Bush Shares Challenge of 3 Wartime Chiefs : History: Truman, Johnson and Nixon also sought public support for a distant war fought for abstract principles. They paid a political price.

Though he received the traditional standing ovation at the start of his 1968 State of the Union address, President Lyndon B. Johnson could not shut his mind to the outraged protests against his leadership on the Vietnam War.

“I was thinking as I was walking down the aisle tonight of what Sam Rayburn told me many years ago,” Johnson told the assembled members of the House and Senate. “The Congress always extends a very warm welcome to the President--as he comes in.”

President Bush, as he received his own standing ovation Tuesday night, marched in the footsteps of three post World War II predecessors--Presidents Harry S. Truman, Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. Like them, Bush faced a uniquely difficult challenge: sustaining public support for a distant war that was fought, not in response to a direct attack on Americans, but in the name of abstract principles of global order and justice--what Bush called “a big idea: a new world order.”

For the United States, World War II began on “the day of infamy,” when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. But the Gulf War, Vietnam and Korea were responses to aggression against remote and little-known countries that American presidents saw as indirect though nevertheless dire threats to the nation’s future security.

Bush’s three predecessors, as Johnson’s wry recollection suggested, paid a heavy political price because they could not persuade enough of their fellow countrymen to share their view of the threat and sustain the sacrifices of protracted war.

And the question that cast a fateful shadow over the warmly received rhetoric of Bush’s second State of the Union address was whether he could succeed where Truman, Johnson and Nixon did not.

Truman’s so-called “police action” in Korea and the agonizing struggle in Indochina waged by Johnson and Nixon differed from each other in significant ways. And both differ substantially from the current war in the Mideast: Iraq lacks the support of two powerful Communist patron states, China and the Soviet Union--both of which helped North Korea and North Vietnam against the United States.

Yet in the final analysis, as Johnson declared in his 1966 State of the Union speech, “war is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. Therefore to know war is to know that there is still madness in the world.”

Just as Bush did Tuesday night when he called for “a victory over tyranny and savage aggression,” his three predecessors argued that the madness of war is vital to the nation’s interest.

“Korea is not only a country undergoing the torment of aggression; it is also a symbol,” Truman declared in his 1951 State of the Union address, when the war in Korea was already six months old. “It stands for right and justice in the world against oppression and slavery. The free world must always stand for these principles and we will stand with the free world.”

In the 1967 State of the Union address, with Americans palpably weary of Vietnam, Johnson resorted to a quotation from Thomas Jefferson to support prolonging the struggle: “It is the melancholy law of human societies to be compelled sometimes to choose a great evil in order to ward off a greater.”

Then Johnson himself added: “We have chosen to fight a limited war in Vietnam to prevent a larger war--a war almost certain to follow.”

Nixon took office in 1969 having pledged to end the war in Vietnam, but determined to end it in his own time and his own terms. In his 1970 State of the Union speech, he defined those as “a way that our generation will be remembered not so much as the generation that suffered in war, but more for the fact that we had the courage and character to win the kind of a just peace that the next generation was able to keep.”

On one point, the four presidents took somewhat different approaches: the question of sacrifice. Whereas Truman bluntly warned that domestic spending would be cut, Johnson rejected giving up on his Great Society programs and Nixon promised that victory would bring rewards.

For his part, though Bush talked in general terms Tuesday night of “the burden of freedom,” he did not spell out its cost in explicit terms.

Whatever the contrasts and parallels in their tactics, the three earlier commanders-in-chief became political casualties of the limited wars they led. In the face of the discontent of a frustrated electorate, Truman and Johnson both gave up chances to seek reelection.

As for Nixon, he later acknowledged that the tactics of the anti-war movement drove him into “the very frame of mind that I so despised in the leaders of that movement,” inducing a siege mentality that led to Watergate and the demise of his presidency.

It may be, as Bush asserted Tuesday night, that “the potential of the American people knows no limits.” But the same is not true for their patience, as Truman, Johnson and Nixon found out.

And one advantage this President has over his predecessors is that he has their experience to remind him of that reality.