NY Times: Bush Faces the New World Order

What we didn’t see then from the high ground of Year One were any of the signal events of Year Two. The ill-fated deficit summit meeting at Andrews Air Force Base — a closed-door exercise that yielded the too-clever-by-180-I.Q.-points “tax revenue enhancements” as a substitute for the president’s “read my lips” no-new-taxes pledge — was three months away. In six months, Saddam Hussein would roll tanks into Kuwait. In eight months, we would hit what economists would later pinpoint as the beginning of a recession, at roughly the time the White House national security team was focused on reuniting East and West Germany. Working in the White House was a daily lesson in politics and policy, and the critical difference between the two.

Seen through the lens of 20 years’ time, what’s telling now is the capriciousness of what we took to be the issues that would define a presidency. For more than half a century, no man or woman living has had as much power to shape the world as an American president. And yet the world retains an even greater power to challenge, confound and surprise. — DANIEL McGROARTY, speechwriter and special assistant to President George H. W. Bush

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