A Subtle Change

Americans have become accustomed to rancorous and dramatic changes in presidential administrations from one political party to the other, signaling breaks with the past and sharp turns in direction. On Friday George Bush became the 41st President in a more subtle transition from one Republican to another and from mentor Ronald Reagan to former understudy Bush. This was not an abrupt change of course but a bend in the trail.

Subtle, perhaps, but with a distinctive and refreshing new tone. In a fashion that Ronald Reagan never did, George Bush reached out to all Americans, and specifically to his Democratic opponents in Congress, to join him in moving the country ahead in bipartisan unity. “We need compromise; we have had dissension,” he said. “We need harmony; we have had a chorus of discordant voices.”

His remarks recalled the 1801 inaugural of Thomas Jefferson in which Jefferson appealed for reconciliation with his political foes after a particularly bitter election campaign. Jefferson called for a restoration of the harmony and affection “without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things.” In more common language, Bush said that the people “did not send us here to bicker. They ask us to rise above the merely partisan.”

Bush’s offer of conciliation will not alter the great differences over such issues as the budget deficit and taxes. But it certainly enhances the opportunity for the sort of accommodation that serves the national purpose rather than narrow partisan satisfaction.

In his own way Bush did seek to put to rest one era in American history--the period of division and distrust following the war in Vietnam. Reagan tried to some degree to soothe the psychic wounds of Vietnam, but he was handicapped by memories of his staunch support of the war and the antipathy that he had held for those who protested it. Not burdened as such, Bush appropriately suggested that Americans have had time to learn the final lesson of Vietnam: “that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory.”

Bush’s speech was simple and direct in many ways, and at times eloquent. There were no grand designs for great new programs expressed in soaring rhetoric, no excessive expectations raised. That would not have been appropriate either to the times or to George Bush the man. Looking westward over the grand national city, Bush instead offered to hone the rough edges of tension, neglect and conflict from the nation. Together, he said, his Administration and the people face the high moral purpose of making kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world. Not a simple task, but a worthy undertaking by a modest and natural man in an area where a concerned President can make a difference.

For eight years Ronald Reagan used his actor’s skills to talk in intimate fashion to Americans through electronic devices, but he remained an insular and aloof President. George Bush demonstrated Friday that he desires his Administration to be more openly and closely linked to the people, offering a greater tolerance for individual attitudes and manners of life. A subtle change, perhaps, but an important and welcome one.