Colonel William R. Higgins - 04 August 1989

Suddenly, the President of the United States is caught by the spotlight.

Here we were, going along nicely – or should I say resignedly – with matters that have become part of this summer's routine news coverage. Another new strategy against drug abuse, more shocking revelations of corrupt diversion of billions of dollars from low-cost housing to high-rise apartments in the Reagan administration's department of housing and urban renewal, and the stock market doing one of its switchback performances – up 20 points one day, down 19 the next and so on. And where, you may ask, is Mr Bush in all this?

Well nowadays it's a great change that once the president gets back from a foreign trip, we don't hear much of him at home. The answer to the question, which is coming at us increasingly from foreign visitors, "How is Mr Bush doing?", is he is doing very nicely in having found his own style, which is so relaxed and affable and unspectacular that it amounts to the absence of what we usually call style.

The fact, which we're becoming familiar with, is that Mr Bush is not what you might call a missionary president. We've had such a run of them, from Kennedy through Johnson and Nixon and Reagan.

The last two, once they were in the White House, were determined to keep up the resident rhetoric, the flag-waving, the gung-ho leadership of their presidential campaigns. And both Mr Nixon and Mr Reagan had a polish to the theatrical showcase of the White House and its doings – Mr Nixon actually brought in trumpeters in skin-tight white uniforms like something out of the Prisoner of Zenda.

Mr Reagan had a scarlet carpet, down which – under theatrical lighting and against a backdrop of sumptuous curtains – he marched to the podium for his press conferences, although he was possessed with nagging fears about press conferences, because of his well-demonstrated haziness about facts. Yet he contrived to hold them as often as possible in the evenings, in prime television time, so that the whole nation might watch the leader leading us all.

Mr Bush has, I believe, already held more press conferences in six months than Mr Reagan in two years, but he calls them on the spare of the moment, he feels no need to rehearse and holds them in the morning, how about this afternoon, and we don't know about them till they're over and then there's a little clip about some current topic he addressed on the evening news.

Mr Reagan, you may remember, never forgot that one of the offices a president is elevated to is that of commander in chief of all the armed forces. And here a man who, during the Second War, made army training films and never left the country, never as president passed up an opportunity to review troops, to speak to the naval academy or the air academy's graduation day. He loved to salute on all occasions, even when he went to board his plane for a weekend at Camp David.

Mr Bush on the other hand was a navy combat pilot, much decorated for bravery, once downed at sea, he doesn't salute. He seems happy to remind himself, and us, that in this democratic system, as in many others, the armed forces are under the command of a civilian.

Mr Bush, I get the feeling, was temperamentally uncomfortable with the whole razzmatazz of campaigning, the need to sound cosmist to look heroic one day and focuses the next to make a resounding issue of all issues, he did it and he learned to do it pretty well because that's the only way you can get elected and he wanted more than anything in life to be elected president.

But once there, he could indulge the luxury of being himself and retiring into the character his friends knew, just the character the polls and the media said would kill his hopes for the presidency – that of an easy-going, earnest, modest, upper-crust north-eastern prep school boy who will very likely be the next commodore of the yacht club or secretary of the golf club.

He's able to maintain this relaxed but confident air in the White House because he's had, remember, a quarter of a century in government. Way back then he was the chairman of the Republican Party and just so long ago he was elected to his first term in the Senate and served two terms, then United States ambassador to the United Nations, was the chief American representative to Communist China before they reinstituted an embassy. Then eight years as vice president and, never forget, he was once head of the CIA, so he's never been protected from the harsher facts of international life.

Well, as I was saying, we were getting along with our usual weekly fare of national troubles and scandals, without much being heard from Mr Bush when suddenly one night on the tube there was this grizzly picture of a hooded figure hanging and twisting in death – Colonel Higgins.

A simple, blurry picture of a dead man, which had exactly the effect that Shiite Muslim terrorists in Lebanon must have hoped to provoke in America. General consternation and outrage, brief interviews on American television with the families of the remaining American hostages, weeping men and women, others bravely not weeping, a wife shouting "Reagan, Bush they talk, they do nothing". A popular disc jockey monitoring a call from a furious citizen, "We should stop negotiating with terrorists and kill them".

Once you advertise on national television the grief and frustration of the families you're bound to provoke this unreasonable rage, the problem reduced to its simplest, impossible solution. Of course everybody would love to kill the terrorists, but where to find them? And if you do that, there are bound to be more kidnappings, more hostages.

Suddenly then, on Tuesday morning, President Bush emerged – was shot out – from his inconspicuous summer and confronted with what's being called his first foreign crisis. I think that if it had been Kennedy or Reagan, we should have had the television networks clear the evening channels for a ringing, impassioned little speech from the Oval Office of the White House.

In Mr Reagan's time we had many such rousing evenings, sworn promises that the criminals would be avenged, but then apart from what's promised, what is specified, what can be done? Mr Reagan ordered the air strike on Libya, which did seem to put paid to Mr Gaddafi as a prominent and successful terrorist, but in 1983 Mr Reagan also sent the marines into Beirut and over 200 of them were murdered.

After that the Reagan administration seemed to back away in anger and frustration from the hostage problem until, remember, Mr William Buckley a CIA station chief, was known to have been tortured and killed. Mr Buckley was a close friend of the late Mr William Casey, the head of the CIA.

There's no question about it, Mr Casey was devastated and when President Reagan saw the grief of the Buckley family and other of the hostages' families on television, he was genuinely hurt and desperate to fulfil the stout promise he'd given on national television. So, at Mr Casey's prompting, he agreed to deal with Iran by secretly exchanging arms for hostages.

Two came out, but as the underground arms trade proceeded, no more. And we all know what that led too – to Admiral Poindexter and Colonel North and Major Secord and the rest, and the whole appalling mess of turning profits from the wishful arms hostages deal over to the rebels fighting the Nicaragua government, the Iran-Contra Affair.

Mr Bush, at least, has in mind the long sorry record of what happens when the United States responds to the kidnappings and/or the murder of Americans with military force.

On Tuesday, the morning after we saw that picture of probably the dead Colonel Higgins, the president called an emergency meeting of top advisors including the secretary of state, the secretary of defence and Admiral Crowl, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and the president made no speeches, demanded no television time. He said he wanted more facts.

He privately reviewed six or seven military options and turned them down, but he is the president of a superpower, and he's expected to act. Colonel Higgins is an American – it's almost never mentioned, by the way, that the colonel was a United Nations officer not, on this mission, an American soldier, but it's enough for most of us that he is yet another American shamed in death by terrorists.

And now a great armada with immense potential firepower is moving towards the Lebanon shore. The president – having started by saying that almost any form of attack on Lebanon, on Iran, might possibly kill a terrorist but would also produce a bloodbath of innocent civilians – the president has evidently left open some military manoeuvre.

Mr Bush, I said is not a missionary president. We were so used to the brave eloquence of Kennedy and Johnson that poor President Carter, no swashbuckler, had to match the peoples' heroic expectations by attempting that gratuitous, doomed helicopter raid to rescue the Iranian hostages. After him, Mr Reagan renewed what was natural to him, the heroic stance.

Americans have in the past, in the past nearly 30 years now, got so used to the idea that their country will leap to the help of nations breaking with a dictator government, especially of the left, that they've come to believe their president can somehow, if he tries hard enough, rescue a besieged or kidnapped American.

One hundred and fifty years ago, an American president defined what he took to be America's mission "wherever the standard of freedom shall be unfold, there will America's heart, her benedictions and her prayers be, but she goes not abroad in search of monsters". It might help if President Bush came to memorise that last sentence.

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