Crack Appears in Bush Armor

WASHINGTON -- Suddenly, President Bush is confronting questions that bedeviled one of his predecessors: What did the president know and when did he know it?

The questions were prompted by the disclosure that Bush was briefed in August about a heightened risk that Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network may have been developing plans to hijack airplanes. That, in turn, sparked speculation Thursday that the strong popular support he gained for his response to the Sept. 11 attacks could now be jeopardized.

In public, administration officials emphasized that the briefing Bush received Aug. 6 at his ranch was neither specific nor unusual, given long-standing concerns about hijackings. Any effort to paint the president as ignoring public safety would quickly be seen as partisan, they said.

However, the officials and their allies acknowledged privately that they were well aware of the potential political damage, and they scurried to control it.

“It looks like somebody was asleep at the switch; this is a fundamental matter for the Bush presidency,” said one Republican with ties to the White House.

Political analysts agreed, noting that what could be at risk is a strong suit of the Bush presidency: a reputation for efficiency, competency and responsibility.

“This is the first bit of information since the attacks that doesn’t necessarily put Bush in a great light and calls into question how good a job [his administration] has done,” said pollster Andrew Kohut, who directs the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. “It could, potentially, diminish some of the luster.”

The president’s public opinion ratings reached remarkable heights in the weeks after the attacks. Ten days after Sept. 11, 90% of those surveyed in a Gallup poll approved of the way he was doing his job.

That rating has dipped to 75% or so in most recent surveys--a figure that still would comfort any president. But this deep reservoir of public support for Bush could be undermined if questions linger about whether his administration should have done more to guard against hijackings.

If it persists, “the idea that this White House might not have done everything that could have been done ... will be extremely troubling to the public,” said Geoffrey Garin, a Democratic pollster.

“People will be open to a reasonable explanation, but the burden is now on the president to offer a reasonable explanation as to why he and the administration didn’t do more,” Garin said.

In the short term, Garin said the White House also needs to explain why news of the August briefing “took so long to get out.”

Thomas Mann, a scholar at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution think tank, noted that concerns about how well the government fulfilled its responsibility to protect the nation had focused on the FBI and CIA.

“Now it gets to the White House.... It naturally raises questions,” Mann said.

The questions about what Bush had been told, what he did with that information and when the information reached him buzzed about Washington on Thursday.

The queries have a historical context.

“What did the president know and when did he know it” became the mantra of investigators looking into President Nixon’s role in the Watergate scandal. They were first posed publicly by Sen. Howard H. Baker Jr., a Tennessee Republican who is now Bush’s ambassador to Japan.