PERSPECTIVE ON GEORGE BUSH : Define the Man to See the President : His sees life’s struggles as essentially personal, and government’s role as supportive, not dominant.

Where is George Bush coming from? Does he have a philosophy? If so, what is it?

There have been three defining events in George Bush’s life that continue to shape his public philosophy. First was his experience as a Navy pilot in World War II. On one of his 58 missions, he was shot down and saved by an American sub; his two airplane mates died. Where, he wondered, did the thinking of our statesmen--the ideas of Woodrow Wilson and his opponents--go so wrong that a second world war engulfed humanity only two decades after the first? That question still dominates Bush’s thinking.

The second event was the death of his 3-year-old daughter Robin, who contracted leukemia in 1952. Bush is a private man, but of her dying he has said, “We found several friends and neighbors who had gone through like tragedies, and . . . we learned from them and they from us, and we were each strengthened. We began to dare more. We had more children. We started more businesses. And we entered more fully into . . . community life.”

The third event was being ambassador to the United Nations, where he came to grasp the commonality of all peoples. Imperfect as the United Nations may be as a political institution--Bush had no delusions that it could solve problems by itself--he saw it as essential to changing the way peoples of different cultures think about each other--as partners rather than strangers.

These three events crystallized Bush’s public philosophy. The central tenet of his beliefs concerns human nature: The unavoidable truth, he came to realize, is that all individuals are both sinful and transcendent. Recall how Robert Penn Warren expressed the point in “All the King’s Men.” On the one hand: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption, and he passeth from the stink of the dydie to the stench of the shroud.” On the other hand: “The creation of evil is . . . the index of God’s glory and His power. That had to be so that the creation of good might be the index of man’s glory and power. But by God’s help.” So with George Bush: Individuals, everywhere (no matter their culture) and always (no matter their century), are subject to wicked feelings, and they are personally responsible to rise above them. Humans are not angels, but they are obliged not to be beasts. That is the index of their dignity. Government cannot win that spiritual struggle for them. What the state can do is organize a sufficiently reliable environment in which the people can wage their personal struggles. To that end, those in the federal government have the responsibility for keeping three primary institutions healthy.

First is the institution of collective security. To defend against domestic bullies, we Americans daily rely on our local institutions of law and order. Internationally, however, there is no law, and America, in Bush’s view, must therefore entangle itself in alliances to isolate, deter and punish bully nations. He believes that national security depends on two great postwar alliances, one with our North Atlantic neighbors, the other with our Pacific partners. But he also believes that the resolve of all nations to secure the integrity of international boundaries must be continually reinforced by persuasion. We must persuade every member of the United Nations of its obligations under Article 39 of the U.N. Charter to unite in collective action against all international aggression. Finding ways to change how nations think about war is the key to peace in the 21st Century.

The second primary institution is democracy. Democracy educates; that is one of its principal virtues. Democracies compel officials to compete for popular support and disclose details of the public business. At the same time, voters are canvassed for their views. This endless, sometimes abrasive, exchange creates what non-democratic systems have never produced: an informed, self-confident citizenry. Democracy generates information, tapping knowledge from diverse sources, extending it to all the people, enabling them to solve their own problems. In the case of developing nations, democracy is particularly important. Imperfect as it may be in countries unused to it, democracy spreads the knowledge necessary to escape poverty, illiteracy and prejudice. The central reality of a non-democratic society, as Bush sees history, is the people’s ignorance, which leaves unchecked their natural tendencies to hatred and suspicion.

In 1982, the Soviet physicist Alexander Sakharov remarked on the absence of a public opinion under communism: “We (Russians) don’t even know how, or by whom, the decision to invade Afghanistan (in 1979) was made! People in our country do not have even a fraction of the information about events in the world and in their own country which the citizens of the West have.”

The third primary institution with which the federal government must be concerned (Bush believes) is economic freedom, including a system of free markets in which, as Walter Lippman once wrote, “for the first time in human history men had come upon a way of producing wealth in which the good fortune of others multiplied their own.” A free person profits by providing something and then teaching others how to use it to their profit. Henry Kaiser’s cement trucks bore the motto, “Find a need and fill it.” If we were less modest, we would recognize that impulse for what it is: neighborliness, community, the habits of human fellowship. Economic freedom exercises us in human empathy, the skill to see things from others’ points of view.

By Bush’s vision of America, it is government’s job to strengthen these primary institutions. Each can break down. Collective security may stumble and collapse in paralysis just when our national interests require action. Democracy may oppress political minorities. Economic freedom may not heed the truly needy. To offset these risks, we must maintain our independent military strength, constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties and traditions of private volunteerism and public social security. They can momentarily prevent disaster, but that is all they can do. The future ultimately depends on keeping our three primary institutions sound.

That is why patient international diplomacy (as in cultivating international partnership in the face of Iraqi aggression) is preferable to impulsive national reaction. That is why it is desirable for the Supreme Court to act with restraint instead of cutting off legislative debate on the great moral and social issues of our time. That is why Congress must begin to address itself more to issues of growth and less to egalitarianism.

Collective security,democracy and economic freedom (in contrast to isolationism, government by judiciary and welfare statism) increase the strength of the people themselves.