President Bush’s speechwriter, Michael Gerson, was traveling outside Washington. His message maven, Karen Hughes, had not gone with her boss to Florida and had to be dialed in by speakerphone. Top aides in the room-Andy Card, Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett-threw out ideas. Bush listened, but didn’t take much advice. Hughes’s main contribution was his calling for a minute of silence. “He knew what he wanted to say,” one aide explains. In his own hand, Bush drafted the majority of his first comments to the nation, reassuring America that the federal government would spare no expense “to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.”
His folksiness didn’t go over so well; a friend in New York told me she broke into tears when she heard Bush’s rocky start. George W. Bush is not known for his oratory. He suffers from malapropisms and he doesn’t seem always to understand the weight his words carry. During this crisis, those shortcomings are instantly magnified. But in the midst of tension, Bush has revealed a surprising strength: extemporaneous speaking.
When the president finally made it back to Washington that Tuesday night, he prepared for a more formal address from the Oval Office. Again, he was bombarded with advice. Some aides wanted Bush to call for “swift justice.” But the president rejected that idea, worrying that it would set false expectations in what he understood would be a complicated and protracted fight. This time he got the tone right. Bush sees himself as the “explainer-in-chief,” as one White House aide says. In prepared remarks, he has repeatedly called on the nation to be patient.
Some of his remarks, however, have not been as tempered. On Sunday, Bush told reporters that “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take awhile.” His off-the-cuff use of the word “crusade”-with all its historic overtones in the Islamic world, was quickly criticized abroad. Yesterday, press secretary Ari Fleischer said the president “regretted” the use of that word and that he meant it “in the traditional English sense … a broad cause.” The administration is learning to be more careful. National-security adviser Condoleezza Rice sits in on the morning communications meetings, listening for other red flags.
While visiting the Pentagon on Monday, however, Bush’s comments were inflammatory by design. He called for Osama bin Laden “dead or alive.” Though some thought Bush the Cowboy was spouting off again, the tough talk was all part of a plan. It was also vintage Bush. He had tried out the phrase on staffers-even fellow cowboy Mexican President Vicente Fox-before using it with reporters. The Bush communications team probably anticipated the cover of the New York Post yesterday: a wanted poster of Osama bin Laden. They didn’t anticipate all the criticism of Bush’s sound bite du jour, especially abroad.
Bush is doing best when he’s allowed to be himself-like atop the wreckage with New York’s rescue workers last Friday. There, he heard a shout from the crowd, “We can’t hear you!” The president’s response: “I can hear you! And the rest of the world can hear you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”
