WWII Lessons Helped Form Bush Strategy

With his torpedo bomber turning into a dive, smoke pouring into the cockpit and flames rippling across the wing, the young Navy flier spotted his target on a small Japanese-held island, released his four 500-pound bombs, then bailed out over open water.

He was rescued at sea, but his two crewmen were lost.

“I have relived that a million times,” the flier, George Bush, recalled 44 years later. “You can’t lose people and not think about it.”

Over half a century, Bush has accumulated a lifetime of vivid experiences--first as a Navy pilot and later as a businessman, a member of Congress, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, leader of the Republican Party, envoy to China, director of the CIA and eventually as vice president and President.

During the 1988 presidential campaign, critics disparaged him as “the resume candidate”--a man who had done a little of everything--in stints of two to four years at a time--often with no visible common thread.

But now, as Bush approaches the most difficult moment of his presidency--whether to launch the nation into a war--many of his varied experiences seem to be playing roles, large and small, in helping him shape his decision.

Besides the personal memories, there also are the lessons of history that Bush--and others of his generation--witnessed in World War II:

The image of a too-timid British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich after having negotiated “peace in our time” with Adolf Hitler--barely 11 months before Nazi forces invaded Poland--lingers for him even now.

“The World War II experience--everyone who came out of it, it shaped their approach,” says a close friend of the President.

“This is why the Munich analogy still lives--the idea of (avoiding) appeasement and stopping aggression,” he says. “This definitely shapes the President’s view. We look at the takeover of Kuwait and think, my God, it’s Hitler taking over Czechoslovakia. That’s the way George Bush sees it.”

From the U.S. failure to join the League of Nations, to Mussolini’s takeover of Ethiopia, from the Nazis’ invasion of the Sudetenland to Harry S. Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, from the Tet offensive in Vietnam to the political upheavals that followed in the United States--Bush, at 66, is every bit a product of the mid-20th Century, of its turmoil and sadness, and of all the hopes that it has held out for what he calls a “new world order.”

By Bush’s own admission, his experience in World War II was a major impetus in propelling him to challenge Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait last August. The comparison with Hitler--and of the necessity of avoiding another Munich--is one he has made several times.

His push to build an international coalition against Iraq--and ultimately to ask U.S. allies to contribute cash and, in some cases, troops and equipment--was shaped in large part by his experience during the Vietnam era, when--he complained--the dearth of allied troops there prompted Americans to feel they were “going it alone--or almost alone.”

“If we are facing a stepped-up commitment abroad and some real sacrifice at home,” Congressman Bush said in a speech in 1968, “it seems essential that our allies in that part of the world--most immediate beneficiaries of our sacrifice--get together and each one pledge itself to do more than they are now doing.”

On Aug. 2, the day Iraq invaded Kuwait, Bush spoke by telephone with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and other Western leaders--even the leader of hostile Yemen--in an effort to enlist the help of as wide an array of supporters from around the world as possible.

Bush’s experience in the Vietnam era also produced another well-learned lesson: To succeed in foreign policy, the President must keep his domestic base solidified and keep Congress on board.

“As far as Congress is concerned, I think one of the big problems of Vietnam is that Congress was able to say it was tricked or misled,” a top Bush lieutenant says. “That’s why we’re playing pretty straight up on this,” he adds.

But it was the military lesson that Bush has stressed over and over--that exercising unlimited patience with only a gradual escalation of force is a no-win policy.

With a force approaching 430,000 troops aboard ships, in the desert, and waiting to take off in bombers and fighters, George Bush and his advisers have repeated almost daily: “This will not be another Vietnam.”

When things are going well for George Bush, there’s no mistaking it: He moves fast. He talks fast. The ideas come tumbling out. The words, the smiles, the phrases, the gestures are, yes, disjointed, but disjointed in an amusing, beguiling way.

Now, just days before a deadline at which he will be making some of the toughest decisions a President can make, that bounce is gone. Nothing is amusing. The mood is somber.

The gulf is on the brink of war. A Soviet crackdown in Lithuania threatens to unravel two years of progress in U.S.-Soviet relations. At home, the economy is grim, and even closer to home, the President’s wife, Barbara, fractured her leg Sunday in a sledding accident.

“The President has a lot on his mind,” White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said Sunday. “He’s very concerned and occupied by all these events.”

At a time of great tension, Bush has been going through his paces with a relentless rhythm. The meetings are constant. The telephone calls never-ending. Here he is, on the phone at one moment early in the morning with California Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica) or at another with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, trying to keep in line the political and international support for his Persian Gulf policy.

“He’s tired. His face is puffier,” says a friend after a visit with the President.

Says another longtime friend, former Rep. Thomas (Lud) Ashley: “He’s not as ebullient as he usually is. He still moves like an athlete, but not with the bounce he did six or eight months ago. He’s doing a lot of things. It isn’t that he’s slowed down, but the bounce isn’t there.”

“He’s completely absorbed in this,” says one frequent White House visitor who has watched Bush in action recently. “He’s not jumpy. He’s just on the phone every time I’ve seen him in the last two months. He’s either going to or coming from a phone call, coming from a call with Mubarak, going to a call with Kohl, coming from a call with Mitterrand.” (His references were to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Francois Mitterrand, with whom Bush has consulted often throughout the five-month crisis.)

The President has always been a man who pursues his goals on a personal level. In his years at the United Nations, and then in Beijing, he took pains to befriend other diplomats. As vice president, he strove to get to know other leaders on a personal basis.

“Everything with George Bush is personal--not conceptual,” says the longtime friend.

But with those personal relationships comes an expectation that on this international playing field, a certain integrity will be displayed.

Throughout much of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, the United States, officially neutral, quietly sought to balance Iran’s impact throughout the Persian Gulf region with behind-the-scenes support for Iraq.

While the President had never placed Saddam Hussein on his list of world leaders with whom he had developed a personal relationship, a friend of Bush says the Iraqi president was someone with whom Bush hoped he could do business.

Like Syria’s Hafez Assad, one White House official says, Hussein is “an evil you have to live with, so it’s an evil you deal with.”

But, because the United States had dealt with him over the years, his invasion of Kuwait seemed all the more reprehensible to the White House.

“Here’s a case of Bush thinking we had something worked out, a relationship, a gentlemen’s agreement,” the friend says.

The shock that such was not the case, the friend added, accounts for “this un-Bush-like vehemence.”

The anger Bush had demonstrated, “is not a put-on,” a White House staffer says.

Take, for example, George Bush, a few days before Christmas, talking with a small group from the House of Representatives. He has just told them that if force must be used to evict Hussein from Kuwait, so be it.

“If we get into an armed situation, he’s going to get his ass kicked,” the President said.

Part Texan, very much New Englander. One of the guys, but every bit a product of Yale. Matter of fact.

“That is how he talks,” says a 1988 campaign aide. “That’s how these fellows who went from the war to the Ivy League talked--’We’ll kick their ass. . . .’ It’s quite genuine to George Bush.”

When Bush entered Yale in 1945, he was 21 years old and just back from the war. His formal education was about to begin, but so many of the crucial, formative experiences of his life had already occurred: Not just the horrors of World War II, but the mistakes on the world stage that led up to it.

“His thinking, his education, his experience,” says a longtime friend, all tell him--as he looks at the united response to Iraq’s aggression--that “this is what the world didn’t do before World War II.”

Briefly, Bush equated Hussein with Hitler. He sees Hussein, former Congressman Ashley said, as “a bad guy . . . a very, very bad influence.”

But the personal attacks are gone now. From his years as a player in tense diplomatic stand-offs, he knows that the end-game is not a time to get personal.

“In an end-game, you don’t corner your opponent. You stick to principle,” says a White House official, reflecting a diplomat’s appreciation of the closing crunch. “You’ve got to leave the principle intact, but you don’t corner your opponent so he feels threatened.”

With Bush’s background, the official says, “the President understands that.”

Times staff writer Doyle McManus contributed to this report.