The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

"No matter whether th' constitution follows th' flag or not, th' supreme coort follows th' iliction returns."

-- Mr. Dooley

Not this time. Neither the flag nor the returns. "That flag decision," allowed political analyst Horace Busby, "shows that old Mr. Dooley ((Finley Peter Dunne's fictional Chicago bartender)) sometimes didn't know what he was talking about. This Supreme Court must not even read the newspapers." Busby plans to monitor the July 4th festivities across the nation. If the flag burners come out in force, there could be quite a political ruckus and possibly a constitutional amendment in less time than it takes to sing The Star-Spangled Banner.

On the morning after the court had, with great heaving and sighing, delivered the flag decision, George Bush hit the Oval Office about 7:l5. He did not even want to hear about the state of the world from his CIA briefer until he had dealt with flag burning. In the three-minute walk from his apartment upstairs, he probably saw the flag in the Yellow Room or maybe the one in the Blue Room. Maybe he glanced down toward the Mall and spied the 50 flags at the base of the Washington Monument. If he missed all those flags, there was one right behind his desk in the Oval Office.

Bush called flag burning reprehensible. He vowed that he would say so publicly later in the day. Where he left off, his senior staff picked up. "Seems to me," said one aide, "any virtue if carried to an extreme becomes a vice. No right is absolute if it is outweighed by damage to that society."

There is nothing hokey about Bush's indignation. He has carried his reverence for the symbols of freedom on his sleeve as long as he has been in politics and used them a time or two for political advantage. Back in the presidential primary campaign of l988, Bush's field surveys showed that the controversy over requiring the Pledge of Allegiance in schools was a warm issue, the pro-Pledge stand wildly favored in many audiences. His visit to a New Jersey flag factory during the campaign drew some boos from the political commentators, but Bush never blushed.

Handling the flag at that level of power is tricky. Lyndon Johnson quite literally ground his teeth when he looked out his White House window and saw the Viet Nam protesters desecrate flags. But he was a prisoner of jingoism gone sour. Richard Nixon used the Stars and Stripes as a weapon against the marchers, ordering extraordinary displays of flags, pointedly wearing a flag lapel pin.

Air Force One pilot Colonel Ralph Albertazzie had a better idea. When traveling abroad with the President, he was moved by the sight of people weeping when the plane taxied up. But he often flew and landed at night, and the long, graceful fuselage was swallowed by the dark. Albertazzie had small spotlights installed in the plane's horizontal stabilizers to illuminate the flag painted on its towering rudder. Wherever and whenever the President flies, the flag glows; the darker the night, the more spectacular the effect. That, in a way, is the history of the flag. It is not going to change, whatever the court may say.