several years ago as well by the World Health Organization and the European Union...

...It was subsequently explained by staffers that Bush had not been informed of the heart attack until later...

...The demand was also addressed to the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and International Herald Tribune...

...Too controversially, it developed the next day...

...Why should they be worried about a shield, an umbrella, which, if it ever works, will be there only to protect us against a rogue North Korean or Iranian missile or two...

...This may have been true, but the next day he checked into the hospital...

...He said, "We will require all power plants to meet clean air standards in order to reduce emissions...

...Pennsylvania's Governor Tom Ridge was, and he reportedly was passed over because he was considered "soft" on missile defense...

...To help resolve the standoff, prison authorities acceded to the inmates' demand to allow prison conditions to be viewed by a group including Tom Wicker, associate editor of the New York Times, and Clarence Jones, publisher of the Amsterdam News in Harlem...

...The Russians say they have persuaded North Korea to give up its missile effort, and they are working on Iran to do the same...

...The Bush Administration has suffered some damage because it has beenperceived as less than forthcoming about Vice President Cheney's heart condition...

...Last September, campaigning in Michigan, Governor Bush had chided Vice President Al Gore for proposing voluntary limits on carbon dioxide and other emissions...

...President Kennedy harkened more to Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara than to the more deliberate Secretary of State Dean Rusk, especially in crises like Berlin and Cuba...

...They say they have some tricks up their sleeves: decoys to fool our missiles, and a shower of rockets that would overwhelm any defense...

...Donald Newbury talked of a defense attorney assigned to him who did not talk to him for three months...

...Four influential Republican Senators, including Larry E. Craig of Idaho, wrote the President opposing carbon dioxide restrictions...

...There are exceptions...

...In 1976BenjaminBradlee, then editor of the Washington Post, faced the dilemma of a demand by Croatian terrorists who had hijacked an airliner: Print our statement or 62 hostages will be killed...

...In supporting Congress' overturn of former President Bill Clinton's workplace safety regulations, the Administration displayed a business reaction to a program that would drive up production costs...

...Incidents like these have occasioned soul-searching in the journalistic community: Is it ethical to submit to this kind of blackmail, which could establish a pattern for future blackmail...

...President Franklin D. Roosevelt kept secret his hypertension and was not photographed in a wheelchair...

...Once rogue states are no longer acting like rogues, they argue, the U.S...

...As for Administrator Whitman, left twisting in the wind, her aides said it was the President's prerogative to change his mind and she would follow his lead...

...And that is what the Russians and others are telling the Bush Administration about NMD...

...I'm a goddamn national hero...

...The Administration therefore slowed up its campaign for a bill authorizing aid to faith-based charities, in effect recalling the legislation for further engineering...

...ABM...

...History recounts other episodes of terrorists and criminals negotiating media recognition in return for sparing innocent lives...

...It was as if the government had given up on gun control...

...Publication, in fact, helped his brother identify him...

...Consequently, President Woodrow Wilson's massive stroke in 1919 was originally announced as indigestion...

...Paul Dudley White's extensive briefing on President Dwight D. Eisenhower's heart attack in 1955, it became the custom to give exhaustive briefings on leaders' ailments...

...They are talking about MIRV ICBMs, Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles with Independent Re-entry Vehicles—that is, multiwarhead missiles...

...Coal-burning power plants, which produce about half of America's electricity, also produce about a third of its carbon dioxide emissions and a large part of other pollutants...

...I used to believe that too, but as I get older I am less certain...

...A few days before the Santee shooting, Democratic Representative Jim Turner of Texas said on the NRA Web site, "I don't think you will hear as much about gun control in this Congress as the last...

...A 1994 law banned the sale of semiautomatic assault guns...

...Giving Up on Gun Control Gun control has been an issue in this country since at least 1934, when Congress passed a law restricting machine guns and sawed-off shotguns...

...While the energy drafting team, headed by Vice President Cheney, drafted, the lobbies lobbied...

...After the latest episodes of juvenile gun violence in Santee and El Cajon, California, the reaction from the White House and Congress was markedly different...