Bush's 1989 speech at the United Nations - 29 September 1989

It used to be that when the President of the United States came to New York for a dinner, a speech, you read about it next morning in the paper.

Nowadays there are, I should guess, countless thousands of New Yorkers and suburban New Yorkers who are warned, in print or on the box, of his coming next morning and make a point that day of avoiding at all costs midtown New York on the east side.

Last Monday, I was coming in from Long Island on a bus which normally does the 100-mile trip in a little over two hours. It enters the city through the Queens Tunnel that goes under the East River, emerges to drive up Third Avenue and deposits passengers at six spaced stops before ending the run at 79th Street.

On Monday we were on time through the Queens Tunnel but when we emerged we saw ahead of us a wall of trucks and cars, and looking downtown and uptown, jammed traffic as far as the eye could see. Since it was one of those brilliant, bone-dry days of early fall, you could see clearly about three or four miles.

We sat there with the engine throbbing and chugging and, 25 minutes later, we had moved half a block and turned on to Third Avenue. Ahead was what gloomy cab drivers are always promising as New York's Doomsday gridlock.

At that point the driver said, "I'm sorry but we're going to have to ask all of you to get out at 42nd Street. Because of the traffic, we can't go any further uptown. We apologise, we have never done this before".

"What's going on here?" asked a middle-aged lady holding on to a suitcase and a bundle. A lean old man said simply, "the president". "Oh my God", she said.

The president had come to the United Nations. A quick overnight trip, the same thing – Mr Reagan's trip last year – cost the city something like, it was calculated, $2 million for the extra battalions of police, radio police cars at 100-yard intervals along the 20-mile run to the airport, cost of delayed deliveries to trucking companies, work hours lost during the shutting down of office blocks within a mile or more of the United Nations and of the Park Avenue Hotel, where the president's large delegation was housed.

Security is the name of the expensive game. And there is surely no sign that it is ever going to be relaxed. Of course you all heard what President Bush had to say in his first speech as president to the General Assembly.

His main theme was chemical warfare and he said it was time "to rid the earth of this scourge", just as he said a month ago, "It was time to rid this country of this scourge" – that scourge being the invasion of drugs.

The military and some conservative supporters had advised the president not to propose now, or in the near future, a treaty banning poison gas. But while he turned them down, he satisfied the less dogmatic of them by proposing that both the United States and the Soviet Union should agree to cut their arsenals of chemical weapons and then move on to a treaty that would ban all poison gas.

While ordinary people like us on the outside may think it's a simple pledge to take, the whole chemical weapons issue – while not as complex as the nuclear weapons issue – is complicated enough. One nasty complication, which does not come out much in the speeches of the superpower leaders, is actually the main anxiety that lies at the back of their minds, which is not the chemical arsenals of the Soviet Union and the United States, but of many other countries, including dictatorial regimes in the Middle East which are well supplied by manufacturers in the west.

In the same way, we've become so joyful over the warming relations between M. Gorbachev and Mr Bush, so relieved to think that the Cold War is ending or ended, and, therefore, so comforted by the vanishing prospect of a big war that we – and "we" means also our leaders when they talk about arms control in public – we forget, or like to forget, that eight or nine countries now have what is technically called a nuclear capability, which means if they don't have the weapons out there on show, or within guarded compounds, they could assemble them almost any time.

However, intelligence precautions being what they are among the great or the big powers, we're not likely to know soon how many small countries have the scientists and, like Hamlet, have the means, and will, and strength to do it.

I'm thinking of the countries in or around the Middle East which remember what Israel did to Iraq's nuclear reactor. This memory is quietly cherished by American policymakers and it explains, I think, why, through all the changes and audacities in Israeli policy, the United States will go on seeing Israel as its chief defensive ally in that part of the world.

From time to time, American experts on television panel talk shows remind us of the sleeping menace of nuclear weapons in the hands of nations that were not in the nuclear club 25 or even 10 years ago.

But it is not a theme that presidents and general secretaries like to harp on, since it could plant in us a mood of gloom where now there is steady rejoicing, a mood that contributes to the health of the world's economies, the reassurance that has sprung up from the greatly-improved relations between America and the Soviet Union. A change started, we shouldn't forget, by Mr Reagan.

This reassurance must be at the core of Mr Bush's extraordinary popularity. The first thing that visitors to this country still ask is "How is President Bush doing?" And this was not a question difficult to answer during his honeymoon.

A presidential honeymoon, since Franklin Roosevelt took his cue from Napoleon's calendar, has been 100 days, when criticism is suspended, goodwill is vouchsafed. "Give the man time!" is the generous slogan. But after that people tend to say, "So what has he done?" And inevitably, "What has he done for me?"

Well, the most marked characteristic of Mr Bush's presidency so far is cheerful caution, prudence. The general trust in him has been reinforced by his extraordinary demeanour, his day-to-day image, if you like. I say "extraordinary" because it's something vivid and attractive that we never expected.

Throughout his campaign, he had to fight a lot of derision about the image he presented of an upper-crust, eastern prep school, Yale, country club secretary which, for two generations or more, has always been said to be fatal to presidential ambitions in the rough-and-tumble of national politics, a nation in which, 30 years ago, money and political influence moved away from Wall Street and the eastern establishment, to the south-west, to Barry Goldwater and Reagan, and the new, prospering western establishment.

The character that Mr Bush played out, or seemed to represent during the early part of his campaign, was confidently ridiculed by his presidential opponents. He was a wimp. He tried to smother this image by decking himself out in leather jackets and driving trucks and wallowing in the good earth of Midwestern farmers and saying, "Hi fella!"

His advisors, his television advisors in particular, warned him that enough of this was enough. They decided he must overcome this risible character by doing what Franklin Roosevelt did even more in his early days, afflicted by the image of a Harvard country squire condescending to be nice to us. Be bold! Be mean! Be downright!

I should say at once that the comparison with Roosevelt is wobbly. Roosevelt had, under the lordly manner, a will of steel and the stubbornness of a bull. We didn't know this until he got in the White House at a perilous time when one American family in three or four had nothing coming in.

Prudence was never a Roosevelt gift – the pit of the Depression called for extraordinary, dramatic, improvised policies. And Roosevelt, to the delight and astonishment of the country, responded, even his first day, saying he might have to take hold and do things beyond what was allowed by the Constitution.

A frightened Congress applauded him to the echo and gave him emergency powers that he revelled in and such as no president has had since. Mr Bush, on the other hand, had to fake boldness and meanness, at the expense of poor Governor Dukakis. Remember him?

And he thus revealed a streak which, for the time being, blanketed the wimp in him and, indeed, got him elected. But then, once in the White House, it was too late to turn him out. He took the risk – one of the few risks he has taken – of reverting to his natural type, of being himself again.

Reagan's jodhpurs and bucking broncos were replaced by slacks and a blue blazer. He moved easily about his Maine town, at small rallies and outdoor picnics, Naval Academy graduations, whatever. And was, once again, the easy-going preppy we used to know, always cheerful, friendly, offhand.

The country likes it because this natural manner translates into policy as not alarming us, not threatening us with evil empires or an imminent decline in military strength. He faces the country's chronic problems, drugs, housing, day-care, Poland, Nato, with a crinkled forehead and genuine concern.

He listens well to all sides and tells us he's doing his best. He is canny, cagey. He's not going out on a limb. And this character seems to suit the country. Even his critics say that he, like Gilbert's House of Lords, "throughout the war did nothing in particular and did it very well".

Whatever the explanation, today President Bush, with 69% all for him, is more popular at this stage of his presidency, than Reagan 53%, Nixon 60%, Carter 59% or Ford... dear me, 39%.

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